These Two Questions Predict Your Ability to Predict the Future

Predicting the future is hard. No one is right most of the time. But it’s possible to be wrong less often.

Last year, I launched a forecasting tournament with Good Judgment. From February through September, over 2,000 people registered their predictions on 25 different events, including:

Before the tournament started, 584 of the participants answered ten questions on their mental models that I developed for Think Again. We were able to predict their forecasting accuracy from how they answered the full set of questions. But there were two questions that rose above the rest in differentiating the best forecasters. Here they are—how would you respond to them?

(a) To thine own self be true

(b) Great minds think alike

(c) Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

(d) The best revenge is to prove others wrong

(a) Tools for winning arguments

(b) Hunches to test

(c) Symbols of allegiance

(d) Elements of my identity

I designed these questions to assess your tendency to think like a preacher, prosecutor, politician, or scientist. In preacher mode, you’re proselytizing your own views. In prosecutor mode, you’re attacking someone else’s views. In politician mode, you only listen to people if they already agree with your views.

The best forecasters avoided those traps. They strongly believed that (c) foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and saw their political views as (b) hunches to test.

If you picked both of those answers, on average, your forecasts were more than twice as accurate as people who only chose one—and more than three times as accurate as people who chose neither. You think like a scientist.

Thinking like a scientist doesn’t mean you have to own a microscope or buy a telescope (though I would enjoy it if you dressed up like Bill Nye on Fridays). It means you don’t let your ideas become your identity. You have the humility to know what you don’t know, the curiosity to question your convictions, and the intellectual integrity to seek out evidence that contradicts your assumptions and people who challenge your thought process.

People who thought like scientists made significantly fewer accuracy and calibration mistakes over the next seven months:

Why? The data showed that they updated their forecasts more often. When you think like a scientist, changing your mind isn’t a threat to your ego—it’s a moment of growth. It means you've learned something new.

People who rethought their forecasts more often had higher accuracy scores (r = .19).

On average, the winning forecaster had the mental flexibility to update his predictions a whopping 9.5 times per question. More on him in my next post.

In the meantime: