Philip Tetlock – Ignore confident forecasters
January 27th, 02007 by Stewart Brand
Ignore confident forecasters
“What is it about politics that makes people so dumb?” From his perspective as a pyschology researcher, Philip Tetlock watched political advisors on the left and the right make bizarre rationalizations about their wrong predictions at the time of the rise of Gorbachev in the 1980s and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union. (Liberals were sure that Reagan was a dangerous idiot; conservatives were sure that the USSR was permanent.) The whole exercise struck Tetlock as what used to be called an “outcome-irrelevant learning structure.” No feedback, no correction…
Read the rest of Stewart Brand’s Summary
This entry was posted on Saturday, January 27th, 2007 at 4:25 pm and is filed under Futures, Long Bets, Seminars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Posted on May 21st, 2007 at 1:21 am
But surely (and yes, it is ironic) confidence isn’t the marker to avoid: relentless adherence to inflexible dogma is. Even the foxes are confident in their predictions sometimes, but that is because they have evaluated the alternatives, not because they’ve run it through their particular pet equation and gotten “The Answer”.
Posted on July 4th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
[...] Philip Tetlock recently presented a Seminar About Long-Term Thinking to the effect that confident forecasters ought to be ignored. Still, it’s distressingly rare to find even a moderately systematic evaluation of political forecasts in the popular media. In this category comes an article from the online version of Radar magazine earlier this year, “The Iraq Gamble”, which scrutinises journalistic commentators’ predictions about the war in Iraq. In it, writer Jebediah Reed tracks the fortunes of predictions against those of the predictors, and is disturbed by what turns up. [M]aybe something is amiss in the world of punditry. Are the incentives well-aligned? Surely those who warned us not to invade Iraq have been recognized and rewarded, and those who pushed for this disaster face tattered credibility and waning career prospects. Could it be any other way in America? … So we selected the four pundits who were in our judgment the most influentially and disturbingly misguided in their pro-war arguments and the four who were most prescient and forceful in their opposition. … Then we did a career check … and found that something is rotten in the fourth estate. [...]
Posted on April 27th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
[...] enn rever i gjennomsnitt, skyldes det prisen de betaler for å ta sjanser – de kommer gjerne med mange spådommer som aldri slår til: The value of Hedgehogs is that they occasionally get right the farthest-out predictions— civil [...]
Posted on April 28th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Tetlock’s work provides a foundation to what many of us have believed for some time. Were he to have left it there, his achievement would be noteworthy. His research and analysis proffers refinements to the major conclusion of fox vs hedgehog.
My concern for his work is it is ignored. Even those who taut its merits are inclined to forget the conclusion and applicability to their own behavior.
Tetlock’swork is germane to our freedom and security … economic, homeland and national. The WMD conclusion is a nightmare that consumed our youth, our riches and reputation … and much more. Had our intelligence community practiced less the expert and more the fox, maybe the conclusion would have been different and/or the courage to challenge existed.
Tetlock’s work screams out the need for asymmetric views and counter measures. But the bias in our thinking pulls our center of gravity to our hedgehog position. Illustrations are the Isreli-centric thinking in our intelligence community , dogma in financial fraud detection, and resistance to carbon emission reduction by business
Posted on July 20th, 2008 at 10:53 am
The Iraq coda at the end now seems oddly out of date and off target.
Posted on December 10th, 2008 at 9:27 pm
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Posted on April 2nd, 2009 at 7:25 am
[...] I was just trying to summarize a podcast I listened to. A probably better summary can be found here. And if you look around just at bit you should be able to download the podcast as well. Posted [...]