A Strong Year for Good Judgment Inc: 2022 in Review and Outlook

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A Strong Year for Good Judgment Inc: 2022 in Review and Outlook

What a year! With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, protests in Iran, rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait, and inflation pressures around the world, 2022 was the busiest year yet at Good Judgment. Our esteemed clients and FutureFirst™ subscribers in the private sector, government, and non-profit organizations posed a record 181 questions to the professional Superforecasters. More than 80 questions resolved and were scored in 2022. We launched an additional 422 questions on Good Judgment Open, our public forecasting site and primary training ground for future Superforecasters.

Good Judgment’s Superforecasters’ outlook on the 2022 US midterm elections as of 22 October 2021, published in The Economist.

At the start of 2022, our Superforecasters called the 2022 US midterm election, as can be seen in The Economist’s The World Ahead publication, an ongoing collaboration that showcases how “data-driven approaches are becoming popular in all kinds of journalism.” Other appearances of Good Judgment and Superforecasting in the press and news can be found here. The Superforecasters also nailed the forecasts on Jerome Powell’s renomination to head the Federal Reserve and on the Tokyo Olympics. Looking ahead, their forecasts focus on the Russia-Ukraine conflict, tensions around Taiwan, global economy, and key elections in 2023 (many of which are featured in The World Ahead 2023).

Here are some of the other key developments and projects we worked on in the past year:

We launched an updated version of our subscription-based forecast monitor, FutureFirst. In addition to a brand-new interface, the monitor has been equipped with the following features:

    • Forecast Channels: Questions are grouped by theme or topical focus. Some of the current channels are US Elections, Ukraine, Geopolitics, Economics, Policy, Markets, China, and the Federal Reserve. These are available as part of FutureFirst or as standalone subscriptions.
    • Implied Medians: In addition to probability ranges, for specific questions FutureFirst now includes a median as part of a continuous probability distribution.
    • API Access: FutureFirst REST API enables clients’ programs to retrieve daily updated forecast data for use in their models. Separate entry points deliver Question data, Forecast data, and Forecast Distribution data (for applicable questions). Data can be provided in JSON or CSV formats.
Good Judgment’s Superforecasters called Jerome Powell’s renomination to lead the Fed months in advance.

We have further refined our question cluster methodology to illuminate complex topics with a diverse set of discrete questions which themselves can be valuable but taken together provide decision makers with a robust real-time monitoring tool.

We expanded our workshops to include advanced training sessions on question generation and low probability/high impact “gray swan” events. We resumed offering in-person workshops in 2022 even as we continued to offer virtual trainings for teams scattered across the globe—with an average Net Promoter Score of 71 across all sessions, above Apple. Of all the organizations that had a workshop in 2021, more than 90% came back for more in 2022, now regularly sending their interns and new hires through our training.

The US military continues to lead the way: Superforecasting training has been part of the curriculum for senior officers since 2019, and Good Judgment has been delivering semester-long courses at National Defense University in Washington, DC, continuously since the start of 2020. Over the same period, civil servants and military officers from Dubai have been forecasting during and after our annual two week-training courses.

We launched the Forecasting Aptitude Survey Tool, a screening tool that measures characteristics that Good Judgment’s research found correlate with subsequent forecasting accuracy. It’s been an integral part of our workshops for years, and we’re now pleased to provide it to organizations looking for an additional input to evaluate their existing or prospective staff.

To help advance decision-making skills among high school students, Good Judgment partnered with the Alliance for Decision Education to launch a pilot forecasting challenge for selected schools across the United States. We are continuing and expanding this project in 2023. At the other end of the education spectrum, we collaborated with the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University in a semester-long course that honed the forecasting skills of top graduate students.

The Superforecasters’ forecast on a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine.

With climate change becoming a growing concern worldwide, we partnered with adelphi, a leading European think tank for climate, environment, and development, to produce “Seven questions for the G7: Superforecasting climate-fragility risks for the coming decade,” published in 2022. Commissioned by the multilaterally backed climate security initiative Weathering Risk, it is the first report of its kind that applies the Superforecasting methodology to climate-related risks to peace and stability. We also partnered with Dr. William MacAskill, the author of the groundbreaking 2022 book What We Owe the Future, supplying 22 additional forecasts on the long-term impacts of climate change.

Finally, at the end of 2022, Good Judgment’s co-founder Philip Tetlock launched the non-profit Forecasting Research Institute, an exciting additional venture that will advance the frontiers of forecasting for better decisions. We look forward to contributing to their efforts in 2023—and beyond.

It’s already shaping up to be another exciting year of uncertainty in 2023, with gridlock in Washington, rising geopolitical tensions, and fierce global economic headwinds. We look forward to those challenges and contributing our forecasts and insights with the help of a phenomenal staff at Good Judgment Inc, the unrivalled skills of our professional Superforecasters, and the support of our expanding roster of clients and partners around the world.

Please sign up for our newsletter to keep up with our news in 2023.

Good Judgment Inc and Metaculus Launch First Collaboration

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Good Judgment Inc and Metaculus Launch First Collaboration

Metaculus and Good Judgment Inc are pleased to announce our first collaboration. Our organizations, which represent two of the largest human judgment forecasting communities in the world, will compare our results and methodologies in a project comprised of identical forecasting questions that ask about the future of 10 Our World In Data metrics. We plan to share insights, lessons learned, and analysis to contribute to the broader community and to the science of forecasting.

