How open are various decision-makers to actually paying attention to forecasts?
How likely are they to just make the same decision anyway, referring to forecasts when they justify this decision and ignoring them the rest of the time?
How does this vary for different decision-makers and contexts (e.g., politicians vs civil servants vs funders vs business leaders)?
How does this vary by different approaches to forecasting (e.g. those surveyed by Beard et al.), different presentations of forecasting, and different topics?
I’m guessing a good amount of research will have already been done on these topics, but I’ve been surprised about such things before.
I imagine these questions could be answered through a mixture of:
surveys of relevant people
lab experiments
interviews with people who’ve tried implementing forecasting in relevant settings
literature reviews of potentially relevant work in political science and political economy (e.g., on kinds of info are drawn on in political decision-making more generally)
probably also other approaches
It seems plausible that these sorts of questions aren’t as well answered by academic research as by people just actually trying to implement forecasting in relevant institutions, get relevant decision-makers to pay attention to forecasts, etc.
(This is one of my own ideas about a cluster of questions that might warrant academic/​academic-style research. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this cluster and the cluster I suggest in a different comment, including regarding how important, tractable, and neglected these questions are.)
How open are various decision-makers to actually paying attention to forecasts?
How likely are they to just make the same decision anyway, referring to forecasts when they justify this decision and ignoring them the rest of the time?
How does this vary for different decision-makers and contexts (e.g., politicians vs civil servants vs funders vs business leaders)?
How does this vary by different approaches to forecasting (e.g. those surveyed by Beard et al.), different presentations of forecasting, and different topics?
I’m guessing a good amount of research will have already been done on these topics, but I’ve been surprised about such things before.
I imagine these questions could be answered through a mixture of:
surveys of relevant people
lab experiments
interviews with people who’ve tried implementing forecasting in relevant settings
literature reviews of potentially relevant work in political science and political economy (e.g., on kinds of info are drawn on in political decision-making more generally)
probably also other approaches
It seems plausible that these sorts of questions aren’t as well answered by academic research as by people just actually trying to implement forecasting in relevant institutions, get relevant decision-makers to pay attention to forecasts, etc.
(This is one of my own ideas about a cluster of questions that might warrant academic/​academic-style research. I’d be interested in people’s thoughts on this cluster and the cluster I suggest in a different comment, including regarding how important, tractable, and neglected these questions are.)