A husband-and-wife team of scientists became giants in the field of forecasting by creating and overseeing the Good Judgment Project, a massive and lengthy academic inquiry into how to train predictors and improve their predictions. In the process, they coined and popularized the term “Superforecasting” and spawned a company that provides forecasts for businesses and governments.
“The story started in the summer of 2009,” recalls Barbara Mellers, one half of the research duo. “My husband, Phil Tetlock, and I decided to apply for a contract with IARPA.” That’s the government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an entity she describes as “the little sister to DARPA,” the much larger Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
“We put this grant together as a chance to work together on something that interested both of us,” notes Mellers. She and her husband both teach psychology, and they’re both cross-appointed at the University of Pennsylvania to the School of Arts and Sciences and The Wharton School.
They were seeking funds that IARPA awards to projects of interest to the intelligence community. Unlike DARPA, which tends to keep its research classified, IARPA shares some of its findings with the public, which fits with the mission of academia. But a slight misalignment arose when IARPA took three or four months to notify Mellers and Tetlock that their application for a project had been accepted.
The delay made things a little “awkward” as Mellers remembers it. By then, She and Tetlock were leaving the University of California at Berkeley to assume their current positions at Penn. Some of the funding had to filter through UC Berkeley, so the project initially included five or 10 students and faculty members from that school under the direction of Prof. Don Moore. Mellers and Tetlock recruited 20 or 25 students and faculty from
