Have you ever been infuriated by a doctor’s unwillingness to give you an honest, probabilistic estimate about what to expect? Or a lawyer who won’t tell you the chances you’ll win your case? Their behaviour is so frustrating because accurately predicting the future is central to every action we take. If we can’t assess the likelihood of different outcomes we’re in a complete bind, whether the decision concerns war and peace, work and study, or Black Mirror and RuPaul’s Drag Race. Which is why the research of Professor Philip Tetlock is relevant for all of us each and every day. He has spent 40 years as a meticulous social scientist, collecting millions of predictions from tens of thousands of people, in order to figure out how good humans really are at foreseeing the future, and what habits of thought allow us to do better. Along with other psychologists, he identified that many ordinary people are attracted to a ‘folk probability’ that draws just three distinctions — ‘impossible’, ‘possible’ and ‘certain’ — and which leads to major systemic mistakes. But with the right mindset and training we can become capable of accurately discriminating between differences as fine as 56% versus 57% likely. In the aftermath of Iraq and WMDs the US intelligence community hired him to prevent the same ever happening again, and his guide — Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction — became a bestseller back in 2014. That was five years ago. In today’s interview, Tetlock explains how his research agenda continues to advance, today using the game Civilization 5 to see how well we can predict what would have happened in elusive counterfactual worlds we never get to see, and discovering how simple algorithms can complement or substitute for human judgement. We discuss how his work can be applied to your personal life to answer high-stakes questions, such as how likely you are to thrive in a given career path, or whether your business idea will be a billion-dollar unicorn — or fall apart catastrophically. (To help you get better at figuring those things out, our site now has a training app developed by the Open Philanthropy Project and Clearer Thinking that teaches you to accurately distinguish your ’70 percents’ from your ’80 percents’.) We also bring a few methodological questions raised by the author of a recent review of the forecasting literature. And we find out what jobs people can take to make improving the reasonableness of decision-making in major institutions their profession, as it has been for Tetlock over many decades. We view Tetlock’s work as so core to living well that we’ve brought him back for a second and longer appearance on the show — his first appearance was back in episode 15. Some questions this time around include: What would it look like to live in a world where elites across the globe were better at predicting social and political trends? What are the main barriers to this happening? What are some of the best opportunities for making forecaster training content? What do extrapolation algorithms actually do, and given they perform so well, can we get more access to them? Have any sectors of society or government started to embrace forecasting more in the last few years? If you could snap your fingers and have one organisation begin regularly using proper forecasting, which would it be? When if ever should one use explicit Bayesian reasoning?