WEAPONS of mass destruction will be found in Iraq. It will rain tomorrow. Jeremy Corbyn cannot possibly become leader of the Labour Party. The Japanese rugby team will never beat South Africa. Human beings can not resist trying to scry the future. If soothsaying is not the oldest profession, it is certainly one of them.
大规模杀伤性武器将在伊拉克被发现，明天会下雨，杰里米·科尔宾不可能成为工党领导人，日本橄榄球队永远也无法打败南非队。人类无法抗拒去尝试预测预测未来，它毕竟是最古老的职业之一。
The Chinese had the I-Ching; the Roman speered at the entrails of sacrificed animals. These days, anyone wanting to know what the future holds can consult everything from telephone psychics to intelligence agencies, bookies, futures markets and media pundits. Their recordis far from perfect. But it is difficult to say just how imperfect: for all the importance people attach to forecasting, hardly anyone bothers to keep score.
中国人古有《易经》，古罗马人观察献祭动物的内脏。如今，凡是想知道未来的人能够从一切渠道——从灵通热线到情报人员，从赌注经纪人到期货专家和媒体权威——得到建议。虽然他们的纪录远非完美。但是，只谈论如何的不完美是困难的：尽管人们给予预测极大的重要性，几乎没有人愿意费力坚持。
Philip Tetlock is a rare exception. His most recent book, “Superforecasting”, (written with Dan Gardner, a Canadian journalist with an interest in politics and human psychology) is a scientific analysis of the ancient art of divination. Mr Tetlock, who teaches at the Wharton School of Business, became famous for concluding, on the basis of a 20-year forecasting tournament that ran between 1984 and 2004, that the average expert is “roughly as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee”. His findings were more subtle than that, and his new book is an attempt to set the record straight. It shows that the future can indeed be foreseen, at least in the near term. More interestingly, it shows that some people are much better at it than others. And, crucially, it shows that prophecy is not a divine gift, but a skill that can be practised and improved.
菲利普·泰罗克（
PhilipTetlock
）是一个罕见的例外。他（与对政治和人类心理感兴趣的加拿大记者丹·加德纳（
Dan Gardner
）合写的）最新著作《超级预测》就是对古老的预测艺术的一个科学的分析。在沃顿商学院教书的泰罗克曾根据
1984
年到
2004
年之间的
20
年预测大赛，提出过一般专家的“准确性大致同投掷飞镖的大猩猩一样”的结论，并因此而成名。他现在的发现比这个结论还要敏锐，而且这本新书是他纠正这个结论的一次尝试。此书表明，未来的确可以预测，起码是在短期内。更有趣的是，有些人比另外一些人更擅长此道。关键是，此书表明，预测不是上天赋予的一个礼物，而是一种可以运用于实践并且能够得到提高的技能。
The book describes another contest, this time run by America's spies in the wake of the disastrous misadventure in Iraq. Begun in 2011, it posed hundreds of geopolitical questions (“Will Saudi Arabiaagree to OPEC production cuts in November 2014?” for instance) to thousands of volunteer participants. A small number of forecasters began to pull clear ofthe pack: the titular “superforecasters”. Their performance was consistently impressive. With nothing more than an internet connection and their own brains, they consistently beat everything from financial markets to trained intelligence analysts with access to top-secret information.
该书描述了另一种竞赛，不过这次竞赛是由美国情报人员在伊拉克的灾难性意外事故之后组织的。始于
2011
年的这场竞赛，向数千位自愿参与者提出了几百个（诸如“沙特会在
2014
年
11
月同意欧佩克减产吗？”）地缘政治问题。极少数的预测者开始从有名无实的“超级预测者”中脱颖而出。他们的表现总是给人留下深刻的印象。除了一个互联网连接和他们自己的大脑，他们总是能够在无所依赖的情况下，打败从金融市场到可以得到绝密信息的专业情报分析师的一切。
They were an eclectic bunch: housewives,unemployed factory workers and professors of mathematics. But Mr Tetlock andhis collaborators were able to extract some common personality traits.Superforecasters are clever, on average, but by no means geniuses. Moreimportant than sheer intelligence was mental attitude. Borrowing from Sir Isaiah Berlin, a Latvian-born British philosopher, Mr Tetlock divides peopleinto two categories: hedge hogs, whose understanding of the world depends on oneor two big ideas, and foxes, who think the world is too complicated to boild own into a single slogan. Superforecasters are drawn exclusively from the ranks of the foxes.
他们是一群形形色色的人：家庭主妇、失业的工厂工人、数学教授。但是，泰罗克和他的合作者能够总结出一些共同的人格特征。超级预测者一般都很聪明，但绝非天才。比纯智力更重要的是心态。借助拉脱维亚裔英国哲学家以赛亚·伯林的做法，泰罗克把人分成了两类：刺猬和狐狸。前者对于这个世界的认识依赖于一两种重大思想，后者认为这个世界太复杂以致于无法归结为一句单独的口号。超级预测者主要出自狐狸这类人。
Humility in the face of a complex world makes superforecasters subtle thinkers. They tend to be comfortable with numbers and statistical concepts such as “regression to the mean” (which essentially says that most of the time things are pretty normal, so any large deviation is likely to be followed by a shift back towards normality). But they are not statisticians: unlike celebrity pollsters such as Nate Silver, they tend not to build explicit mathematical models (after all, questions such as“Will Russia officially annex Ukranian territory in the next three months?” areless suitable for the data-heavy, historical approach that Mr Silver prefers).
面对一个复杂世界时的谦卑让超级预测者成为敏锐的思想者。他们往往对（从本质上表明事物在大多数时间中都非常正常，因而任何大的偏差都有可能紧接着一次快速回归常态的）“回归均值”之类的数字和统计概念感到亲切。但是，他们不是统计专家：不同于
Nate Silver
那样的民调专家，他们往往不去构建清晰的数学模型（毕竟，像“俄罗斯会在今后三个月内正式吞并乌克兰领土吗？”这样的问题是不适于
Silver
擅长的大数据的、历史的方法。）
But superforecasters do have a healthy appetite for information, a willingness to revisit their predictions in light of new data, and the ability to synthesise material from sources with very different outlooks on the world. They think in fine gradations. Rather than assigning something a probability of 60 to 40, for instance, a superforecaster might, after careful consideration and many small revisions to take account of newfound subtleties, settle on odds of 62 to 38.
但是，超级预测者又的确拥有一种健康的对于信息的嗜好，一种根据新数据去重新考虑他们的预测的意愿，以及整合来自对这个世界有着截然不同观点的材料的能力。他们思维慎密。例如，在经过深思熟虑并根据新发现的细微之处做出诸多微调之后，他们不会给予某一事件
60-40
的可能性，而是把概率定在
62-38
之间。
Most important is what Mr Tetlock calls a“growth mindset”: a mix of determination, self-reflection and willingness to learn from one's mistakes. The best forecasters were less interested in whether they were right or wrong than in why they were right or wrong. They were always looking for ways to improve their performance. In other words, prediction is not only possible, it is teachable.
最重要的是泰罗克所说的“成长性心态”：一种由决断力、自我反省能力和从别人的失败中吸取教训的意愿力所组成的混合物。最好的预测者对于对错的兴趣少于对于对错原因的兴趣。他们总是想方设法去提高他们的表现。换句话说，就是：预测不仅仅是可能的，而且是可以传授的。
Talk of growth mindsets, statistical fluency and a complicated world may sound dry and technical. It is not. Mr Tetlock's thesis is that politics and human affairs are not inscrutable mysteries. Instead, they are a bit like weather forecasting, where short-term predictions are possible and reasonably accurate.
