or Powell's or me• • •
"Mike and Jon, Jon and Mike—I've known them both for years, and, clearly, one of them is very funny. As for the other: truly one of the great hangers-on of our time."—Steve Bodow, head writer, The Daily Show
•
"Who can really judge what's funny? If humor is a subjective medium, then can there be something that is really and truly hilarious? Me. This book."—Daniel Handler, author, Adverbs, and personal representative of Lemony Snicket
•
"The good news: I thought Our Kampf was consistently hilarious. The bad news: I’m the guy who wrote Monkeybone."—Sam Hamm, screenwriter, Batman, Batman Returns, and Homecoming
June 07, 2008
I Want to Be an Expert, Too!
By: Bernard Chazelle
Experts assured us that Iraq would be a cakewalk and we'd be tripping all over WMDs as we stroll down Baghdad streets. When it turned out differently, we were told that "No One Could Have Predicted That."
Today, Big Brown lost a horserace: a loss that No One Could Have Predicted. I was listening to NPR in the car and one expert after the next kept reassuring us that Big Brown could not lose. It did. (Which makes me happy because between a gorgeous horse and human vermin injecting it with steroids for extra bucks, I'll always take the side of the horse.)
Surprise: even the oil industry has experts.
The oil survey has correctly predicted the direction of futures 49 percent of the time since its start in April 2004.
Please tell me I am reading this wrong. A direction is a binary thing, right? It's up or down? So, if I flip a coin I get it right 50% percent of the time plus or minus a few standard deviations. So, why are we paying those people more than enough to buy a penny for the experiment?
— Bernard Chazelle
Never fear. I predict, with a 50% probability, that you will become an expert. Since my chances are null, maybe 50.00000000000000001%
Posted by: bobbyp at June 7, 2008 07:25 PMHey, it's worked for weather so well that we now have multiple 24/7/365 channels to guess what it'll be like next week.
It's presently pouring outside and we've received a tornado watch. This morning's forecast, "chance of rain 50%". Fancy way of saying it's either raining or it's not.
For all the huzzah about newsrooms being taken over by PR, Marketing and Bean Counter types, it's anecdotally clear that it's the weather guessers who are calling the shots.
Posted by: rehctaw at June 7, 2008 07:33 PMI only predict things that have already happened.
Posted by: Rob Payne at June 7, 2008 08:31 PMA bit of cold comfort:
http://www.amazon.com/Expert-Political-Judgment-Good-Know/dp/0691128715/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212905471&sr=8-1
Louis Menand of the New Yorker (http://:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1)
"It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock's new book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business -- people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables -- are no better than the rest of us. When they're wrong, they're rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons."
and
"Tetlock also found that specialists are not significantly more reliable than non-specialists in guessing what is going to happen in the region they study. Knowing a little might make someone a more reliable forecaster, but Tetlock found that knowing a lot can actually make a person less reliable."
Posted by: karrsic at June 8, 2008 02:13 AMTo be fair to those guys, the direction can also be "no change". To be fair to everyone else, though, if their predictions are valuable they're not going to make them available for free. So anyone claiming to be an expert and giving free advice is probably full of shit. Which you already knew.
Posted by: Doctorb at June 8, 2008 05:27 AMCome on, be fair: no one flips a penny, the coin is too small. Quarter, you flip a quarter. An expert is worth at least a quarter.
Posted by: abb1 at June 8, 2008 09:53 AMDoctorb: I think the "no change" direction is the equivalent of the coin landing on its side. :)
Posted by: Bolo at June 8, 2008 03:49 PMPlease note Mr. Shenk's even funnier sly comment. That the analysts have been "bearish" -- meaning they have predicted that oil would decline -- in 20 of the past 21 weeks.
In case you haven't been paying attention, prices have doubled in that period.
Posted by: hedgehog at June 8, 2008 09:27 PM
