CONTRA EXPERTS

One argument that conservative populists often make is that the "experts" really don't know that much.  For me, that's obviously true of almost all the rightwing radio gasbags and other conservative pundits but there is solid empirical research that indicates that regardless of political ideology, even though an expert may know a lot about a particular areas, expert predictions are often worse than chance.

One of the best investigations of experts is Philip Tetlock’s 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?”:

He picked two hundred and eighty-four people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” and he started asking them to assess the probability that various things would or would not come to pass, both in the areas of the world in which they specialized and in areas about which they were not expert.

By the end of the study, in 2003, the experts had made 82,361 forecasts.

Tetlock gave his experts questions about the future which he designed to have only 3 answers: the future would be like the present, it would be better than the present or it would be worse. Tetlock found that their predictions were less accurate than simply picking one fo three possibilities at random and more disturbing, he found that the more experts knew, the less accurate they were.