Abstract
Although RAND researchers had spent considerable effort to develop Delphi, they were very reluctant when it came to disseminating the technique. This changed when Olaf Helmer joined forces with young engineer Theodore J. Gordon to carry out a large Delphi study that aimed at a much longer temporal outlook as had hitherto been attempted. The long-range forecasting study that the two researchers completed in 1964 was at the time the largest Delphi, and undoubtedly also the most influential, because it received wide public attention.
Curiously, however, the Delphi design developed by Helmer and Gordon did not consider the principles that Helmer and Nicholas Rescher, in “On the Epistemology of the Inexact Sciences,” had proposed a few years earlier. While the long-range Delphi study became the paradigmatic case and thus influenced the use of the technique for the decades to come, its methodological shortcomings quickly became apparent.
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Notes
- 1.
German Delphi practitioner Michael Häder (2006, 351, 2009, 15) reports that a total of 14 experiments had been conducted at RAND prior to the publication of Gordon and Helmer’s “Report on a Long Range Forecasting Study” (1964). Although I inspected a vast array of relevant literature, including the source Häder refers to (Linstone and Turoff 1975, 10), and read all the available RAND writings on Delphi from the first two decades after its inception, I could not verify this figure. When asked how many Delphi studies RAND had carried out prior to his arrival, Gordon stated: “All I can do is give you an impression. A lot of informal experimentation: let’s try this, does this work, let’s try that. And formal reports: only a few” (Interview with Theodore J. Gordon by the author, 16 August 2013, p. 7).
- 2.
This is the second meaning of the term “paradigmatic” described in Thomas Kuhn’s Postscript to the Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn 1976).
- 3.
Andersson (2018, 82) suggests that “the conflation of time and space” in the notion of long-range (instead of long-term) forecasting was “a result of experimentation not only with Operations Research (OR), but also with systems analysis, at RAND.” This is not true. The term “long range forecasting” was well established in meteorology already at the turn of the century (cf. Pietruska 2018, 108–155).
- 4.
Two of the European participants, “Professor Dennis Gabor and Monsieur Bertrand de Jouvenel” (Gordon and Helmer 1964, ix) are thanked by name in the acknowledgments section of the report. De Jouvenel (1903–1987), author of the concept of futuribles and founder of an organization and a journal with the same name, is one of the best known twentieth-century futurologists (e.g., Jouvenel 1967). Dennis Gabor (1900–1979), a British physicist of Hungarian origin, is probably best known for inventing holography, which earned him the 1971 Nobel Prize in Physics. He also wrote extensively on the future (most importantly Gabor 1963).
- 5.
These dates were mentioned in relation to Panel 5, the panel on war prevention. Considering the authors’ practice to send all the questionnaires to all the participating experts, it appears justified to generalize these dates onto the whole study.
- 6.
I have added to the items their numbers from the final list (see below).
- 7.
For the sake of space, the items are not fully entered into the table.
- 8.
Cf. http://www.state.gov/t/isn/4797.htm, accessed 28 June 2017.
- 9.
Brown and Helmer (1964, 5–8) also introduced another way of comparing the correctness of the median values. They define an area of 25% around the true value, which they call “ballpark,” and determine how many medians are located in the ballpark of each question. This was true for six of the first-round medians, and for nine of the fourth-round medians.
- 10.
In an interview, Helmer shared some recollections on Dalkey. After Helmer had left RAND for the IFTF, “Dalkey pretty much devoted himself to pursuing research on Delphi for a number of years. So I think that became his main interest. I don’t know if he contributed anything—I don’t mean to talk down—but I think in a way because of his interest, he contributed just through that. Pursuing and maintaining an interest. I don’t think he contributed very many original ideas to this, but on the other hand he was very conscientious from a scientific point of view. And so was quite careful in applying some ideas and improv[ing] the methods” (Interview with Olaf Helmer by Kaya Tolon, 3 June 2009, p. 7).
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Dayé, C. (2020). The Boredom of the Crowd: The Long-Range Forecasting Delphi, 1963–1964. In: Experts, Social Scientists, and Techniques of Prognosis in Cold War America. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32781-1_6
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