Most books I read don’t lead to a recommendation. Some do… but how does Superforcasting fare, and what can we take away from this work?
I’ll be honest, I only picked up this book for two reasons:
1. My primary job is to build prediction algorithms, and I realized its been a while since I read something that really increased my knowledge in this area.
2. Amazon was giving me a 2-for-1 special, and one of the other books on the list was one I was already wanting to read, so this one came along for the ride.
While this book was not recommended to me, nor did it “speak” to me when I saw it, I begrudgingly eventually got around to picking it up. I really had to force myself to begin, but once my other books were done, I had nothing else lined up, so this was as good of a pick as any other.
There’s three real ways to get original research into your head- conduct original research yourself, read Journals, or read books that take someones research and present it in a more readable fashion. If its an area that you absolutely live for, original research and Journals are a great way to go… but if its outside of your core competency and day to day lives, I prefer getting into the books.
The thing about forecasting is that we all do it, and we all need to do it better. Whether its buying a real estate property, where we have to forecast growth and rents… to forecasting economic changes, stock shifts, or one of many other things- forecasting is part of our day-to-day basis. Understanding what you do wrong and what you can do better is helpful. Despite doing it every day, we often fail to think about thinking. This means that despite forecasting, we rarely step back and think about how we forecast.
The same is true about those we trust and follow. Do we follow someone because they are a great forecaster? Or do we follow someone because they are a great pundit- unyielding in their story, and a great storyteller? This is what this book will help you think about. This book will convince you to begin embracing the teachings of Enrico Fermi, but as you near the end you’ll begin realizing that what the author is fighting for is out of your scope and only has a 2.7% chance of happening in the next 5 years (have forecasters scored and evaluated in such a way).
Somehow, this book was a New York Times Best Seller. I think most readers will be bored as all get out honestly. To me this book was very much like an academic journal or an academic textbook. At times it was painful reading, but you KNEW it was good for you, so you made yourself do it anyway.
And ultimately this was my take-away. It was definitely worth the read. You will learn from it. It will improve what you do, but there’s a good chance you won’t love every minute of it. There are times you will want to put the book down, and times you won’t want to pick it back up… but you will grudgingly do so because you know its good for you. You’ll also have to put aside the authors core argument about changing the way the world forecasts, because its out of scope for most readers. You probably won’t be forecasting world events, but rather you’ll be forecasting company sales, or real estate investments. That doesn’t mean the conversation can’t be beneficial though.
In fact this reminded me NOT to make precise forecasts any time someones going to be keeping score, and that is completely against the goals of the author!
So if you are ready to learn something new that a lot of other books don’t cover, and want to get better at something all of us have to do to be successful (after all, stocks- real estate- even CDs are all based on forecasting what is around the corner, right?) – Go pick this one up!