OTTAWA-So-called experts are no more accurate than a dart-throwing chimpanzee when it comes to accurately forecasting events in the future. That’s according to an account of University of California psychologist Philip Tetlock, as told by Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner during the PMAC annual national conference in Ottawa June 13 . Gardner, author of Future Babble, gave an engaging and oftentimes darkly funny account during his keynote address of how and why futurist pundits so often get their predictions so incredibly wrong.
For example, in 2008 the price of oil went over $140 a barrel and experts said it would soon hit $200. Meanwhile, it dropped to $30 a few months later. In 1967, other experts said the USSR would have one of the fastest-growing economies in the year 2000. As history turned out, the USSR did not exist.
Think like a fox
Gardner noted two styles of decision making that Tetlock came up with: thinking like a fox and thinking like a hedgehog. The hedgehog, Garnder said, know just one big idea, whereas foxes don’t have one overarching idea but rather know many little things. The hedgehog prefers thinking that leads to one clear, decisive answer while fox-style thinking can lead to “on one hand, on the other hand” style of cognition.
Which tends to be more accurate in predicting the future? The fox tends to be able to predict somewhat better than the hedgehog due to their ability to pull pieces of information from a variety of sources and revamp their ideas on an ongoing basis.
But just because predictions are so often wrong doesn’t mean we don’t believe them. In fact, we’re more likely to believe media pundits who think like hedgehogs, and therefore make self-assured, black-and-white predictions about what will happen. Pundits who think like foxes, Gardner noted, are less convincing because they tend to present several sides of the same issue. The bottom line, he said, was to be skeptical of forecasts made by pundits.