GJ: Could you tell us about your journey to becoming a Good Judgment Superforecaster?

VVK: I’m a news junkie, and the GFC [Global Financial Crisis] in many ways shaped my thinking and my approach to news and, nowadays, investing too.

In the period 2007/8, when the financial crisis happened, I was fresh out of college with a couple years’ experience in the industry. I started questioning the entire world around me and the numbers (billions of dollars in bailout) that were discussed in the media. That singular incident made me dig deeper to understand what happened and why it all happened. One link led to another, and one of those links led me to the excellent blog of Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution). One post there, which talked about crowd wisdom with a link where interested folks could nominate themselves, sounded very intriguing. I nominated myself and didn’t think much of it. Long after I had forgotten about it, I got an email asking if I was still interested, along with next steps.

I was part of the format where the cohort wasn’t aware of the forecasts made by the rest—so it was ‘to each his own.’ Extremely early days for the GJP (it was the Good Judgment Project back then) and multiple other contenders in the coveted IARPA competition. I made it into the ranks of Supers in the second year. In hindsight, it might have been better to crack it during the first year, so there is always scope for improvement. However, it didn’t say anywhere that the top 1% would get to move to the next level, so there was no incentive either.

I used to be 3-4 times freer during the 2010s and would answer all the questions on the day they came up. Despite that, I had a reasonable Brier score and was trying my best to provide reasonable rationales too. I’m paying the penalty of middle age now with very little time between life, family, and work, but I’m still part of GJI whenever I’m able to contribute.

A few interesting tidbits that I learned from Terry [Murray, GJI co-founder and Project Manager for the GJP at UC–Berkeley] earlier was that I was one of the earliest Superforecasters (perhaps the only one) who was both an Indian and based out of South Asia. So, in a few ways, I played a small part in bringing an outside view and diverse viewpoints.

GJ: What is your area of expertise outside of accurate forecasting? How has it helped you in your forecasting work with Good Judgment?

VVK: I’m a technologist and an engineer with more than a passing passion for music and arts. It has taught me to be methodical and look at hard numbers but also accept that one is prone to errors and/or can have bad days. I take that to heart and don’t berate myself too much if I get something wrong as long as the process is right.

GJ: And on the flipside, how does your expertise in forecasting help you in your day job?

VVK: My forecasting experience has made me more balanced as a person and has also helped me in being conscious about the various biases in action. I’m someone who is naturally introspective, even prior to the GJP days. Nowadays, when I listen to a conversation, I can mostly get the difference between an emotional appeal without facts and a factual appeal without a lot of conviction/flair, and I’m delighted to have that skill, as it’s a critical skill, in my opinion, particularly in our increasingly split-right-down-the-middle world. Without having spent these thousands of hours—this part of life is a labor of love—it might have been quite difficult to get the debiasing and the always “search for information from both the sides” as part of the moral and life fabric.

Being balanced has its disadvantages, as many people prefer a confident leader who can make major mistakes (and explain them away) vs a grounded guy who doesn’t make as many mistakes but also doesn’t sound uber confident. However, nowadays I’ve made peace with the approach as this suits me more as the person that I strive to be. Put differently, maybe the GJP and I were on a collision course that was bound to happen, who knows?

GJ: What type of forecasting questions do you enjoy working on most?

VVK: Any kind. The more imprecise the question, the better I used to love it, and we never had a shortage of extremely strange questions in the earlier part of the journey. A few notable ones were the Nicaragua canal, armed UAV, Nigeria elections, Chinese corruption cases, etc.

A fair number of us were very passionate about these questions. I recall how many of us were discussing some very obscure topics as if our entire lives depended on it. It’s very heartening to note that a lot of the original gang is still there and still adding value.

I would like to think I add value in the questions where I can bring my analytical skills. One thing that pleases me the most is that whenever I set my mind on the questions and invested enough time to keep searching for news, I was quite regularly on the right side of maybe, even for a lot of the stubborn questions for which I had very little information.

GJ: What advice would you give those starting out as forecasters and wanting to improve their skills?

VVK: It’s a very diverse world out there, and there are lots of biases out there too. A forecaster needs to look at both sides of the aisle to understand what’s going on and hopefully not put their own bias into their probability judgments. This means one must bring a lot of time, aptitude, and interest into doing one’s own independent research while coming up with an answer.

The exercise is enriching, and it’s a priceless experience to understand the goings-on and to predict the outcome for complex situations with reasonable accurately. If someone can do it enough times and also consistently, then they are only limited by what they want to achieve. No distance is too great if the commitment and interest is there.

There will be pitfalls on the journey. But the process is as important as the journey. It could be that sometimes you don’t get the answer right if, say, a time period involved skewed the probability and the outcome occurred right after the question closed. But if the general direction is right, take heart, take the lessons, and strive to get better.