judgement
Forecasting triage
The rule
Spend your thinking only on the hard-but-knowable middle. Skip what is already obvious, and skip what is pure chance.
Where it flips
Sorting can become an excuse to dodge hard questions by calling them "unknowable." The fix is to first test whether work actually shrinks the doubt. Only then file a question under hopeless.
Some questions answer themselves, like "will the sun rise tomorrow?" Some are pure coin-flips that no effort can crack, like next week's tiny market wiggle. Real skill is wasted on both. A good guesser sorts questions first. Pour your energy into the ones that are hard but truly knowable with work. And do not pretend you can guess the things that cannot be guessed.
A worked example
Aayra ignores tomorrow's index tick, which is just noise, and the fact that cash loses to rising prices, which is obvious. She spends her effort on the knowable middle: can a business hold its profit margins for a decade? [illustrative]
How to spot it
- ·effort spent on random noise
- ·the obvious over-analysed
- ·the knowable-but-hard avoided
Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner · Superforecasting