Philip E. Tetlock

Philip Tetlock is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who spent two decades collecting and scoring the predictions of political experts. The result, published in Expert Political Judgment in 2005, was that the average expert did little better than chance, and the more famous the expert, the worse the forecast.

From 2011 he co-led the Good Judgment Project, a forecasting tournament funded by the US intelligence community's research arm, in which thousands of volunteers answered geopolitical questions. The top two percent, whom he named superforecasters, beat professional analysts with classified information, and Superforecasting, written with Dan Gardner, describes what they did differently.