In this episode (recorded 11/1/17), we interview superforecaster Bruno Jahn. Bruno is a forecasting consultant with an M.A. in Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies from the Freie Universität Berlin.
We begin by talking about how Bruno got involved with Good Judgment and how he became a superforecaster. Then we go through a number of Good Judgment Project forecasting questions we did poorly on and discuss whether our forecasts were really inaccurate or whether we were just unlucky. We go on to consider whether expertise can sometimes be an obstacle to forecasting.
Next Bruno tells us about his forthcoming book on forecasting, Sichere Prognosen in unsicheren Zeiten (“Certain Forecasts in Uncertain Times”), which comes out in April 2018. Bruno says that modern forecasters play a similar social to Roman augurs and talks about the value of “common-sense Bayesianism”. He also argues that serious forecasting can serve as an antidote to fake news. We close the podcast by talking about what supeforecasters are like. whether we will see a “Jamaica coalition” in Germany, and why center-left parties seem to be collapsing in Europe.
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