Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

The Good Judgment Project was founded by Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers in 2011 and was essential to identifying and nurturing the superforecasters who are the subject of the book.

A multiyear forecasting study, the GJP began when IARPA was smarting from the shame of recent failures in American intelligence-gathering and thus launched a competition that would help it identify new ways to forecast relevant geopolitical events. The forecasting tournament comprised a competition among five scientific teams led by top world researchers, who would attempt to predict the types of issues intelligence analysts dealt with daily. As one of these teams, GJP had to answer IARPA’s 500 questions about world affairs in the span of four years. The GJP began to overshadow its competitors from the first year, during which it outperformed the control group by 60%. The GJP continued on this path of success, also beating the experts attached to academic institutions from other groups. Indeed, the GJP’s performance was so stellar that IARPA got rid of all other competitors after the first two years. Tetlock’s key insight from the competition was that “foresight is real” and that “some people […] have it in spades” (18).