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Expert Political Judgment
Tetlock's 2005 landmark documenting two decades of expert predictions scored against outcomes — revealing that <em>credentialed forecasters perform no better than chance</em> and that confidence inversely correlates with accuracy.
Published by Princeton University Press in 2005, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? presented the results of Tetlock's twenty-year study tracking 28,000 predictions from 284 political scientists, economists, and intelligence analysts. The central finding — that expert forecasts were no more accurate than random guessing — challenged the authority of expertise itself. More consequentially, the book identified a small minority of forecasters who consistently outperformed everyone else, and documented the cognitive habits distinguishing them: thinking in probabilities, updating frequently, seeking disconfirmation, and resisting identity-protective reasoning. The book introduced the fox-hedgehog framework as an empirical predictor of forecasting accuracy.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The study's design was elegant in its rigor. Tetlock asked experts to make specific, falsifiable predictions about geopolitical events: Would the Soviet Union use force to retain its Baltic states? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the European Union expand eastward? Each prediction required a probability estimate and a time horizon. Each was scored against what actually
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