QotD: If Learning, Not Gloating, Is the Goal

[liveonearth]

"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute.  This will take many questions and question clusters.  Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do.  But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug.  A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought.  If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.