Prediction as the New Meritocracy: Why the Future of Expertise Will Be Measured, Not Claimed

A guest post by Steve Kuhn, founder of Major League Pickleball

Here’s a guest post by my dear friend Steve Kuhn, founder of Major League Pickleball. Now he’s got a new company, SportsPredict.com. In this essay, he makes the intellectual case for his new venture.

When Steve pitched the idea of a “new sports betting company” to me Japan this summer, I was initially skeptical, if not dismissive. After ten minutes, he had me shrugging my shoulders with a “Definite maybe.”

Steve’s very eager for comments, and a great conversationalist, so don’t be shy.

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The world is full of wasted intelligence. The Economist recently profiled a Bosnian math prodigy who twice medaled at the International Mathematical Olympiad but couldn’t afford Oxford’s fees. He now programs on a decades-old computer in Sarajevo. Multiply that story by millions and you glimpse our greatest economic inefficiency: the misallocation of talent.

Governments subsidize chips and data centers while ignoring the scarcest resource of all, brains. Nobel laureates still emerge overwhelmingly from rich countries (and from rich families in those countries); American children from the top one percent of households are ten times likelier to become inventors than those from below-median incomes. The geography of genius remains tilted toward wealth and luck, not potential. We spend trillions optimizing hardware while leaving human software uncompiled.

At the same time, the global public has grown skeptical that anyone’s expertise matters. Tom Nichols, in “The Death of Expertise”, argues that citizens now confuse equality of rights with equality of knowledge. The internet made everyone a pundit and no one accountable. Credentials inspire distrust; humility is mistaken for weakness. The result is a paradoxical world: vast pools of unused ability on one side, collapsing trust in demonstrated competence on the other.

Add a third force, artificial intelligence, and the picture becomes clearer. Large language models like ChatGPT are, at bottom, prediction machines. They forecast the next word, conditioned on every word before it. Out of that simple act of statistical anticipation emerges something that looks and feels like understanding. Their success reveals a deep truth: prediction is not a byproduct of intelligence; it is its essence.

Prediction Is What Intelligence Does

To think is to forecast. A brain, whether biological or artificial, is a device that models the world by predicting its own future states. It guesses what will happen next and updates when it’s wrong. That’s how we move, learn languages, and make decisions. Cognition is prediction in motion.

LLMs have shown how far this idea can go. By predicting the next word, they implicitly model physics, politics, and human psychology, because those are embedded in the patterns of text. Intelligence, it turns out, is an emergent property of very good prediction. The smarter the predictor, the richer the internal world model it must build.

But LLMs are trained on language. What the world now needs is a system that trains humans on reality, a way to measure and improve real-world prediction itself. That’s where SportsPredict.com comes in. It’s the human counterpart to AI, a skill-based sports prediction platform where users compete to forecast real outcomes, build measurable track records, and prove their analytical edge in a transparent, data-driven way.

Why Sports Are the Right Place to Start

Sports are the world’s most democratic data system. Every match ends with a binary truth: win or loss, over or under. No committees, no ideology, no “oracle function” required. Questions resolve themselves. A good prediction is visibly good within hours, not years.

That makes sports the ideal sandbox for rebuilding expertise. The data is free, the outcomes clear, the stakes emotional. Billions already engage in primitive forecasting every weekend: Who will win? By how much? SportsPredict simply formalizes that universal behavior, adds scoring and transparency, and builds a public ledger of accuracy.

SportsPredict’s SMART (Sports Market Accuracy RaTing) system measures how often and by how much each forecaster beats the consensus. Over time, these scores become something new, a proof of expertise. Unlike grades or résumés, they cannot be bought. They are earned through calibration, humility, and empirical success. They are the intellectual equivalent of an Elo rating in chess.

Youth: The Hidden Reservoir of Clarity

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game suggested that some of the brightest strategic minds are children, clear thinkers unburdened by adult overconfidence or ideology. Yet in the real world, those same young minds are locked out of forecasting arenas, from stock markets to sports gambling, by both law and culture.

