In this analysis is there any assumption about information states? Is the idea that the forecasts are all based on public information everyone has available to them? Or can that explain part of the different performance and then we need to look at a subset with perhaps better access to the information and see how they perform against one another—or various types of informational asymmetries or institutional factors related to the information.
Superforecasters used only public information, or information they happened to have access to—but the original project was run in parallel with a (then secret) prediction platform for inside the intelligence community. It turned out that the intelligence people were significantly outperformed by superforecasters, despite having access to classified information and commercial information sources, so it seems clear that the information access wasn’t particularly critical for the specific class of geopolitical predictions they looked at. This is probably very domain dependent, however.
In this analysis is there any assumption about information states? Is the idea that the forecasts are all based on public information everyone has available to them? Or can that explain part of the different performance and then we need to look at a subset with perhaps better access to the information and see how they perform against one another—or various types of informational asymmetries or institutional factors related to the information.
Superforecasters used only public information, or information they happened to have access to—but the original project was run in parallel with a (then secret) prediction platform for inside the intelligence community. It turned out that the intelligence people were significantly outperformed by superforecasters, despite having access to classified information and commercial information sources, so it seems clear that the information access wasn’t particularly critical for the specific class of geopolitical predictions they looked at. This is probably very domain dependent, however.
Thanks. Interesting, though not too surprising in some ways.