Geopolitical Forecasting, International Relations How spooks are turning to superforecasting in the Cosmic Bazaar

Perry World House's recent white paper on geopolitical forecasting is referenced in this piece from The Economist.

Every morning for the past year, a group of British civil servants, diplomats, police officers and spies have woken up, logged onto a slick website and offered their best guess as to whether China will invade Taiwan by a particular date. Or whether Arctic sea ice will retrench by a certain amount. Or how far covid rates will fall. These imponderables are part of Cosmic Bazaar, a forecasting tournament created by the British government to improve its intelligence analysis.

Since the launch of the website in April 2020, more than 10,000 forecasts have been made by 1,300 forecasters, drawn from across 41 government departments and several allied countries. The site has around 200 regular forecasters monthly, who must draw only on publicly available information to tackle 30-40 questions live at any time. Cosmic Bazaar represents the gamification of intelligence. Users are ranked by a brutally simple measure: the accuracy of their predictions.

Read more in The Economist >>