A small number of these participants quickly separated themselves from the pack and consistently maintained their exceptional performance. Tetlock dubbed these individuals "superforecasters" and subsequently focused his team on aggregating the forecasts of these standout performers—a strategy that draws from the "wisdom of the crowd." As you well know, this strategy relies on some degree of independence in the information, approaches, and insights producing the forecasts. We often think of independence in a very statistical sense, but Superforecasting conveys a useful framing of independence as how one assembles diverse teams and how team dynamics can be established to maintain this diversity. 4 This approach won the IARPA tournament by a substantial margin with the use of one subtle but important tweak. Tetlock extremized the aggregated prediction probabilities—so, for example, a probability of 70 percent became 85 percent. 1/6  BIS central bankers' speeches  So what can we learn from these non-technical superforecasters who outperformed the intelligence community? Tetlock lists a number of characteristics that generate individual diversity and maintain that diversity in a team dynamic. My quick summary of these lessons is to be humble, always question, listen to alternative views, and—very comfortingly for Bayesians like me—always express your forecast as a distribution rather than a point forecast, and crucially update that forecast when new information arrives. Further, constantly assess why forecasts worked and didn't work.
6 See Donald Kohn and Brian Sack, Monetary Policy during the Financial Crisis, preliminary discussion draft  presented at the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at Brookings and Yale School of Management Program on Financial Stability event, Responding to the Global Financial Crisis: What We Did and Why We Did It, Washington, D.C., September 11–12, 2018. 7 Possible sources to which this lament has been attributed are catalogued here, although its actual provenance  is not known. 8 As part of our analysis of what went wrong in our forecasting before the Great Recession, researchers at the  Federal Reserve and European Central Bank jointly looked at various methods of more directly including highfrequency fluctuations in our forecasting models. The results from this research are reported in Luci Alessi, Eric Ghysels, Luca Onorante, Richard Peach, and Simon Potter, Central Bank Macroeconomic Forecasting during the Global Financial Crisis: The European Central Bank and Federal Reserve Bank of New York Experiences, Federal Reserve Bank of New York Staff Reports, number 680, July 2014. 9 See survey questions and results to the Survey of Primary Dealers and Survey of Markets Participants, Federal  Reserve Bank of New York. 10 Of course, the NBER didn’t actually declare the start of the recession until late November 2008, nearly a year  after it officially began. 11 Estrella and Mishkin’s original paper, updates, related research, and current recession probabilities implied by  the term spread are available on the New York Fed’s Research website.