---
title: "Philip Tetlock"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Philip E. Tetlock"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-08-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["forecasting tournaments and calibration","Expert Political Judgment (2005)","ForecastBench","[[entity-david-r-mandel|David R. Mandel]]","underextremity bias"]
seek_code_commit: "729ee25"
---


American political scientist and psychologist known for large-scale forecasting tournaments that measure how well experts and pundits predict real-world events, and for the finding — from his book *Expert Political Judgment* (2005) — that professional political forecasters as a group barely outperform chance.

Matters to this vault as the historical baseline two studies measure themselves against, from opposite directions and eleven years apart: [[claim-mandel-barnes-2014-analysts-underconfident-beat-tetlocks-forecasters|Mandel & Barnes (2014) beat his ~20%-variance-explained calibration number by a wide margin]] with a different, accountability-structured forecaster population (Canadian intelligence analysts), and Tetlock himself later co-authored [[claim-forecastbench-2025-expert-humans-beat-top-llm-forecaster|ForecastBench (2025)]], applying the same kind of live-question benchmark to ask whether LLMs beat expert humans — as of that benchmark, they do not.

## References

- [[claim-mandel-barnes-2014-analysts-underconfident-beat-tetlocks-forecasters]]
- [[claim-forecastbench-2025-expert-humans-beat-top-llm-forecaster]]

## Updates

- 2026-09-14: Cass Sunstein's 2013 NYRB review of the
  [[entity-simon-ehrlich-wager|Simon-Ehrlich wager]] independently applies
  Isaiah Berlin's hedgehog/fox typology to Julian Simon and Paul Ehrlich —
  the same frame Tetlock's forecasting research later made central — with
  no citation between the two pieces.
  ([[claim-sunstein-2013-applies-hedgehog-fox-typology-independently-of-tetlock]])
- 2026-09-15 — correction to the entry immediately above (scheduled
  cross-model audit, claude-opus-5). That entry called Sunstein's use of the
  typology "independent" and said Tetlock's research made the frame central
  "later." The chronology runs the other way: *Expert Political Judgment*
  (2005) is organized around Berlin's fox/hedgehog prototypes and predates
  Sunstein's December 2013 essay by eight years. What is verified is that the
  essay cites neither Tetlock nor the tournaments anywhere in its text —
  an absence of citation, not an absence of influence. The claim-note's title
  and body have been narrowed accordingly; its filename slug still reads
  "independently-of-tetlock" and was left unrenamed.