YEAH, WE KNOW THIS MR. KRISTOF

A NY Times pundit makes an alarming discovery: Pundits, especially well-known political pundits, SUCK. This could've and should've been written 30 years ago.

Learning How to Think
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: March 26, 2009
NY Times

One explanation is that so-called experts turn out to be, in many situations, a stunningly poor source of expertise.

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged many or few years of experience,” Mr. Tetlock wrote.

Indeed, the only consistent predictor was fame — and it was an inverse relationship. The more famous experts did worse than unknown ones.

Kristof draws the obvious conclusion:

The marketplace of ideas for now doesn’t clear out bad pundits and bad ideas partly because there’s no accountability.