“Most people would expect to find domain experts doing well in their domain,” says Nick Hare, one of the super-forecasters (informally, they go by “supers”) whose performance in the project landed him an invitation to the Good Judgment Project's annual summer conference. But, in fact, “there are people who are good at all domains” – outperforming even specialists. And they could hold the key to reconfiguring the way intelligence services think about making predictions in the future.

Hare's interest in discovering a basis for good political forecasting predates the Good Judgment Project. For over five years, Hare served as head of futures and analytical methods at the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD): looking for ways to improve intelligence officers' performance while finding ways to create accountability in the wake of the Butler Report, “looking at how we can get intelligence analysts to approach their task to make them more likely to be right", he says. It's a “'dirty secret of the intelligence community,” he adds, that there are few formal structures in place to determine whether intelligence reports – which are likely to be narrative in character – in fact prove accurate. “[If we say] 'such-and-such a country is unlikely to back down on this issue' – what does 'back down' look like? What does 'unlikely' look like?... If somebody is not being rigorous to the point of tedious pedantry – it's difficult to say whether a prediction is right or wrong.”

Hare points to the failure of intelligence leading up to the 2003 Iraq War – which led to the Butler Inquiry into intelligence – as a turning point. “Traditionally, you got a bright person, you sat them down in front of a pile of intelligence, and then they wrote things. Nobody checked how good they were.” Now, however, it's more important than ever to ask how intelligence analysts can approach their task in a way that makes them more likely to be right – so that an intelligence failure is less likely.

‘Open-minded thinking’

Hare's interest in the Good Judgment Project was piqued by reading an article by Tetlock, who struck him as “one of the few people talking about futures who’s interested in getting it right, and not just guffing on”. He signed up to be a forecaster, only to find his skills were so good they put him into the “supers”.

So, what makes Hare such a good forecaster? His success, he says, comes down not to knowledge but his capacity for “active, open-minded thinking”: applying the scientific method to look rigorously at data, rather than seeking to impose a given narrative on a situation.