[SAGE Seminar] [SOC Seminar] Forty Years of Forecasting Tournaments: What We Learn When We Get Serious about Keeping Score
Speaker
Dr. Philip TetlockLocation
Sage Conference Room, Psych 1312Info
“Meliorism” stresses the feasibility of improving human judgment—and has been the driving philosophical force behind subjective-probability forecasting tournaments over the last 40 years. This talk focuses on what we have learned: (a) about spotting talent (superforecasting), cultivating talent (training), developing teams (coaching), and designing crowd-aggregation algorithms; (b) about aleatory-uncertainty boundary conditions on Meliorism. I also offer an uncharacteristically bold forecast for the next 40 years. Large Language Models have arrived--and Artificial General intelligence (a.k.a. Superintelligence) is not far behind. The 2020/2030s will be a transitional historical era in which humanity loses its cognitive dominance in virtually all forecasting arenas—and big competitive advantages accrue to those who can exploit the exponential growth in sophistication of these technologies. Beyond this era, all bets are off.
