Forecasts That Don’t Mean Much
Comedian George Carlin had a character called Al Sleet, otherwise known as the Hippie-Dippie Weatherman. Sleet’s speciality was vague or ambiguous weather forecasts, and his most famous was:
Tonight’s forecast: Dark. Continued mostly dark tonight, changing to widely scattered light towards morning.
Everyone can find this funny, but it takes a very special kind of intellect like Philip Tetlock to take it seriously. Why seriously? Because Tetlock has spent much of his career studying forecasting, why we get it wrong (as we often do), and whether we can get it right (which, with discipline, we sometimes can).
A forecast
He has just come out with a new book, Superforecasting: The Art & Science of Prediction, which I am going to discuss in just a second.
But first, we have to talk about dart-throwing chimpanzees.