University of Pennsylvania — Philip Tetlock’s “Making Conversations Smarter, Faster” Forecasting Project

The Open Philanthropy Project recommended a grant of $1,550,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to support work on a collaborative reasoning system called “Making Conversations Smarter, Faster” (MCSF). This system will be designed to incentivize high epistemic quality in participants’ contributions to a collaborative reasoning process, for example a policy debate or a forecasting exercise. Another goal of MCSF is to identify and cultivate “super analysts” (who are significantly better than average at distinguishing between strong and weak ideas, arguments, and evidence) in much the same way that recent forecasting tournaments have identified and cultivated “superforecasters” (who are significantly better than average at producing accurate forecasts).

See Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner’s 2015 book: “Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction”. Superforecasting, Tetlock and Gardner, 2015

The funds are intended to support the initial development and pre-testing of MCSF, laying the groundwork for future confirmatory studies. This work will be led by Professors Philip Tetlock and Barbara Mellers of University of Pennsylvania, and Professor Emeritus Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University.

Update: In February 2019, we added $250,000 to the original award amount. The “grant amount” above has been updated to reflect this.

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