Become a prophet

A group of people around the world can guess events across the globe, and this ability can be trained over time.

Reflect on the chaotic events in the recent history of the world. Can you guess the US presidential chair will fall into Barack Obama's hands before he is elected Democratic representative candidate? As for "Arab Spring" , can you anticipate the direction of the revolution as soon as the first signs appear? And do you correctly predict the evolution of the recent crisis in Ukraine? The person who answers 'yes' to the whole question can be called a prophet , able to predict the outcome of world events with impressive accuracy. This has nothing to do with reading tea grounds, looking at glass or celestial objects. Some "prophets" are just ordinary people, come from all walks of society but have accurate judgment .

In the past few years, psychologists have found a range of hidden talents. For example, a group of people did not forget any face even though they met only once a few years ago. Others have a genius tongue, differentiating different flavors, another group possessing the ability to store supernatural memories, can easily remember every event in life that is trivial after many years. These talents are largely due to genetic genes, while theoretically the predictive ability is thought to be due to the experience and skills learned. However, the leading political experts tend to have a poor prediction, which according to the University of Pennsylvania Times scientist Philip Tetlock: 'The probability of chimp to hit darts hit target also. nearly equal to the probability that experts predict the political situation '.

Can judge ability through many methods - (Photo: AFP)

Inspired by one of the reports of Tetlock political scientist, the American "Active Intelligence Research Projects" (IARPA) organization has focused on the 'Effective Judgment Project' . on finding new approaches to making political predictions. Taking place in the form of a contest, this project recruits thousands of participants regardless of social background to test judgment skills through a series of questions such as ' Will Robert Mugabe leave the chair Zimbabwe on September 30 , 2011, ' or ' Greece is still an EU member until June 1, 2012? '. Instead of simply answering yes or no, they are required to anticipate each event by making estimates in the form of probabilities.

After 3 years of the contest, the team of Tetlock experts has now announced the first few results on specialized Psychological Science. One of the goals of IARPA is to determine whether candidates are always in a predictable manner. Therefore, in the first year, Mr. Tetlock checked the results of more than 2,000 participants and filtered out 2% of the lead, then these people continued to team up until the end of the competition. By the end of the second year, their achievement was four times more accurate than the rest, and one of the best "prophets" of the dentist practice competition.

Besides the good score in terms of intelligence, the best guess group has the same characteristics: a liberal vision . This, as Tetlock expert emphasizes, wants to guess well, it is necessary to keep the mind constantly changing, helping to handle the unrest. In addition, they need to understand themselves, know their own weaknesses, and consider past historical data before making judgments. Other strategies are trained in the direction of minimizing long-standing prejudices when perceiving things, in order to eliminate the tendency to amplify the risk of an event (for example in the case of terrorist attacks). In addition, ' prophets' when operating separately seem to be better guessed when forming a group, to avoid a party's opinion. If you practice how to criticize the views of others, the participants achieve the best results when they are allowed to cooperate with each other.

The competition continues in an effort to find ways to allow us to enhance our life prediction skills.