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Customer Ratings: 4.5 (from 16 reviews) |
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| Editorial
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Product Description
The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This book fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. |
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| Product Details |
| Author: |
Philip E. Tetlock |
| Binding: |
Hardcover |
| Dewey Decimal Number: |
320.019 |
| EAN: |
9780691123028 |
| ISBN: |
0691123020 |
| Label: |
Princeton University Press |
| Languages: |
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| List Price: |
| Amount: |
5200 |
| Currency Code: |
USD |
| Formatted Price: |
$52.00 |
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| Manufacturer: |
Princeton University Press |
| Number Of Items: |
1 |
| Number Of Pages: |
352 |
| Package Dimensions: |
| Height: |
120 |
| Length: |
920 |
| Weight: |
135 |
| Width: |
630 |
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| Product Group: |
Book |
| Publication Date: |
2005-07-05 |
| Publisher: |
Princeton University Press |
| Studio: |
Princeton University Press |
| Title: |
Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? |
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| Customer Reviews |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2008-01-10
0 out of 2 found this review helpful.
Summary: Instant classic
This is a very important book, and I say this knowing full well that the highest compliment one can pay a book is to call it "important." Here we find a rigorous empirical test of the accuracy of political forecasters. Before I go on, try to imagine the extent to which we are daily inundated by the overconfident, pompous verbosity of forecasters, whether it be political forecasters telling us who will win upcoming elections and why, economic forecasters telling us that we will soon be (or soon will not be) in a recession, ecological forecasters trumpeting that in 10 years (or 20, or 100) all oil will run out, or that the population will explode and the earth will be "overpopulated," that global warming will do this or that in so many years, or... the list goes on and on. Much of the doom-and-gloom shock news that journalists love to hurl at us are not actual stories of what has come to pass, but wildly speculative projections designed to shock and scare us about what the "experts" say will soon happen. Well, guess what? "Experts" are usually no more accurate in their predictions than "nonexperts," meaning, of course, that despite all their "mathematical models" (which are often useless), they are not actually outperforming chance; i.e. (drum roll please) they are guessing. Faust and Ziskin famously argued that since clinical psychologists actually do not outperform laypersons at a variety of tasks on which they are supposed to be "scientific authorities" (for example, psychologists with an average of 30 years clinical experience could not outperform office secretaries at predicting future behavior of patients), that they should never be considered "experts" in courts. Well here Tetlock does the same for political forecasters. In a recent entertaining book, Black Swan, the author Nassim Nicolas Taleb amusingly argues that expert forecasters are literally nothing more than paid liars. Tetlock here outlines decades of his research that shows us why. This book just might change how you see the world, and will definitely change your opinion of the utility of listening to or reading the "news." Read it. I know that many accuse Tetlock of having a right-leaning bias. What struck me as I read this book is how balanced and fair he actually is. If anything, this accusation, made frequently by academics, is evidence of the left-leaning bias common among professors. |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2007-03-31
3 out of 3 found this review helpful.
Summary: Anyone who forecasts or does formal planning for a living...
...can't afford to do without this book. It is scary to think that many people will be writing PhDs in the Social Sciences, and then be called upon to make or influence policy without being familiar with this book's central arguments and evidence. |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2007-01-06
19 out of 21 found this review helpful.
Summary: A classic of Political Science & Cognitive Psychology
Tetlock shows conclusively two key points: First, the best experts in making political estimates and forecasts are no more accurate than fairly simple mathematical models of their estimative processes. This is yet another confirmation of what Robyn Dawes termed "the robust beauty of simple linear models." The inability of human experts to out-perform models based on their expertise has been demonstrated in over one hundred fields of expertise over fifty years of research; one of the most robust findings in social science. Political experts are no exception.
Secondly, Tetlock demonstrates that experts who know something about a number of related topics (foxes) predict better than experts who know a great deal about one thing (hedgehogs). Generalist knowledge adds to accuracy.
Tetlock's survey of this research is clear, crisp, and compelling. His work has direct application to world affairs. For example he is presenting his findings to a conference of Intelligence Community leaders next week (Jan 2007) at the invitation of the Director of National Intelligence.
"Expert Political Judgment" is recommended to anyone who depends on political experts, which is pretty much all of us. Tetlock helps the non-experts to know more about what the experts know, how they know it, and how much good it does them in making predictions. |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2006-12-08
5 out of 7 found this review helpful.
Summary: An Ode to the Obvious
I was a house-guest just before the 2006 elections in
the U.S. and found this book on the bedside table in
my room. Reading it made me giggle. I remark on this
for two reasons: first, I don't usually giggle. Second,
it's not usual for books from university presses to
provoke any kind of emotion.
What got the chuckle from me was proof of something
that you may have long suspected. Those pundits on TV
and the op-ed page have no more idea of what's going
on and what's going to happen than the average intelligent
adult. Remember when The Economist Magazine predicted
that the bottom was going to fall out of oil prices?
Apparently, neither do they. Where are all the people
who said that there would be western-style democracy
flourishing in Iraq?
What I never thought about before was the reason that
the overly-well-informed are not better than the rest
of us when it comes to predictions: they know too much.
Right, the more information you have, the greater number
of obscure details you can command, the more likely you
are to consider them important in making predictions
about future events. What's wrong with that?
Well, there's an old maxim that if you hear barking, you
shouldn't look for hyenas, dingoes or wombats. Chances
are, it's a dog. The odds always favor the obvious, which
is how the obvious became obvious in the first place.
The author's conclusions about the fallibity of experts is
founded in a lot more than a hunch. He gathered and analyzed
predictions-over 80,000 of them. He found that the experts were
wrong more often than blind chance. He has some other
observations about cognitive style and the differences in our
ways of thinking about the past (which seems inevitable once
it's passed) and the future.
Is it too much to hope that some news-gathering, pundit-
using organization would make a list of the predictions
that it broadcasts and revisit them a year or two later
to see how well the experts did?
I predict there's not a chance of it happening.
--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN 9781601640005 |
Customer Rating: 5
Review Date: 2006-10-25
7 out of 9 found this review helpful.
Summary: brilliant and encouraging
Why isn't this book on the front page of every newspaper everywhere? The author makes a cogent argument that informed amateurs are as good as "experts" in seriously important fields from investing to politics. He provides experimental evidence that this is the case. This is the hypothesis that a bunch of farmers and merchants tested when they sat down and organized the United States of America. This is the hypothesis that every smart investor proves when he meets or beats hedge funds spending millions on experts and computer power. A very empowering book. Well-written, well-argued, well-referenced. I dare you to read this one and not give it to a friend. |
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