Cohorts of Superforecasters from Good Judgment Inc and Pro Forecasters from Metaculus will make predictions on their separate platforms on a set of 10 questions about technological advances, global development, and social progress on time horizons ranging from one to 100 years.

A Future Fund grant is supporting both organizations in producing these expert forecasts, as well as a public tournament on the Metaculus platform, though this collaboration between Metaculus and GJI is distinct, separate, and voluntary.

“Our shared goal is advancing forecasting as a trusted method for leaders to make critical decisions,” said Gaia Dempsey, CEO of Metaculus. “We’re thrilled to be working with our partners at Good Judgment Inc. This is the first time two of the largest players in the field of forecasting have come together in the spirit of collaboration to compare methodologies and to advance the science of forecasting.”

“We’re excited to be partnering with Metaculus to combine our approaches to apply probabilistic thinking to an uncertain future and help individuals and organizations make better decisions about the future,” said Warren Hatch, Good Judgment’s CEO. “We look forward to building on this collaboration for Our World In Data.”

Good Judgment Inc harnesses the wisdom of the crowd, led by Superforecasters, to quantify hard-to-measure risks for smarter strategic decisions for the private and public sectors.

Metaculus is a forecasting technology platform that optimally aggregates quantitative predictions of future events.

A Year in Review

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Good Judgment Inc: A Year in Review

From our headquarters in Manhattan to Canada to Brazil and points in between, the Good Judgment team had a productive and exciting year in 2021. Here are some of the key developments and projects we worked on in the past year.

FutureFirst™ Launched

One of the biggest additions to Good Judgment’s spectrum of services in 2021 was the launch of FutureFirst. FutureFirst is a client-driven subscription platform that gives our user community unlimited access to all Good Judgment’s subscription Superforecasts.

In many ways, FutureFirst is a consolidation of our scientific experiments and several years of successful client engagements. We designed FutureFirst to

    • offer clients one-click access to the collective wisdom of our international team of Superforecasters—to their predictions, rationales, and sources;
    • enable easy monitoring of the Superforecasters’ predictions on a wide range of topics (economy and finance, geopolitics, environment, technology, health, and more); and
    • allow clients to nominate and upvote new questions that matter to their organization so that the topics are crowd-sourced from the community of clients directly.
A sample of books that mention Superforecasters

With the addition of the Class of 2022 Superforecasters, Good Judgment now works with more than 180 professional Superforecasters. They reside on every continent except Antarctica and have been identified through a rigorous process to join the world’s most accurate forecasters.

There are currently some 80 active forecasts on FutureFirst, with new questions being added nearly every week. Taken together, the forecasts on the platform paint the big picture of global risk with accuracy not found anywhere else.

Improving Ways of Eliciting and Aggregating Forecasts

At the same time, we continue to crowdsource other ideas to enhance the value of our service for clients. In response to user feedback and innovations by our data science team, we:

    • now offer “continuous forecasts” so that clients can have a target forecast number as well as probabilities distributed across ranges;
    • provide “rolling forecasts” on a custom basis with predictions that automatically advance each day so that the time horizon is fixed—for instance, the probability of a recession in the next 12 months;
    • will be launching API access shortly for clients to have a data feed directly into their models.

 

Superforecasters in the Media

Superforecasters predict Jerome Powell’s reappointment

From questions about the Tokyo Olympics to the renomination of Jerome Powell to our early forecasts about Covid-19 that were closed and scored in the past year, the year 2021 offered many examples of Good Judgment’s Superforecasters providing early and accurate insights. The European Central Bank and financial firms such as Goldman Sachs and T. Rowe Price all referenced our forecasts in their work. The year also brought both new and returning collaborations with some of the world’s leading media organizations and authors.

    • We worked with The Economist on their “What If” and “The World Ahead 2022” annual publications.
    • The Financial Times featured our forecast on Covid-19 vaccinations on their front page and on their Covid-19 data page.
    • Sky News launched an exciting current affairs challenge for the UK and beyond on our public platform GJ Open.
    • Best-selling authors Tim Harford and Adam Grant also ran popular forecasting challenges.
    • Adam Grant’s Think Again and Daniel Kahneman’s Noise (with coauthors Oliver Sibony and Cass R. Sunstein) published in 2021 discuss Superforecasters’ outstanding track record.
    • Magazines such as Luckbox and Entrepreneur published major articles about Good Judgment and the Superforecasters.

 

Training Better Forecasters

Our workshops continued to attract astute business and government participants who received the best training on boosting in-house forecasting accuracy. Of all the organizations that had a workshop in 2020, more than 90% came back for more in 2021. And they were joined by many more organizations in the public and private sectors throughout the year. Many of these firms now regularly send their interns and new hires through our workshops. Capstone LLC, a global policy analysis firm with headquarters in Washington, DC, London, and Sydney, went a step further: They made our workshops the cornerstone of multi-day mandatory training sessions for all their analysts.

“This led to the adoption of [S]uperforecasting techniques across all of our research and a more rigorous measuring of all our predictions,” Capstone CEO David Barrosse wrote on the company’s blog. “Ultimately the process means better predictions, and more value for clients.”

As many in our company are themselves Superforecasters, we start any forecast about Good Judgment in 2022 by first looking back. The science of Superforecasting has shown that establishing a base rate leads to making more accurate predictions. If the developments in 2021 are a valid indication, next year will bring more exciting projects, fruitful collaborations, and effective ways to bring valuable early insight to our clients.