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Superforecasting: What Makes Good Predictors

Superforecasting: What Makes Good Predictors

In 2011, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) launched the largest forecasting tournament in history. They recruited thousands of volunteers to predict geopolitical events: Would North Korea conduct another nuclear test? Would the euro crisis escalate? Would Assad fall? The volunteers competed against each other and, crucially, against professional

Is Violence Really Declining?

Is Violence Really Declining?

In 1945, two atomic bombs killed approximately 200,000 people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the 80 years since, nuclear weapons have killed no one in war. Zero. Is this evidence that humanity is getting better? Or are we just living in the gap between catastrophes? This question—whether violence

Violence and Its Decline

Violence and Its Decline

Are We Getting Better at Not Killing Each Other—Or Just Waiting for the Next Catastrophe? Here's a claim that sounds too good to be true: we live in the most peaceful era in human history. Not relatively peaceful. The most peaceful. Less war. Less murder. Less torture.

Synthesis: Designing Smarter Groups

Synthesis: Designing Smarter Groups

We've covered a lot of ground: the wisdom of crowds, prediction markets, superforecasting, groupthink, swarm intelligence, epistemic democracy. Now let's pull the threads together into practical principles for making groups smarter. The core insight is simple: collective intelligence is engineerable. Groups can be smarter than individuals—

Epistemic Democracy: Voting as Knowledge Aggregation

Epistemic Democracy: Voting as Knowledge Aggregation

In 1785, the Marquis de Condorcet proved something remarkable about majority voting. If each voter is more likely to be right than wrong on a binary question—even just slightly more likely—then as the number of voters increases, the probability that the majority is correct approaches certainty. This is

Structural Violence: Johan Galtung's Challenge

Structural Violence: Johan Galtung's Challenge

In 1969, Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung asked a question that still reverberates through debates about violence and progress: If people die from preventable causes—poverty, lack of medical care, discriminatory policies—is that violence? His answer was yes. He called it "structural violence"—harm embedded in social systems

The Fat Tails of Violence: Nassim Taleb's Critique

The Fat Tails of Violence: Nassim Taleb's Critique

Here's a statistics problem: In the years 1988-2000, the annual fatality rate from commercial aviation disasters averaged about 1,000 people globally. In 2001, a single attack killed 3,000 people using commercial aircraft. What's the "trend" in aviation deaths? The answer depends on