The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament.
Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 88...
| Publicado en: | International Studies Quarterly Vol. 62; no. 2; pp. 410 - 423 |
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| Autores principales: | , , , , |
| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Jun2018
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| Materias: | |
| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=ssf&AN=130886331&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: ssf uiTerm: 130886331 longDbName: Social Sciences Full Text (H.W. Wilson) uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 00208833 ISQ jtl: International Studies Quarterly issn: 00208833 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Jun2018 vid: 62 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 130886331 10.1093/isq/sqx078 ppf: 410 ppct: 13 formats: fmt: – @attributes: type: T db: hlh ui: 130886331 – @attributes: type: P db: hlh ui: 130886331 tig: atl: The Value of Precision in Probability Assessment: Evidence from a Large-Scale Geopolitical Forecasting Tournament. aug: au: Friedman, Jeffrey A Baker, Joshua D Mellers, Barbara A Tetlock, Philip E Zeckhauser, Richard affil: Dartmouth College University of Pennsylvania Harvard University su: Geopolitics International relations Probability theory Statistical accuracy Political forecasting Uncertainty (Information theory) Natural language processing sug: subj: Geopolitics International relations Foreign affairs International Affairs Probability theory Statistical accuracy Political forecasting Uncertainty (Information theory) Natural language processing ab: Scholars, practitioners, and pundits often leave their assessments of uncertainty vague when debating foreign policy, arguing that clearer probability estimates would provide arbitrary detail instead of useful insight. We provide the first systematic test of this claim using a data set containing 888,328 geopolitical forecasts. We find that coarsening numeric probability assessments in a manner consistent with common qualitative expressions—including expressions currently recommended for use by intelligence analysts—consistently sacrifices predictive accuracy. This finding does not depend on extreme probability estimates, short time horizons, particular scoring rules, or individual attributes that are difficult to cultivate. At a practical level, our analysis indicates that it would be possible to make foreign policy discourse more informative by supplementing natural language-based descriptions of uncertainty with quantitative probability estimates. More broadly, our findings advance long-standing debates over the nature and limits of subjective judgment when assessing social phenomena, showing how explicit probability assessments are empirically justifiable even in domains as complex as world politics. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: N holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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