Cedric Chin: ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well. Instead of withholding judgment until an exhaustive search for data is complete, I will force myself to make a tentative forecast based on the information available, and then systematically tear it apart, using the insights gained to guide my search. The only problem with it is that it doesn’t seem to work that well. (more)

Book by Philip Tetlock

Zvi Mowshowitz: The $140,000 Question. There was a no good, quite bad article by Michael Green that went viral. (2025-11-23) Green Poverty Line Is A Lie (more)

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #5. Bullying: Why do those who defend themselves against bullies so often get in more trouble than bullies? This is also true in other contexts but especially true in school. (more)

Sports activity that is actively managed, esp by 3rd parties, see esp Youth Sports run by adults, vs Pick-up Games.

a bug up my butt: is it the passive Consumerism of the Spectacle? The arbitrary yet emotionally-intensive Group Identification (Tribalism) ("my team can beat your team") (Pavlovian training for "my country can beat your country"?)? The pretense of College Sports and Olympics events as involving Amateur-s? (more)

Author of Free-Range Kids

Zvi Mowshowitz: Childhood and Education Roundup #7 (more)

Venkatesh Rao: The History and Future of Memeing Things Into Reality. In early 2021, a ragtag group of Reddit users sent Wall Street into a frenzy by memeing a struggling video game retailer’s stock to unimaginable heights. What started as an inside joke about GameStop shares suddenly became very real: the stock’s price skyrocketed 1,700% in weeks, toppling hedge funds and minting overnight millionaires​. (more)

Martino Agostini on Bending Spoons’ Billion-Dollar Pivot: How a Milanese Tech Operator Is Redefining Strategic Finance… In late October 2025, Milan-based technology group Bending Spoons executed one of the most precisely choreographed financing sequences seen in European tech. Within forty-eight hours, the company announced three interlinked moves that reshaped its balance sheet and redefined its market narrative: the planned acquisition of AOL, a $2.8 billion debt package, and a $710 million equity raise. (more)

Tell-HN post: Bending Spoons Laid Off Almost Everybody At Vimeo. Various comments: (more)

Gareth Edwards: Breaching the Trust Thermocline Is the Biggest Hidden Risk in Business. In large bodies of water, the temperature drops slowly the deeper one dives. That change can, if the descent is slow enough, feel almost imperceptible. Yet at a certain point, the water temperature drops sharply and alarmingly. This point is the thermocline—a near-physical barrier where warm water meets cold. The shift between the two is sudden and dramatic. (more)

Philip Eyrikson Tetlock[3] (born March 2, 1954) is a Canadian-American political psychologist and writer, and is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences. He was elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society in 2019. He has written several non-fiction books at the intersection of psychology, political science and organizational behavior, including Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction; Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?; Unmaking the West: What-if Scenarios that Rewrite World History; and Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics. Tetlock is also co-principal investigator of The Good Judgment Project, a multi-year study of the feasibility of improving the accuracy of probability judgments of high-stakes, real-world events. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_E._Tetlock

Cate Hall: Rightness is a prison. *We just wrapped up our first quarterly reviews for Astera’s spring residency cohort, and one of my favorite things to come out of it was this statement by resident Edwin Kite: “Based on past completed projects of comparable ambition, it is near certain that our initial scientific assumptions are wrong.” (more)

Matthew Yglesias: How to be less full of shit. In terms of my personal growth, I think the most important book I read in 2020 was Philip Tetlock’s which came out five years ago...somehow the title of Superforecasting turned me off of reading it when it first came out. But it’s a really good book. (more)

Bryan CaplanTackling Tetlock. Philip Tetlock, one of my favorite social scientists, is making waves with his new book, Expert Political Judgment. Tetlock spent two decades asking hundreds of political experts to make predictions about hundreds of issues. (more)

Andrew Gelman: Thinking fast, slow, and not at all: System 3 jumps the shark. (more)

Bryan Caplan: Two Flawless Articles on Overconfidence. Well, they’re very good, anyway. The first is a 1999 gem by Philip Tetlock: “Theory-Driven Reasoning About Plausible Pasts and Probable Futures in World Politics: Are We Prisoners of Our Preconceptions?” (American Journal of Political Science 43(2): 335-66). The second is a 2005 piece by Erik Hoelzl and Aldo Rustichini: “Overconfident: Do You Put Your Money on It?” (Economic Journal 115: 305-318). (more)

Bryan Caplan: My Defense of Experts Against the Leading Expert. Forget “the Best of 2007”; Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment may well be the best book ever written on political psychology. (See here for an earlier discussion). I say this even though I’m a big defender of experts, and Tetlock’s book is usually interpreted as a grand debunking of experts’ pretensions. (more)

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