superforecasting demands thinking that is open-minded, careful, curious, and—above all—self-critical. It also demands focus. The kind of thinking that produces superior judgment does not come effortlessly. Only the determined can deliver it reasonably consistently, which is why our analyses have consistently found commitment to self-improvement to be the strongest predictor of performance. (Location 376)
when you have a well-validated statistical algorithm, use it. (Location 392)
“It’s going to be one of these exponential curves that we’re kind of at the bottom of now,” Ferrucci said. (Location 408)
“there’s a difference between mimicking and reflecting meaning and originating meaning,” Ferrucci said. That’s a space human judgment will always occupy. (Location 416)
They know that no matter how tempting it is to anoint a pet hypothesis as The Truth, alternative explanations must get a hearing. (Location 663)
Thinking like Fermi, Bill unpacked the question by asking himself “What would it take for the answer to be yes? What would it take for it to be no?” (Location 1848)
As the legendary investor Charlie Munger sagely observed, “If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.” (Location 2322)
Most people lack the stomach for this because they look at it the wrong way, he told me in 2013: “It’s funny that a 90% chance of failing people don’t like, but a 10% chance of changing the world people love.” (Location 3794)
That means, as Danzig advises, planning for adaptability and resilience. Imagine a scenario in which reality gives you a smack in the ear and consider how you would respond. Then assume reality will give you a kick in the shin and think about dealing with that. “Plans are useless,” Eisenhower said about preparing for battle, “but planning is indispensable.”11 Taleb has taken this (Location 3844)
Of course, triage judgment calls get harder as we come closer to home. How much justifiable confidence can we place in March 2015 on who will win the 2016 election? (Location 4294)
Certain classes of outcomes have well-deserved reputations for being radically unpredictable (e.g., oil prices, currency markets). But we usually don’t discover how unpredictable outcomes are until we have spun our wheels for a while trying to gain analytical traction. (Location 4298)
Superforecasters see Fermi-izing as part of the job. How else could they generate quantitative answers to seemingly impossible-to-quantify questions about Arafat’s autopsy, bird-flu epidemics, oil prices, Boko Haram, the Battle of Aleppo, and bond-yield spreads. (Location 4306)
Conclusion: roughly twenty-six women in the pool, a daunting but not impossible search task.1 (Location 4313)
The surprise is how often remarkably good probability estimates arise from a remarkably crude series of assumptions and guesstimates. (Location 4316)
Nothing is 100% “unique.” Language purists be damned: uniqueness is a matter of degree. (Location 4319)
Superforecasters are in the habit of posing the outside-view question: How often do things of this sort happen in situations of this sort? (Location 4321)
Savvy forecasters learn to ferret out telltale clues before the rest of us. They snoop for nonobvious lead indicators, about what would have to happen before X could, where X might be anything from an expansion of Arctic sea ice to a nuclear war in the Korean peninsula. (Location 4336)
Yet superforecasters also know how to jump, to move their probability estimates fast in response to diagnostic signals. (Location 4343)
For instance, if you are a devout dove who believes that threatening military action never brings peace, be open to the possibility that you might be wrong about Iran. (Location 4346)
part. In classical dialectics, thesis meets antithesis, producing synthesis. In dragonfly eye, one view meets another and another and another—all of which must be synthesized into a single image. (Location 4349)
Synthesis is an art that requires reconciling irreducibly subjective judgments. If you do it well, engaging in this process of synthesizing should transform you from a cookie-cutter dove or hawk into an odd hybrid creature, a dove-hawk, with a nuanced view of when tougher or softer policies are likelier to work. (Location 4351)
Superforecasters understand the risks both of rushing to judgment and of dawdling too long near “maybe.” (Location 4375)
They realize that long-term accuracy requires getting good scores on both calibration and resolution—which requires moving beyond blame-game ping-pong. It is not enough just to avoid the most recent mistake. (Location 4377)
Don’t try to justify or excuse your failures. Own them! Conduct unflinching postmortems: Where exactly did I go wrong? And remember that although the more common error is to learn too little from failure and to overlook flaws in your basic assumptions, it is also possible to learn too much (you may have been basically on the right track but made a minor technical mistake that had big ramifications). (Location 4381)
Master the fine arts of team management, especially perspective taking (understanding the arguments of the other side so well that you can reproduce them to the other’s satisfaction), precision questioning (helping others to clarify their arguments so they are not misunderstood), and constructive confrontation (learning to disagree without being disagreeable). (Location 4387)
Implementing each commandment requires balancing opposing errors. Just as you can’t learn to ride a bicycle by reading a physics textbook, you can’t become a superforecaster by reading training manuals. (Location 4394)
“It is impossible to lay down binding rules,” Helmuth von Moltke warned, “because two cases will never be exactly the same.”5 As in war, so in all things. Guidelines are the best we can do in a world where nothing is certain or exactly repeatable. (Location 4400)