Globe: Expertise is overrated

The Sunday Boston Globe's Ideas section has an interview with Philip Tetlock, who has a book on expertise: Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. Tetlock has asked experts their predictions and then recorded the results. The basic result: experts don't do much better than a coin flip in predicting the future.

Interesting stuff. Experts are very good at reviewing what happened and explaining it through their particular lens of experience and expectations. But when it comes to predicting the future, there are just too many random factors to predict much better than a coin toss. Hopefully, scientific endeavors fare better than this, but we see it a lot.

1 Comment(s)

Luke said:

This is not new Jack - it's well known that experts make hopeless forecasters as they tend to view the world through their own limited lens. Best forecasting is done through role play and simulated analogy - in other words, putting yourself in the shoes of others and acting out what happens when a particular set of circumstances arise. This is the whole aspect of decision theaters...

October 8, 2008 3:46 AM