From a piece in the Observer about our current fears, by Tim Adams:
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.
Comments