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Amazingly fascinating, long article. Anons vs Al Gore, anyone?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/06/how-to-predict-the-future/588040/

The Peculiar Blindness of Experts

Credentialed authorities are comically bad at predicting the future. But reliable forecasting is possible.

David Epstein

FTA:
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In 2011, IARPA launched a four-year prediction tournament in which five researcher-led teams competed. Each team could recruit, train, and experiment however it saw fit. Predictions were due at 9 a.m. every day. The questions were hard: Will a European Union member withdraw by a target date? Will the Nikkei close above 9,500?

Tetlock, along with his wife and collaborator, the psychologist Barbara Mellers, ran a team named the Good Judgment Project. Rather than recruit decorated experts, they issued an open call for volunteers. After a simple screening, they invited 3,200 people to start forecasting. Among those, they identified a small group of the foxiest forecasters—bright people with extremely wide-ranging interests and unusually expansive reading habits, but no particular relevant background—and weighted team forecasts toward their predictions. They destroyed the competition.

Tetlock and Mellers found that not only were the best forecasters foxy as individuals, but they tended to have qualities that made them particularly effective collaborators. They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top forecasters told me. They crossed disciplines, and viewed their teammates as sources for learning, rather than peers to be convinced. When those foxes were later grouped into much smaller teams—12 members each—they became even more accurate. They outperformed—by a lot—a group of experienced intelligence analysts with access to classified data.
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Cleverly written, intellectually satisfying article.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/18/notes-on-the-great-realignment/

Notes on the Great Realignment

By Roger Kimball

FTA:
...I sometimes imagine Bill Kristol reposed among the debris of his machinations, like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” muttering terrible imprecations to his mesmerized if batty acolytes.

I’ll probably never know, but it’s clear that they do employ some effective means of getting the message out. I was reminded of this over the last couple of days when I noticed that Anne Applebaum, Max Boot, and Gabriel Schoenfeld all showed up with essentially the same homework assignment.
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Witness, for example, the resistance to the election of Donald Trump and the embrace of Brexit by the Brits. (It is still, after three years, unclear whether the British people will have their way or whether they will be made to continue in their vassalage by the coterie of transnational progressives, British as well as continental, who run the bureaucracy in Europe.)

In a long and brilliant essay in The Claremont Review of Books, Christopher Caldwell presents a picture of Viktor Orbán that is sharply at odds with the hostile portrait painted by critics like Applebaum, Boot, and Schoenfeld. Caldwell by no means papers over Orbán’s faults—the fact, for example, that he seems to have enriched himself and his friends while in office (a habit, by the way that he shares with many if not most politicians). But he also understands Orbán’s virtues. Writes Caldwell: “Orbán is blessed with almost every political gift—brave, shrewd with his enemies and trustworthy with his friends, detail-oriented, hilarious.”
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Allowed to proceed unchecked, the bureaucratic liberal consensus would destroy Hungary qua Hungary, just as it would eventually destroy all nations qua nations. Viktor Orbán understands that.

So does Donald Trump. Max Boot warns that Trump is “attempting to apply Orbanism to the United States.” What do you suppose that means? Here is a list of a few recent initiatives undertaken by the president:
...
If any of these speeches is an instance of Trump’s following Orbán’s “sinister” example (as Boot charged), I for one applaud his course of action.

Donald Trump is a sort of dynamo. Has any president done more to keep his campaign promises? How much richer, most secure, freer are we today than we were under the watchful eye of Barack Obama? And note that the swamp-like areas of life that remain unfree are those areas still under the jurisdiction of such “progressive” phenomena as Title IX hysteria on college campuses and the spirit of censorship that has disrupted the culture of social media and other “woke” initiatives.

The real battle that has been joined—and it is a battle that is forging a great political realignment—is not between virtuous progressive knights riding the steeds of liberalism, on the one hand, and the atavistic forces of untutored darkness represented by “populism,” on the other.

The real battle is between two views of liberty. One is a parochial view that affirms tradition, local affection, and the subordination of politics to the ordinary business of life. The other is more ambitious but more abstract. It seeks nothing less than to boost us all up to that plane of enlightenment from which all self-interested actions look petty, if not criminal, and through which mankind as a whole (but not alas individual men) may hope for whatever salvation secularism leavened by utilitarianism may provide.

We are still in the opening sallies of the Great Realignment. Many old alliances will be broken, many new ones formed. I expect a lot of heat, and even more smoke. I hope that there will also be at least occasional flashes of light.