Philip E. Tetlock – författare

Alla gör vi förutsägelser, i stort och i smått. Om världshändelser, om vem som vinner val eller fotbollsmatcher, om samhällsekonomi och privatekonomi, om vad som kommer att ske på jobbet och så vidare. Vi är alla prognostiker, men de flesta av oss är dåliga på att förutsäga framtiden. Psykologen Philip Tetlock visade i sin uppmärksammade bok "Expert Political Judgment" hur dåliga politiska experter är på att göra förutsägelser trots att de gör det hela tiden. Men bland de experter han studerade fanns också en del som var påfallande träffsäkra. I "Konsten att förutsäga framtiden" presenterar han resultaten av ett omfattande forskningsprojekt som har involverat tusentals människor som ställt prognoser om världshändelser. Dessa var inte experter på det de tillfrågades om, men en del av dem visade sig vara utomordentligt träffsäkra. De var "superprognostiker". Vad gjorde dem så bra på att förutsäga? Hur samlade de information, hur resonerade de och hur förhöll de sig till sitt eget resonerande och till ny information? Och vad kan vi andra lära oss om tankefel som vi lätt gör, men som superprognostikerna lyckas undvika. Lättillgängligt och underhållande redogör Tetlock tillsammans med Dan Gardner för sina forskningsresultat. Daniel Kahneman, nobelpristagare i ekonomi och känd för sin banbrytande forskning om tankefel, säger följande om boken: "... en underbar bok om hur Tetlock och hans forskarlag fick vanliga människor att slå experter. Det är också en handbok för klart tänkande i en osäker värld. Läs den!"."Philip Tetlock är en världsledande expert inom ett viktigt fält. ... en underbar bok om hur Tetlock och hans forskarlag fick vanliga människor att slå experter. Det är också en handbok för klart tänkande i en osäker värld. Läs den! /Daniel Kahneman "Det är en väldigt bra bok. Den borde faktiskt vara obligatorisk läsning – något jag aldrig tidigare skrivit i en recension. Den borde finnas på varje chefs och investerares läslista ..." /Management Today Tetlock, tillsammans med sin medförfattare Dan Gardner, redovisar och diskuterar projektet i den mycket läsvärda ”Konsten att förutsäga framtiden”. De undersöker några av deltagarna i den grupp de arbetat med – de som visat sig vara mycket bra på att förutsäga framtiden – från tre olika perspektiv. De studerar deras intelligens, deras matematiska förmåga och deras konsumtion av nyheter – och finner i nyanserade och intressanta resultat att alla dessa tre faktorer har en positiv påverkan på deltagarnas förutsägelser, men att de inte ensamma räcker för att förklara de extremt goda resultat som vissa av deltagarna uppvisar." /SvD Under strecket

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMIST “The most important book on decision making since Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow.”—Jason Zweig, The Wall Street Journal   Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?   In Superforecasting, Tetlock and coauthor Dan Gardner offer a masterwork on prediction, drawing on decades of research and the results of a massive, government-funded forecasting tournament. The Good Judgment Project involves tens of thousands of ordinary people—including a Brooklyn filmmaker, a retired pipe installer, and a former ballroom dancer—who set out to forecast global events. Some of the volunteers have turned out to be astonishingly good. They’ve beaten other benchmarks, competitors, and prediction markets. They’ve even beaten the collective judgment of intelligence analysts with access to classified information. They are "superforecasters."   In this groundbreaking and accessible book, Tetlock and Gardner show us how we can learn from this elite group. Weaving together stories of forecasting successes (the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound) and failures (the Bay of Pigs) and interviews with a range of high-level decision makers, from David Petraeus to Robert Rubin, they show that good forecasting doesn’t require powerful computers or arcane methods. It involves gathering evidence from a variety of sources, thinking probabilistically, working in teams, keeping score, and being willing to admit error and change course. Superforecasting offers the first demonstrably effective way to improve our ability to predict the future—whether in business, finance, politics, international affairs, or daily life—and is destined to become a modern classic.

Why do citizens in pluralist democracies disagree collectively about the very values they agree on individually? This provocative book highlights the inescapable conflicts of rights and values at the heart of democratic politics. Based on interviews with thousands of citizens and political decision makers, the book focuses on modern Canadian politics, investigating why a country so fortunate in its history and circumstances is on the brink of dissolution. Taking advantage of new techniques of computer-assisted interviewing, the authors explore the politics of a wide array of issues, from freedom of expression to public funding of religious schools to government wiretapping to antihate legislation, analyzing not only why citizens take the positions they do but also how easily they can be talked out of them. In the process, the authors challenge a number of commonly held assumptions about democratic politics. They show, for example, that political elites do not constitute a special bulwark protecting civil liberties; that arguments over political rights are as deeply driven by commitment to the master values of democratic politics as by failure to understand them; and that consensus on the rights of groups is inherently more fragile than on the rights of individuals.

Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications. The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis.Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems.He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems.He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.