Are Predictions Getting Better?

If you’re the kind of person who cares about “The Folly of Prediction” and The Signal and the Noise, you may want to read Amy Zegart‘s Foreign Policy piece about predictions. Making predictions within the intelligence community, for example, is a different game than betting on basketball:

In March Madness, everyone has access to the same information, at least theoretically. Expertise depends mostly on how geeky you choose to be, and how much time you spend watching ESPN and digging up past stats. In intelligence, however, information is tightly compartmented by classification restrictions, leaving analysts with different pieces of data and serious barriers to sharing it. Imagine scattering NCAA bracket information across 1,000 people, many of whom do not know each other, some of whom have no idea what a bracket is or the value of the information they possess. They’re all told if they share anything with the wrong person, they could be disciplined, fired, even prosecuted. But somehow they have to collectively pick the winner to succeed.

In other spheres, however, predictions just keep getting better. “Smart people are finding clever new ways of generating better data, identifying and unpacking biases, and sharing information unimaginable 20 or even 10 years ago,” writes Zegart.