How to Predict the Future

The decisions that humans make can be extraordinarily costly. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were multi-trillion-dollar decisions. If you can improve the accuracy of forecasting individual strategies by just a percentage point, that would be worth tens of billions of dollars. Yet society does not invest tens of billions of dollars in figuring out how to improve the accuracy of human judgment. That seems really odd.

That’s a quote from today’s interviewee, who has made his career helping the intelligence community predict the future better. In this interview, we discuss:

* Which prediction methods perform the best?

* How does IARPA create tech for American spies?

* What technologies give democracies an advantage over autocracies?

* Could the Internet have been designed better?

Our interviewee, Jason Matheny, championed research into human judgment and forecasting at the R&D lab for the intelligence community: the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, which he directed from 2015-2018.

[This interview was originally published in 2023, at this link, without the audio: Statecraft was still transcript-only then.]

You can find the transcript for this conversation at www.statecraft.pub.