Reasons to Be Fearful: Experts No Better Than Chimpanzees

In times like these, everyone should have a book by their bedside to reach for at three in the morning. If the Bible doesn't work for you, Philip Tetlock's nicely oxymoronic volume Expert Political Judgment might be an alternative. Tetlock's book is based on two decades of research into 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends". He asked them simply to do what they apparently did best: predict what would happen in the world next in answer to specific questions. Would oil prices rise or fall, would there be a boom or a bust, would we go to war? And so on. When the study concluded, in 2003, Tetlock's experts had made 82,361 forecasts and the results were correlated with the facts as they had turned out. The experts were less accurate in their forecasts than a control group of chimpanzees choosing entirely randomly would have been. Even specialists in particular narrow fields were not significantly more successful than reasonably informed laymen. "We reach the point of diminishing marginal predictive returns for knowledge disconcertingly quickly," Tetlock suggested. "In this age of academic hyperspecialisation, there is no reason for supposing that contributors to top journals - distinguished political scientists, area study specialists, economists and so on - are any better than attentive readers of the New York Times in 'reading' emerging situations. (The Observer, U.K., January 4, 2009)

Comments

[Dan Underhill]

I just finished reading "The Jungle" by Upton Sinclair. It came up on several reading lists when I was going to high-school but it is one that I never chose to read back then. What has changed since "The Jungle" was written is that both the masses and the aristocrats who rob them have become ever so slightly more sophisticated. Technical and industrial advances have improved our lot and the robber barons who end up with all the patents will tell us that it couldn't have happened without them just as they said at the turn of the twentieth century. There are now regulations, brought about by activists, that require that employers treat their employees (if they set up business in the developed world) slightly more fairly than in 1906. Buying an election (2000 and 2004 notwithstanding) is a little more difficult than it was. It describes exactly what the radical group called "Neo-Conservatives" (who are in no way conservative) have been trying to create with their "Neo-Liberal" (which is liberal only in the archaic sense meaning morally unrestrained) economic schemes such as "Free Trade". "Free Trade" is a means of making industry and the plight of all working men & women very much like what was described in this 103-year-old book.

While specifics might be impossible for experts or chimpanzees to predict, trends (such as what the powers-that-be are trying to do to us) remains pretty much the same and were it not for such forces as the American Revolution, the Anti-Slavery Movement, the Union Movement, the Peace Movement, and the ecology movement, etc. we would all be absolutely (instead of just pretty much) enslaved.

[Jeffrey Simons]

I just finished reading the short story "Babel's Children" by Clive Barker, where all of the world's decisions are made by scientists running racing games between frogs on a giant map of the world. This report is thus a little unsettling.