Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

Is your business playing it safe&#8212or taking the right risks? If you read nothing else on managing risk, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help your company make smart decisions and thrive, even when the future is unclear. This book will inspire you to: Avoid the most common errors in risk management Understand the three distinct categories of risk and tailor your risk-management processes accordingly Embrace uncertainty as a key element of breakthrough innovation Adopt best practices for mitigating political threats Upgrade your organization's forecasting capabilities to gain a competitive edge Detect and neutralize cyberattacks originating inside your company This collection of articles includes "Managing Risks: A New Framework," by Robert S. Kaplan and Anette Mikes; "How to Build Risk into Your Business Model," by Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine; "The Six Mistakes Executives Make in Risk Management," by Nassim N. Taleb, Daniel G. Goldstein, and Mark W. Spitznagel; "From Superstorms to Factory Fires: Managing Unpredictable Supply-Chain Disruptions," by David Simchi-Levi, William Schmidt, and Yehua Wei; "Is It Real? Can We Win? Is It Worth Doing?: Managing Risk and Reward in an Innovation Portfolio," by George S. Day; "Superforecasting: How to Upgrade Your Company's Judgment," by Paul J. H. Schoemaker and Philip E. Tetlock; "Managing 21st-Century Political Risk," by Condoleezza Rice and Amy Zegart; "How to Scandal-Proof Your Company," by Paul Healy and George Serafeim; "Beating the Odds When You Launch a New Venture," by Clark Gilbert and Matthew Eyring; "The Danger from Within," by David M. Upton and Sadie Creese; and "Future-Proof Your Climate Strategy," by Joseph E. Aldy and Gianfranco Gianfrate.

It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work on race in America. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of this dilemma by viewing the issues of race as they are now, not as they were a generation or so ago.

Political scientists often ask themselves what might have been if history had unfolded differently: if Stalin had been ousted as General Party Secretary or if the United States had not dropped the bomb on Japan. Although scholars sometimes scoff at applying hypothetical reasoning to world politics, the contributors to this volume--including James Fearon, Richard Lebow, Margaret Levi, Bruce Russett, and Barry Weingast--find such counterfactual conjectures not only useful, but necessary for drawing causal inferences from historical data. Given the importance of counterfactuals, it is perhaps surprising that we lack standards for evaluating them. To fill this gap, Philip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin propose a set of criteria for distinguishing plausible from implausible counterfactual conjectures across a wide range of applications.

The contributors to this volume make use of these and other criteria to evaluate counterfactuals that emerge in diverse methodological contexts including comparative case studies, game theory, and statistical analysis. Taken together, these essays go a long way toward establishing a more nuanced and rigorous framework for assessing counterfactual arguments about world politics in particular and about the social sciences more broadly.

Why do citizens in pluralist democracies disagree collectively about the very values they agree on individually? This provocative book highlights the inescapable conflicts of rights and values at the heart of democratic politics. Based on interviews with thousands of citizens and political decision makers, the book focuses on modern Canadian politics, investigating why a country so fortunate in its history and circumstances is on the brink of dissolution. Taking advantage of new techniques of computer-assisted interviewing, the authors explore the politics of a wide array of issues, from freedom of expression to public funding of religious schools to government wiretapping to antihate legislation, analyzing not only why citizens take the positions they do but also how easily they can be talked out of them. In the process, the authors challenge a number of commonly held assumptions about democratic politics. They show, for example, that political elites do not constitute a special bulwark protecting civil liberties; that arguments over political rights are as deeply driven by commitment to the master values of democratic politics as by failure to understand them; and that consensus on the rights of groups is inherently more fragile than on the rights of individuals.

It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal's seminal work on race in America. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of this dilemma by viewing the issues of race as they are now, not as they were a generation or so ago.

Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

What if the Persians had won at Salamis? What if Christ had not been crucified? What if the Chinese had harnessed steam power before the West? Disparaged by some as a mere parlor game, counterfactual history is seen by others as an indispensable historical tool. Taking as their point of inquiry the debate over the inevitability of the rise of the West, the eminent scholars in "Unmaking the West" argue that there is no escaping counterfactual history. Whenever we make claims of cause and effect, we commit ourselves to the assumption that if key links in the causal chain were broken, history would have unfolded otherwise. Likewise, without counterfactual history we all too easily slip into the habit of hindsight bias, forgetting, as soon as we learn what happened, how unpredictable the world looked beforehand, and closing our minds to all the ways the course might have changed. This collection is thus both an exploration of alternative scenarios to world history and an exercise in testing the strengths and weaknesses of counterfactual experiments.
"If ever there was an argument for the usefulness of counterfactual history, this admirable, and admirably focused, collection has convincingly made it."
--Robert Cowley, editor of the What If?TM series
"With chapters ranging from politics to war to religion to economics and to science and technology, this is the most thematically wide-ranging collection on counterfactuality. An intelligent, cutting-edge study with important things to say."
--Jonathan C. D. Clark, Department of History, University of Kansas
"This volume is likely to become a standard reference in the literature on historical methodology, and could have adramatic impact on the way future generations of historians approach disciplinary inquiry. . . . By allowing readers to share in the doubts and epiphanies that lead up to the authors' epistemological revelations, the volume allows readers to grasp the rich potential of approaching their own research from a counterfactual perspective."
--Aaron Belkin, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of California, Santa Barbara
Philip E. Tetlock is Mitchell Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, and author of "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" Richard Ned Lebow is James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and author of "The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders," winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology. Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History at Ohio State University, a Fellow of the British Academy, and author of "The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800," winner of two book prizes.