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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I said minimally informed people, which means, people who read the new york times.If you read Caplan's review, he points out that the "laymen" in Tetlock's study were students who would have been far better informed than the general public.

But their choices are often no better than flipping a coin in domains with larger uncertainties.Caplan also states in his review that Tetlock "loaded the dice", as they say, in favor of the randomly-guessing "chimps" and against experts.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Let me put the challenge this way. Either there are indicators of who is more accurate or there are not. If there are no indicators, then everyone is equally likely to be accurate, and a simple average of everyone's views would be the best we could do. If there are indicators of who is more accurate, then you should defer to the opinions of people who score better according to those indicators, in addition to feeling that those who score worse should defer to you.

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