How U.S. intelligence created games to improve its forecasts, with Canadian help
WASHINGTON — Amir Bagherpour already has a detailed set of charts predicting how everything will play out in the NAFTA negotiations, even though they don’t actually start for another few weeks.
He makes predictions for a living.
The U.S. intelligence community runs a prediction market where forecasters across government compete for prognosticative supremacy — it looks like a golf tournament leaderboard, only instead of birdies and bogeys, people are ranked by how correctly they call coup d’etats and counter-insurgencies.
Bagherpour was one of them. He was a State Department analyst under the Democrats and made predictions about things like Israeli-Palestinian peace, the Syrian conflict, Colombia’s negotiations with the FARC rebels, and the counter-ISIS campaign.