New ways of thinking about geopolitical forecasting

Most intelligence agencies rely on the informed hunches of trained specialists. But there are people from ordinary walks of life who routinely do far better at predicting events than the experts. Tara Isabella Burton meets some of them.

Political forecasting is among the most vital roles played by the intelligence services: determining which country's government is most likely to collapse in the next few months, or whether a given nation has weapons of mass destruction that render them a threat. But what happens when there's no way to assess the quality of those forecasts – or the people making them?

In 2004, the Butler Review on the events leading up to the 2003 Iraq invasion found that the British Government's decision to invade – based on the premise that Saddam Hussein had WMDs – was the result of a major intelligence failure. It is just one example of how the predictions that go on behind closed doors can often be fallible.

But the work of Philip Tetlock and his team at the Good Judgment Project – funded by the US government's Intelligence Advanced Research Project (Iarpa) – points to new ways of thinking about geopolitical forecasting, and the question of what makes a person better-equipped to predict world events. A few people, the project has revealed, have extraordinary talents for seeing the future – might you be one of them?

Could you be a ‘super-forecaster’?