Why "Experts" Get it Wrong
Timothy Birdnow
I found this on CCNET. Interesting perspective on "experts" and how they generally get it wrong.
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/technology/the-more-famous-the-expert-the-worse-his-predictions
The more famous the expert, the worse his predictions
Robert Matthews
Last Updated: May 8, 2011
As predictions go, it was truly disturbing - made all the more so by the authority of the source.
In 1989, Dr Mustafa Tolba, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), warned that over the coming years as many as 50 million refugees would be wandering the globe to escape the ravages of climate change.
By 2005, Unep felt confident enough to say the 50 million mark would be reached "by 2010". Other experts agreed, among them the celebrated environmentalist Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University.
So where are they? In a word, nowhere. A recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in England found no evidence of any mass migration caused by climate change.
On the contrary, it suggested that - unsurprisingly - people prefer to stay in their own country in the face of environmental upheaval.
Unep has tried to disown the prediction, but has succeeded only in sparking a media furore after being caught removing graphics clearly stating "50 million climate refugees by 2010" from its website.
It looks like the agency is learning the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb that "prediction is very difficult - especially of the future".
It's unlikely to give up making predictions, though: after all, that's what expert groups are supposed to do. But as a fascinating new survey of the prediction business shows, we should all be much more sceptical about forecasts - especially those made by experts.
As the journalist Dan Gardner points out in Futurebabble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, experts have been getting predictions wrong for centuries, for all kinds of reasons.
In 1789, the English economist Thomas Malthus showed with almost mathematical certainty that the world was condemned to mass starvation by the obvious fact that populations increase exponentially, inevitably outstripping food supplies.
Two centuries on, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures show that even the least developed nations are enjoying rising food levels. Clearly, Malthus had not banked on the ingenuity of agriculturalists to feed the world.
Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but as Gardner shows, experts are quite often prone to making them.
He cites the results of a pioneering study begun in the 1980s by Professor Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California who brought together hundreds of experts in political science and economics, and asked them to predict what the future might hold.
The result was a collection of more than 27,000 forecasts whose veracity was then checked over the following years. The outcome, published in 2005, was salutary. It showed that the typical expert did not perform significantly better than random guessing.
But Prof Tetlock went further, trying to identify why some experts were so much worse than others. He found that political beliefs or levels of optimism made no difference: a cheery right-winger was just as likely to do badly as a miserable Marxist. Qualifications or access to confidential information did not matter, either.
Far more important, he found, was the mindset that the experts brought to making predictions.
Those who did badly did not like getting bogged down in complexities, or weighing up the evidence from a variety of sources. Instead, they had a habit of making predictions that complied with some grand, overarching thesis. And having made their predictions, they were - ironically enough - strikingly confident about them.
A grand thesis, simple views, confidence ... as Gardner points out, that's pretty much a thumbnail sketch of the perfect media pundit.
End Excerpt.
Do read the whole thing; it's worth your while.
I found this on CCNET. Interesting perspective on "experts" and how they generally get it wrong.
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/technology/the-more-famous-the-expert-the-worse-his-predictions
The more famous the expert, the worse his predictions
Robert Matthews
Last Updated: May 8, 2011
As predictions go, it was truly disturbing - made all the more so by the authority of the source.
In 1989, Dr Mustafa Tolba, the head of the UN Environment Programme (Unep), warned that over the coming years as many as 50 million refugees would be wandering the globe to escape the ravages of climate change.
By 2005, Unep felt confident enough to say the 50 million mark would be reached "by 2010". Other experts agreed, among them the celebrated environmentalist Professor Norman Myers of Oxford University.
So where are they? In a word, nowhere. A recent study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in England found no evidence of any mass migration caused by climate change.
On the contrary, it suggested that - unsurprisingly - people prefer to stay in their own country in the face of environmental upheaval.
Unep has tried to disown the prediction, but has succeeded only in sparking a media furore after being caught removing graphics clearly stating "50 million climate refugees by 2010" from its website.
It looks like the agency is learning the truth of the ancient Chinese proverb that "prediction is very difficult - especially of the future".
It's unlikely to give up making predictions, though: after all, that's what expert groups are supposed to do. But as a fascinating new survey of the prediction business shows, we should all be much more sceptical about forecasts - especially those made by experts.
As the journalist Dan Gardner points out in Futurebabble: Why Expert Predictions Fail And Why We Believe Them Anyway, experts have been getting predictions wrong for centuries, for all kinds of reasons.
In 1789, the English economist Thomas Malthus showed with almost mathematical certainty that the world was condemned to mass starvation by the obvious fact that populations increase exponentially, inevitably outstripping food supplies.
Two centuries on, UN Food and Agriculture Organisation figures show that even the least developed nations are enjoying rising food levels. Clearly, Malthus had not banked on the ingenuity of agriculturalists to feed the world.
Everyone makes mistakes, of course, but as Gardner shows, experts are quite often prone to making them.
He cites the results of a pioneering study begun in the 1980s by Professor Philip Tetlock, a psychologist at the University of California who brought together hundreds of experts in political science and economics, and asked them to predict what the future might hold.
The result was a collection of more than 27,000 forecasts whose veracity was then checked over the following years. The outcome, published in 2005, was salutary. It showed that the typical expert did not perform significantly better than random guessing.
But Prof Tetlock went further, trying to identify why some experts were so much worse than others. He found that political beliefs or levels of optimism made no difference: a cheery right-winger was just as likely to do badly as a miserable Marxist. Qualifications or access to confidential information did not matter, either.
Far more important, he found, was the mindset that the experts brought to making predictions.
Those who did badly did not like getting bogged down in complexities, or weighing up the evidence from a variety of sources. Instead, they had a habit of making predictions that complied with some grand, overarching thesis. And having made their predictions, they were - ironically enough - strikingly confident about them.
A grand thesis, simple views, confidence ... as Gardner points out, that's pretty much a thumbnail sketch of the perfect media pundit.
End Excerpt.
Do read the whole thing; it's worth your while.
posted by Timothy Birdnow | 5:23 AM
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