Superforecasters used only public information, or information they happened to have access to—but the original project was run in parallel with a (then secret) prediction platform for inside the intelligence community. It turned out that the intelligence people were significantly outperformed by superforecasters, despite having access to classified information and commercial information sources, so it seems clear that the information access wasn’t particularly critical for the specific class of geopolitical predictions they looked at. This is probably very domain dependent, however.
Superforecasters used only public information, or information they happened to have access to—but the original project was run in parallel with a (then secret) prediction platform for inside the intelligence community. It turned out that the intelligence people were significantly outperformed by superforecasters, despite having access to classified information and commercial information sources, so it seems clear that the information access wasn’t particularly critical for the specific class of geopolitical predictions they looked at. This is probably very domain dependent, however.
Thanks. Interesting, though not too surprising in some ways.