> -----Original Message----- > From: brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com [mailto:brin-l-boun...@mccmedia.com] On > Behalf Of William T Goodall > Sent: Sunday, January 04, 2009 6:35 AM > To: Brin-L > Subject: Experts > > http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jan/04/financial-crisis-anxiety > > [...] > > "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.
I don't differ with Tetlock's essential findings: the pronouncements of most professional pundits in the areas of economics or geopolitics are less than worthless. I've seen separate documentation that, if you use a broker, you will, on average, do slightly worse than simply investing in a broad based index fund. However, having said that, I think that the implications of his work might lead one to overstate the case; to state that there is no worth in studying or trying to understand finance or geopolitics. The former has been argued extensively here, so let me go to the latter. We know, for example, that the Bush White house had total disdain for the experts in nation building. After the successful defeat of the Iraq army, the provisional authority dismissed the experts in the field, and went there own way, relying on totally unproven techniques. The results were a disaster. In 2006, the US put its COIN expert in charge of the Iraq war. Since then, the US has done much better. Thus, we have a case were the experts were clearly in the right. Thus, we seem to have a good example of taking expertise with a grain of salt, instead of totally disdaining them. Dan M. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
