Would you bet your house on which song would win the Eurovision Contest? Someone once did, and Tim Harford used this story for one of his Cautionary Tales podcasts to take about the idea of Superforecasting, as developed by Phillip Tetlock.
If you would like to be a super-forecaster, perhaps start with “Ten Commandments” of Superforecasting on the Farnam Street blog. I’ll add, or perhaps summarise, with:
- Hold your thoughts lightly
- Learn widely
- Think contextually
- Connect dots
Regular readers will know that I write often about these and related topics. Am I a Superforecaster myself? I would not go that far, but I do have a good track record of forecasting, one current example being WeWork.
On April 15th, 2019, over 4.5 years ago, I wrote in a post warning “Your business must make a profit“:
WeWork. Yup. Largest commercial tenant in several major world cities. Investing in long term property investments, funded so far lead by one major investor (SoftBank) with lofty talk about uber-high (sorry for the pun!) valuations. Note, though, that their tenants are all short term in nature and many are highly vulnerable to the coming major recession (and yes, one is coming to the US, UK and beyond, the core indicators are there).
I then followed up on WeWork in detail the following day, 16th April 2019, with “WeWork and remembering lessons of the past“, in which I connected dots to explain what my crystal ball was telling me.
Two days ago WeWork declared bankruptcy.