When I was twelve, my chess rating was higher than it is today. That isn’t unusual: cognitive sharpness often peaks early, long before professional credentials form. SportsPredict provides a rare opportunity for that raw clarity to matter, a legal, status-driven, intellectually honest environment where young people can compete with adults on a level playing field.

It turns the moral argument of Ender’s Game into infrastructure: find the prodigies early, measure them fairly, and let the data speak.

From Game to Global Talent Search

Because the questions are simple and the feedback is immediate, SportsPredict becomes an enormous training ground for analytical intelligence. It transforms “wasted genius into visible genius.” A teenager in Nairobi can compete on the same leaderboard as a PhD student at Stanford. Academics gain an unprecedented dataset on reasoning under uncertainty. Employers, hedge funds, tech firms, NGOs, gain a global résumé filter based not on pedigree but on performance.

This is what the Economist piece on “lost Einsteins” was really missing: an institution that identifies talent automatically. The Olympiad model works, but it reaches thousands. A prediction-based meritocracy could reach billions. Once the first hedge fund or think tank hires from the SportsPredict leaderboard, the game becomes a gateway.

The Forecasting Revolution: From Tetlock to Samotsvety

Professor Philip Tetlock’s research on political judgment proved what skeptics once denied: there is true skill in prediction, and it is a skill that can be learned and improved. In his landmark Good Judgment Project, Tetlock tracked thousands of forecasters over years of geopolitical events. A small fraction, the “superforecasters”, consistently outperformed intelligence analysts with classified information. They weren’t prophets; they were disciplined empiricists who practiced calibration, probability thinking, and constant self-correction.

Forecasting, in other words, is not magic; it’s craftsmanship. Tetlock’s work showed that the right training and feedback can make ordinary people remarkably good at seeing the future a little more clearly than chance would allow.

That insight gave rise to groups like Samotsvety, a loose network of Tetlock-era superforecasters who turned skill into enterprise. They now advise corporations, investment firms, and governments on questions once thought unquantifiable. Samotsvety’s commercial success demonstrates a simple fact: reliable prediction has market value.

SportsPredict.com extends that logic globally. It’s Tetlock’s insight with a billion data points, a perpetual tournament of reasoning where every user, from Manila to Manchester, can learn to think like a superforecaster. It democratizes what Tetlock and Samotsvety pioneered: measurable judgment, disciplined by feedback, rewarded by accuracy.

Restoring Credible Expertise

Nate Silver, who built a career quantifying uncertainty, has long argued that prediction is the ultimate test of understanding. You don’t truly know something until you can forecast its outcome. Journalism once tried to play this role, providing reliable expectations about the world, but it devolved into narrative and reaction. In a sense, prediction markets are the future of news: self-correcting systems where every claim carries a price and every pundit a track record.

SportsPredict is the cultural on-ramp to that future. It teaches probabilistic thinking the way chess teaches logic or music teaches pattern recognition. It rewards being right, penalizes overconfidence, and creates public reputations grounded in evidence rather than eloquence. The best forecasters become what Nichols might call “Oracles of Insight”, trusted not because they are loud or credentialed, but because they have receipts.

Prediction as Civilization’s Operating System

Science, markets, and democracy all work through the same loop: predict, observe, update. When that loop breaks, when we stop measuring accuracy, society drifts toward superstition. Prediction is how knowledge earns its keep.

If large language models represent machine prediction of words, SportsPredict represents human prediction of the world. One synthesizes text; the other synthesizes judgment. Together, they outline a future epistemology in which understanding is continuously tested against outcomes.

Civilization advances when it rewards people who see slightly further ahead. SportsPredict.com is an attempt to quantify that ability at scale, to turn the world’s scattered intuition into a measurable, improvable public good.

The Measured Future

The next enlightenment will not come from more data, but from better feedback. We don’t need more talk; we need scores. The internet made everyone a publisher. Prediction markets will make everyone accountable.

If brains are the new oil, SportsPredict.com is the refinery, extracting signal from noise, converting curiosity into competence, and proving that expertise still matters, provided we’re willing to measure it.

The future of credibility will not be claimed. It will be verified on the scoreboard of SportsPredict.com