In 2011, the U.S. intelligence community did something unusual. They ran a forecasting tournament — and let regular people compete against their own analysts.
The amateurs won. Not by a hair. By more than 30%.
That number changed how researchers think about prediction. And it should change how you read the news.
The tournament that quietly rewrote forecasting
The competition was called the Good Judgment Project, run by Wharton professor Philip Tetlock. He recruited about 2,800 volunteers — teachers, retirees, software engineers — and asked them questions about world events. Will North Korea test a missile this year? Will the Eurozone lose a member by 2014?
The CIA's analysts had access to classified cables, satellite imagery, and human sources. The volunteers had Google.
By year four, a small group Tetlock called "superforecasters" was beating the intelligence community's classified estimates by more than 30%. The U.S. government quietly started inviting them into advisory rooms.
Here's the strange part: most superforecasters weren't subject-matter experts. They were curious generalists with a few unusual habits. Those habits are copyable.
They updated more than they predicted
Most people make a forecast, then defend it. Superforecasters do the opposite. They make a forecast, then go looking for reasons to change it.
Tetlock found that the best forecasters updated their probabilities about 12 times per question, on average. The worst updated maybe 3.
Each new piece of information moved them — a little. Not 0% to 100%. From 60% to 64%. Tiny adjustments, constantly.
That single habit explains a huge chunk of their edge.
They thought in numbers, not adjectives
"Likely." "Possibly." "A serious possibility." These words mean almost nothing.
In one well-known study, U.S. intelligence officers were asked what "serious possibility" meant in a CIA report. Their answers ranged from 20% to 80%. Same phrase. Same agency. Same year.
Superforecasters force themselves to assign a number. Not "likely" — 64%. Not "doubtful" — 18%.
The act of choosing a number, and being graded on it later, turns vague hunches into testable beliefs. You stop sounding smart and start being right.
They started with the outside view
Imagine your friend opens a café in Bangkok. Will it succeed?
The inside view says: "It's a great location, the menu is fresh, my friend works hard." Sounds compelling.
The outside view says: "About 60% of new restaurants close within two years."
Most people anchor on the inside view because the story feels real. Superforecasters start with the outside view — the base rate — and adjust from there.
It's the difference between feeling smart and being right.
They were comfortable being wrong, out loud
The single biggest predictor of forecasting skill, Tetlock found, wasn't IQ. It wasn't education. It wasn't access to classified information.
It was something he called "active open-mindedness" — the willingness to treat your own beliefs as guesses, not identities.
That sounds soft. It isn't. It's the opposite of how most pundits operate, and it's the entire reason a retiree in Nebraska beat a roomful of senior analysts.
What the crowd gets wrong about forecasting
The conventional view is that forecasting is about being smart, having insider info, or finding the one analyst who "saw it coming." The data says otherwise.
Tetlock's research showed that the most confident TV pundits were, on average, only slightly better than chance — and sometimes worse. Accuracy peaked when many ordinary people made many small predictions, and the system aggregated them.
The crowd wasn't smarter than any individual. It was smarter than most individuals.
What Juno lets you do
Juno is built on this idea. Every market is a question with a probability — a number, not an adjective. You can update your forecast as news breaks. You can see what the crowd believes and decide whether to disagree.
It's a place to practice the habits superforecasters spent years building, on questions about Thai markets, elections, sports, and the world. Without joining a CIA tournament.
The habit, not the talent
The 2,800 amateurs didn't beat the CIA because they knew more. They beat the CIA because they updated more, doubted more, and counted more. That's a habit, not a talent — and it's available to you, starting with the next news headline you read.