This 46-minute episode from Freakonimcs (published 14/01/2016) talks about how bad humans are at predictions. There are a lot of reasons why we are bad, including a severe lack of knowledge and massive overconfidence, and this spans all domains, from sports to global politics to general day-to-day activities.

One of the experts interviewed, Philip Tetlock, authored the book Superforcasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Here are his “10 Commandments for Aspiring Superforecasters”:

1. Triage – focus on questions where your hard work is likely to pay off
2. Break seemingly intractable problems into tractable sub-problems
3. Strike the right balance between inside vies and outside views
4. Strike the right balance between under- and overreacting to the evidence
5. Look for the clashing causal forces at work in each problem
6. Strive to distinguish as many degrees of doubt as the problem permits, but no more
7. Strike the right balance between under- and overconfidence, between prudence and decisiveness
8. Look for the errors behind your mistakes but beware of ‘rear view mirror’ hindsight biases
9. Bring out the best in others and let others bring out the best in you
10. Master the error balancing bicycle (this refers to the fact that you can’t become a superforecaster just by reading the manual – learning requires doing, which will give you accurate feedback)

Definitely an interesting episode that really highlights how awful we are as a species at predicting the future.