A lot of contemporary explanations for superforecasters outperforming the Intelligence Community were quite specific to intel: eg that agencies had a pro-secrecy bias so undervalued open source, or couldn't recruit the best forecasters because they had to optimise against leaks

But in the light of the virus those theories seem too narrow.
The broader lesson is probably that many big institutions have an internal information bias, over-rely on 20th century methods, and are easily outclassed by the best crowdsourcing and crowd analysis on social media

Really clear when reviewing the pandemic. On the 17th of March the Prime Minister warned that cases were rising to the point that they 'could double every 5-6 days', which he got from SAGE, who got it from Imperial, who got it from the WHO, who got it from China in Jan/Feb

But anyone looking at the general base rate for infection in Italy, case estimates in the UK, or even the financial times twitter feed(!) could see they had already been doubling every three days. From March 15th https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1239276487062233089?s=19

So anyone who had a decent twitter feed was better informed than the PM, which sounds nuts but has been the case over and over again on masks, aerosol spread, indoor risk, the fomites panic and most consequentially, the belief that suppressing the virus would be fruitless

And therefore a widespread rapid pandemic was inevitable - which led to the emergency hospitals and morgues, stopping trace and test, issuing the do not resuscitate orders for the infirm and pushing covid-positive cases into care homes to Protect The NHS