Before January 1, 2022, will the United States Olympic Committee announce that it is boycotting the 2022 Olympics?
I am in a virtual workshop that will test my abilities to forecast the future, and I have 10 seconds to answer. I’m scanning my brain. (Simone Biles, not relevant. Moscow, 1980, yes. Uyghurs?) But time’s up. I guess 20 percent. Then it’s on to the next questions: What is the probability the U.S. will regulate cryptocurrencies on the stock market by January 2023? Will China attempt to take Taiwan over the next five years? How big is the surface area of the Mediterranean Sea in square kilometers?
“I bet you didn’t wake up thinking you had to answer that question today,” says Warren Hatch, who is co-leading this workshop.
There are about 12 of us taking this training, including a guy from the Department of Defense. Over the next two days, we scratch our heads, trade bits of insight, try to shed our cognitive biases (more on that later), and see if we have the chops for predicting things professionally. I am definitely out, but I suspect a couple in this group qualify. Those who do will be a step closer to gaining an elite, though geeky, kind of status: It’s called a “superforecaster.” And if you are one, you can join the global network of über predictors, the best of the best, who work with the company that arranged this workshop in the first place. It is called Good Judgment. Hatch is its CEO.
While I’m at my laptop sweating it out for Good Judgment in September, experts are making headlines in the real world answering similar questions. “Inflation is elevated and will likely remain so in coming months,” predicts Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell; “There is a chance that we will see big declines in coming years,” wagers a Yale economist on home prices. Anthony Fauci, meanwhile, says a Northeast surge mean, in a concrete way? Is it a 51 percent odds of happening, or 85 percent? Are 2022 and 2023 considered “coming years,” or are 2024 and 2025?
