What is predictable? A commentary on Tetlock et al. (2023)

Abstract

Is prediction possible in world politics-and, if so, when? Tetlock et al.(2023) report some of the first systematic evidence on long-range political forecasting. Asked to guess which countries would get nuclear weapons within 25 years and which would undergo border changes due to war or secession, both experts and educated generalists outperformed chance. On nuclear proliferation-but not border changesthe experts beat the generalists, and the difference grew as the time scale increased from 5 to 25 years. What are we to make of this? The authors see messages for both "skeptics," who consider the political future irreducibly opaque, and "meliorists," who acknowledge the difficulties but think expertise can still improve predictions. Moreover, they suggest progress could be made through adversarial collaboration between scholars of the two persuasions, which would push both to How to cite this article: Treisman, D.