“Top Men”

From The Sydney Morning Herald, June 22, 2007

More than 100 studies have found that experts are often poor forecasters. In one survey Professor Philip Tetlock, of the University of California at Berkeley, obtained 82,361 forecasts from 284 academics, other commentators and professional advisers in the areas of politics and economics. The experts had to select one of three answers (that a situation would not change or would get better or get worse).
The experts performed more poorly than they would have done had they allocated forecasts at random. As an article on Tetlock by Louis Menand in The New Yorker put it: “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.” Tetlock found that the more famous the commentators or forecasters, the more unreliable their forecasts.

Major Eaton: We have top men working on it now.
Indiana Jones: Who?
Major Eaton: Top… men…


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