Dan Gardner Books
Dan Gardner is a Canadian journalist and author specializing in psychology and risk analysis.
Known for: Good Judgment: How to Improve Your Decision Making and Make Better Choices, How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Books by Dan Gardner
Good Judgment: How to Improve Your Decision Making and Make Better Choices
Good Judgment explores the science and practice of forecasting and decision-making. Drawing on research from the Good Judgment Project, the authors reveal how some individuals consistently make more a...
How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between
This book explores why large projects—from skyscrapers and bridges to software systems and space missions—so often fail to meet expectations, and how to make them succeed. Drawing on decades of resear...
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction explores how some individuals consistently make more accurate predictions about future events than others. Drawing on research from the Good Judgmen...
Key Insights from Dan Gardner
Superforecasters and the Science of Prediction
In the Good Judgment Project, we recruited thousands of volunteers to forecast hundreds of real-world events: elections, policy decisions, economic trends. We measured accuracy rigorously, rewarding participants who gave probabilities that matched actual outcomes. Over time, a small group consistent...
From Good Judgment: How to Improve Your Decision Making and Make Better Choices
Cognitive Traits and Habits of Mind
The mental habits of superforecasters run counter to much of human psychology. People crave certainty and often cling to their first beliefs, interpreting new evidence through the lens of what they already think. Superforecasters resist that pull. They live in a state of perpetual curiosity. They a...
From Good Judgment: How to Improve Your Decision Making and Make Better Choices
The Iron Law of Megaprojects
The story always begins with the Iron Law. After analyzing thousands of cases, from railways and power plants to IT systems and the Olympics, I observed an astonishing consistency: over budget, over time, and under benefits—almost always. This is what I call the Iron Law of Megaprojects. More than 9...
From How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between
Learning from Data: The Foundation of Accurate Planning
When I first began teaching project management, most planners relied on intuition. They trusted their teams’ experience or consultants’ predictions. But intuition is a terrible guide for forecasting complex outcomes. Human memory remembers successes and forgets disasters. The only antidote is data. ...
From How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything in Between
The Limits of Expert Prediction and the Birth of the Good Judgment Project
The book opens with a straightforward revelation that unsettled many professional forecasters: experts, when measured rigorously, don’t predict the future reliably. In my landmark study encompassing tens of thousands of forecasts by specialists across economics and politics, the average accuracy sca...
From Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
Defining the Superforecaster Mindset
What distinguishes a superforecaster is not raw intelligence or privileged access to data, but their approach to thinking. These individuals exhibit open-mindedness—the recognition that even well-constructed views may require revision when evidence shifts. They resist ideological inertia and the tem...
From Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
About Dan Gardner
Dan Gardner is a Canadian journalist and author specializing in psychology and risk analysis.
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Dan Gardner is a Canadian journalist and author specializing in psychology and risk analysis.
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