Lemur
03-05-2009, 18:37
Well, maybe not always, but a recent experiment (http://www.bryanappleyard.com/blog/2009/03/pundits-are-wrong-about-everything.php) showed that their predictions are actually worse than chance. In other words, throwing a dart at a wall covered with predictions would yield you better prognostication than you will get from the talking heads on cable news.
Philip Tetlock at Berkeley [...] studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view.
Something to consider the next time your turn on any of the 24-hour news channels ...
Philip Tetlock at Berkeley [...] studied pundits and discovered they were, to a rough approximation, always wrong when making predictions. He took 284 pundits and asked them questions about the future. Their performance was worse than chance. With three possible answers, they were right less than 33 per cent of the time. A monkey chucking darts would have done better. This is consoling. More consoling still is Tetlock's further finding that the more certain a pundit was, the more likely he was to be wrong. Their problem being that they couldn't self-correct, presumably because they'd invested so much of their personality and self-esteem in a specific view.
Something to consider the next time your turn on any of the 24-hour news channels ...