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.
