International Press Praise Prof. Tetlock's Book on Political Forecasting
From "Haas in the News" email:
As pundits began their annual ritual of prophesizing about the new year, Professor Philip Tetlock's recent book, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? made a worldwide splash with its conclusion that expert political forecasts are frequently wrong.
Media outlets such as The New Yorker, BBC News, and The Scotsman tapped Tetlock's book to expose how people who make a business out of making predictions are no better at it than the rest of us. In fact, Tetlock's 20-year study of 82,361 forecasts from 284 experts found that the better known and more frequently quoted they were, the less reliable their predictions were likely to be.
Tetlock, the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair II in Leadership and Communication, asked experts to predict the probability of events in dozens of countries and regions, including the Soviet Union, Canada and the Persian Gulf. He found that knowing a lot about a particular topic ˆ being a specialist ˆ can actually make a person an even less reliable prognosticator.
Tetlock also uncovered a "curiously inverse relationship" between how well forecasters themselves thought they were doing and how well they did. He also noted another inverse relationship between what the media prizes most in punditry ˆ a single-minded determination often required to prevail in ideological combat ˆ and what makes a good forecaster. And that, of course, casts a big shadow over the media frenzy to quote such experts about what's in store for the new year.