But when big events happen – markets crash, wars loom, leaders tremble – we turn to the experts, those in the know. We look to people like Tom Friedman.

We are all forecasters. When we think about changing jobs, getting married, buying a home, making an investment, launching a product, or retiring, we decide based on how we expect the future will unfold.

Take the price of oil, long a graveyard topic for forecasting reputations.

It is wise to take admissions of uncertainty seriously,” Daniel Kahneman noted, “but declarations of high confidence mainly tell you that an individual has constructed a coherent story in his mind, not necessarily that the story is true.

Consumers of forecasting will stop being gulled by pundits with good stories and start asking pundits how their past predictions fared – and reject answers that consist of nothing but anecdotes and credentials.

The ultimate goal of science is uncertainty’s total eradication.

There are no certainties in life – not even death and taxes if we assign a nonzero probability to the invention of technologies that let us upload the contents of our brains into a cloud-computing network and the emergence of a future society so public-spirited and prosperous that the state can be funded with charitable donations.

Ignoring the vices of our friends and the virtues of our enemies sets us up for nasty surprises.

Here’s my long-term prediction for Long Now. When the Long Now audience of 2515 looks back on the audience of 2015, their level of contempt for how we go about judging political debate will be roughly comparable to the level of contempt we have for the 1692 Salem witch trials.

Need for cognition" is the psychological term for the tendency to engage in and enjoy hard mental slogs. [...] superforecasters score high in need-for-cognition tests.