Predictive accuracy brings trust, and trust brings power. Making a series of correct and meaningful predictions can bring fame and fortune.
It’s actually surprising that people don’t do it more. Even if they’re just guessing, it’s a little bit like buying a lottery ticket. Maybe this is because our society has enforcement mechanisms against wild prognostication. You have to earn the right to make forecasts.
Perhaps we can view credentialism, in this light, as a guard against false positives.
Unfortunately, we don’t take the further step of vetting the predictive track record of the people with credentials. We just kind of assume we know what they’re talking about.
I think this is exactly what most pundits do, and it’s well known that correct predictions are reputation makers.
The problem is that making more than one correct but still low-probability prediction is incredibly unlikely, since you multiply two small numbers. This functions as a very strong filter. And you don’t need to carefully vet track records to see when someone loudly gets it wrong, so as we see, most pundits stop making clear and non-consensus predictions once they start making money as pundits.
Predictive accuracy brings trust, and trust brings power. Making a series of correct and meaningful predictions can bring fame and fortune.
It’s actually surprising that people don’t do it more. Even if they’re just guessing, it’s a little bit like buying a lottery ticket. Maybe this is because our society has enforcement mechanisms against wild prognostication. You have to earn the right to make forecasts.
Perhaps we can view credentialism, in this light, as a guard against false positives.
Unfortunately, we don’t take the further step of vetting the predictive track record of the people with credentials. We just kind of assume we know what they’re talking about.
I think this is exactly what most pundits do, and it’s well known that correct predictions are reputation makers.
The problem is that making more than one correct but still low-probability prediction is incredibly unlikely, since you multiply two small numbers. This functions as a very strong filter. And you don’t need to carefully vet track records to see when someone loudly gets it wrong, so as we see, most pundits stop making clear and non-consensus predictions once they start making money as pundits.