Want To Make Better Predictions?

NPR:

We constantly make predictions about the unknown, at scales both large and small.

Which presidential candidates will win each party’s nomination? Which stocks will go up in the next six months — and which down? Should I have a second child? Will I really enjoy the chocolate chip pancakes most, or should I order the pumpkin waffles instead?

When it comes to geopolitical decisions, most of us aren’t very good. Experts aren’t so great either — a well-known study by Philip Tetlock, for example, found that political experts weren’t reliably better than lay people (and in some cases, no better than chance) when it came to making predictions about world events, such as whether there would be a nonviolent end to apartheid in South Africa or whether the United States would go to war in the Persian Gulf.

As for predictions about our own lives, well, we aren’t too great there, either. The psychologist Dan Gilbert (among others) has documented pervasive errors in people’s “affective forecasts” — their predictions about the emotional impact of future events, such as getting married or being denied tenure. People expect such events to be totally transforming, for instance, when often their emotional effects are less dramatic and more transient.

Read the whole story: NPR