Tetlock's Basic Approach: Amateurs and Experts in a Learning System

Tetlock took volunteers, non-experts, who did not have access to special knowledge, and compared their predictive power—and their ability to improve their predictive power—to the predictions of experts—people who knew the topic inside and out and had access to unpublished information. The amateurs won out. The important thing is how the amateurs and experts recorded and took accountability for their predictions. Tetlock set up a learning system and observed how well people did learn. The experts did poorly compared to the amateurs, not only in improvement over time—that part makes sense, because they started further back—but they eventually outstripped the experts, which is surprising.