What makes for good judgment? A re-analysis

The TL;DR key points

• We all make judgments about what’s true or false, but we often don’t know how good our judgments really are 
• Thankfully, the Good Judgment project can tell us something about what makes judgments good
• Below, I describe a re-analysis of their data which vindicates their main findings 
• But the re-analysis also made some potential methodological improvements: ​​

               1. Estimates of accuracy could consider only final forecasts for a question
               2. When we do this, people are better forecasters than it initially appeared 
               3. And we are able to explain and predict accuracy better than it initially appeared

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Good Judgment: Why you should care about it

We all make judgments every day. We all depend on them to make decisions and to live our lives. You might think someone is a good partner for you, and so you might marry them. Or you might think you will be happy in a particular career, and so you might spend countless hours of your life studying and working your way towards it.

But what happens if your judgments are wrong—if the person you married or the career you chose weren't good options?

We all know that this kind of thing happens: people make bad judgments and regret their decisions all the time. That is old news—and bad news, at that. What’s more, if we take a passing glance at the scientific study of reasoning, we’ll see that we are often biased in our judgments and we may not even realize it (check out Kahneman's fantastic book, for instance).

But there is good news: we can improve our judgments!
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