No One Knows What Will Happen

Especially if they are televised “experts”:

Every time there’s a national disaster, a gigantic event, a shooting, a breakthrough, really any news at all, you can rely on television news to find an expert. Some of them know quite a lot about what happened, what will happen, and why. But when it comes to a lot of experts, they really have no idea what they’re talking about.

Blogger Eric Barker points out that political experts’ predicitons [sic] are only slightly better than a random guess, and way worse than a statistical model. In fact, so called experts were better at predicting events outside their own field. Barker points to a study from the 1980′s, when Philip Tetlock had 284 political “experts” make about a hundred predictions. The study is summarized in the book Everything Is Obvious* Once You Know the Answer:

For each of these predictions, Tetlock insisted that the experts specify which of two outcomes they expected and also assign a probability to their prediction. He did so in a way that confident predictions scored more points when correct, but also lost more points when mistaken. With those predictions in hand, he then sat back and waited for the events themselves to play out. Twenty years later, he published his results, and what he found was striking: Although the experts performed slightly better than random guessing, they did not perform as well as even a minimally sophisticated statistical model. Even more surprisingly, the experts did slightly better when operating outside their area of expertise than within it.

You’re better off piecing together a reasonable picture of future events from myriad conspiracy theories than from listening to any expert. Conspiracy theories are essentially open source: people can claim anything, the more credible theories have at least one or two demonstrable aspects behind them. Famous, exhaustively-interviewed “experts” are paid to only express a very narrow range of ideas, and nearly all of the time the ideas turn out to benefit the ones paying them.