No Shelter For Yes

Tuesday's Child Is Full of Grace

Last week, in the wrap-up of my History of the Future course with a discussion of predictive futurism and prediction markets, we discussed a video of a presentation by Philip Tetlock of the book Superforecasting that he co-wrote with Dan Gardner.

I appreciate Tetlock’s clarity and his taste for interesting projects (I use his two counterfactual books in another course that I teach) but I particularly find his general insights into prediction and forecasting applicable to all processes of decision-making within all kinds of institutions.

In the video summary of the findings about forecasting, Tetlock describes the key attributes of teams that performed strikingly better than others in making predictions. He’s mindful of the core epistemological problems with forecasting, namely that some of the most decisive or pivotal events in human life are by their nature not possible to forecast because of their complex and ambiguous nature, that trying to measure predictive success means favoring events which are measurable, and that the dissemination of predictions can have an effect on the event being predicted. Nevertheless, as in any dataset, any measurement that is substantially different from the average or norm invites further investigation and explanation.

Tetlock argues that in this case, the most successful teams had a number of concrete differences in their methods from other groups. One of the most notable attributes was that the most successful forecasters built in some degree of epistemological, methodological and temperamental range in recruiting members and then locked in that advantage by adopting rules for deciding on predictions that were “anti-groupthink”. The central spirit of those rules aimed to privilege “constructive confrontation”—that if the group were not arguing about a prediction, they ought to argue about it, they needed to create an argument about it.

The point in this case is that in any group tasked with understanding what is going to happen next, especially in trying to make judicious decisions, there are a lot of reasons to just hang back and let the decision happen. That’s what Tetlock is speaking about in his presentation, having started with a scene from a film where a meeting about an important decision is taking place and almost everybody in the room is trying to avoid standing out by sounding different than the others.

Taking academia as a prime example, in deliberations about institutional decisions, people on the staff side almost never want to openly contradict a senior administrative leader who is set on a particular course of action, even if they know of arguments against it. Administrative leaders frequently move to make sure that faculty, who are more free to dissent, aren’t in those rooms, and if they are, that the room isn’t where the decision-making is really happening. There is constant pressure for civility and against disagreement, and often no incentive whatsoever to represent or consider points of view that are being “pre-marginalized” or to review scenarios and outcomes that run counter to the dominant decision-making sensibility.

That’s also true with many corporations, professional workplaces, governmental bodies, and advocacy groups. It’s either left to someone who has a dissenting ideology, a prior commitment, to voice a dissent that is dead on arrival, or all the other possibilities for what might happen simply go unspoken and unconsidered.

Under ordinary circumstances, that just means lots of festering wounds that go unaddressed, opportunities that are missed, mistakes that nobody is held accountable for. If “what might happen” is more catastrophic than that, the outcomes can be the end of the institution and the undebatable failure of its mission. Companies go out of business a lot of the time because nobody said the obvious things around the table. Universities go under because nobody questioned the consultancy report that recommended going into heavy debt to build a state-of-the-art athletic facility in an institution with no particular reputation for athletics. Law firms go under because nobody listens when one senior partner says that the firm has become way too dependent on a particular kind of client whose need for legal counsel is transient and circumstantial.

I’ve spent much of my own professional life thinking about how meetings get structured and why most meetings feel like a waste of time. In my own professional world, they’ve felt less and less productive I think by design, because my institution and many like it have deliberately sought to contain and marginalize faculty governance. But even if that wasn’t happening on purpose, even if we still did things as we used to, we’d still need to do much more to achieve what Tetlock describes. It’s not as simple as the willingness to be argumentative, because plenty of people can accomplish that if you don’t try to bury them under mandatory civility and compulsory positivity. There are academic disciplines that worship adversarial exchanges between scholars as if that is the dialectical engine that produces greater truth, and that’s just as bad as boxing out dissent and confrontation altogether.

What people with a shared purpose need in making decisions, what Tetlock describes, is a responsibility to consider other perspectives, to look for arguments against the recommendations as well as arguments for, to regard any conclusions or decisions as genuinely provisional until they’ve been thoroughly roughed up, argued over, and reconsidered. Meaning, there always has to be the possibility that a seeming default course of action will not be what the group chooses to do or say. It needs to be an assignment. Nobody in the room should be able to get away with conforming to the consensus, going along to get along, giving the boss what they want, yes-personing their way to the path of least resistance. That needs to be a qualification to be in the room where decisions are going to get made. That needs to be what an organization, a company, a university, a firm, needs to show its clients, its customers, its publics to be worthy of their trust and investment—that it’s not just a conveyer belt for the people who hold power or who are seeking it, not just an apparatus built to use consultation in order to claim consensus.

Tetlock observes that “forecasting tournaments are extremely artificial”, that they “take the politics” out of judgments that in real life might be political. But in a funny way, I think embracing “constructive confrontation” as the central ethos of meeting culture might put the politics back in to institutions that have spent decades trying to pretend that very political decisions are just blandly technical and professional matters. Among other things, that has set many of them up for being completely blindsided by Trumpism, in which there is absolutely no compunction about doing things for nakedly (and destructively) political reasons. If you can’t admit to yourself that you have real values, real goals, real needs and that all these things require a politics, then you will just assume that you can just inoffensively go about activities that no one could possibly oppose and that you can not really fail to execute.