Philip E Tetlock
Books by Philip E Tetlock
“Tetlock, who is a Canadian American political scientist, conducted a lot of experiments to try and understand what makes people become better at making predictions…What he found is that in a whole range of topics, those he called ‘superforecasters’ tend to be, on average, much better at predicting events than the topic experts that he compared them with. When we listen to the radio or watch TV, we often see these pundits who seem to have extremely strong views about something: for example, they claim with absolute certainty what’s going to happen in the war in Ukraine, or swear that a given politician is going to get elected in the next cycle. And because these people have a very assertive and confident way of telling us these things, we tend to believe them. Tetlock went to the effort of logging all the predictions made by these people, and he found that they were no better than random.” Read more...
“Essentially, what Tetlock did was run a series of longitudinal studies of predictions made by so-called political experts – pundits and the like. What he finds, as will not surprise you, is that these so-called ‘experts’ are, at least for their intended purpose, seldom more accurate than monkeys throwing darts.” Read more...
Kathryn Schulz, Journalist
Interviews where books by Philip E Tetlock were recommended
The best books on Wrongness, recommended by Kathryn Schulz
The award-winning journalist and the world’s leading Wrongologist discusses human error and selects five books on wrongness in both public life and literature
-
1
Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About The World — And Why Things Are Better Than You Think
by Hans Rosling -
2
The Signal and the Noise
by Nate Silver -
3
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Dan Gardner & Philip E Tetlock -
4
Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
by Annie Duke -
5
Hello World: How to Be Human in the Age of the Machine
by Hannah Fry
The best books on Using Data to Understand the World, recommended by Edouard Mathieu
The best books on Using Data to Understand the World, recommended by Edouard Mathieu
Even as more and more data becomes available, many of us have a view of the world that doesn’t correspond to reality. On probabilities in particular, people tend to be completely clueless. Here Edouard Mathieu, Head of Data at Oxford-based research group Our World in Data, recommends books to help readers not only use data to better understand the world, but also make better decisions in daily life.
-
1
Moral Capital
by Christopher Leslie Brown -
2
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
by Julia Galef -
3
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity
by Toby Ord -
4
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Dan Gardner & Philip E Tetlock -
5
The Life You Can Save
by Peter Singer
The best books on Longtermism, recommended by Will MacAskill
The best books on Longtermism, recommended by Will MacAskill
There is so much suffering in today’s world it’s hard to focus attention on future generations, but that’s exactly what we should be doing, says Will MacAskill, a leader of the effective altruism movement. Here, he introduces books that contributed to his thinking about the long-term future and the “silent billions” who are not yet able to speak for themselves.
