Tom Chivers on Nuance, Numeracy, and Forecasting in News Media

The lack of nuance in mainstream news, Tom's views on forecasting and prediction markets in media, and more.

Show Notes

• 00:00 - Intro & Tom's Background and Focus
• 11:22 - The Nuance Problem in Mainstream Media
• 19:15 - Forecasting and Prediction Markets in News Media
• 33:30 - Numeracy and Statistical Literacy Issues
• 44:11 - Tom's Information Diet & Outro

A Conversation on Forecasting with Tom Chivers

In this podcast episode, we sat down with Tom Chivers—author, journalist, and science writer for The i—to have a conversation on forecasting and the news media. We talked about his background in the media industry, his frustrations with mainstream news and its lack of nuance, his views on forecasting and prediction markets in media, and more.

Tom previously wrote for BuzzFeed UK, served as the science editor for UnHerd, and has bylines with New York Times, Guardian, New Scientist, and The Telegraph. He often writes data-driven rebuttals to topics that are being primarily depicted in one way in the media, interjecting nuance into the conversations. In many ways, the same exercise as distinguishing signals from noise. Conducting journalism with a forecaster’s mindset.

He's also written two books, The AI Does Not Hate You in 2019 and How to Read Numbers in 2021, and writes about similar topics discussed in our communities, including effective altruism, rationality, and forecasting. To our knowledge, Tom is one of the most prominent journalists writing about and covering quantified forecasts. In June of last year, Tom assembled a panel of superforecasters for an article on whether China will invade Taiwan and has started to make his own predictions too!

You can follow Tom on Twitter: @TomChivers.

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