Pundits Are Always Wrong

**Lemur** · 03-05-2009, 18:37

Well, maybe not always, but a recent experiment 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 ...

**Sasaki Kojiro** · 03-05-2009, 19:05

Probably true for most partisan people.

**Scurvy** · 03-05-2009, 21:47

I'm not sure pundits are actually supposed to be right - it's why there are often 2 or 3 in a programme - they are there to provide perspectives or different viewpoints - it would be really boring if they were right about everything anyway

**Whacker** · 03-05-2009, 22:36

What's always my favorite is when you get, say 100 random jacktards, all of whom as positing some different future position on x topic. When one of them finally does end up right, he or she is lauded as a veritable genius on whatever subject and suddenly gets tons of airtime across the board.