(It’s foxes who know many things and do better; the hedgehog knows one big thing.)
I haven’t read Tetlock’s book yet. I’m certainly not surprised to hear that foreign affairs “experts” are full of crap on average; their incentives are dreadful. I’m much more surprised to hear that situations like the instability of the Soviet Union could be described and successfully predicted by simple linear models, and I’m extremely suspicious if the linear models were constructed in retrospect. Wasn’t this more like the kind of model-based forecasting that was actually done in advance?
Conversely if the result is just that hedgehogs did worse than foxes, I’m not surprised because hedgehogs have worse incentives—internal incentives, that is, there are no external incentives AFAICT.
I have read Dawes on medical experts being beaten by improper linear models (i.e., linear models with made-up −1-or-1 weights and normalized inputs, if I understand correctly) whose factors are the judgments of the same experts on the facets of the problem. This ought to count as the triumph or failure of something but it’s not quite isomorphic to outside view versus inside view.
(It’s foxes who know many things and do better; the hedgehog knows one big thing.)
I haven’t read Tetlock’s book yet. I’m certainly not surprised to hear that foreign affairs “experts” are full of crap on average; their incentives are dreadful. I’m much more surprised to hear that situations like the instability of the Soviet Union could be described and successfully predicted by simple linear models, and I’m extremely suspicious if the linear models were constructed in retrospect. Wasn’t this more like the kind of model-based forecasting that was actually done in advance?
Conversely if the result is just that hedgehogs did worse than foxes, I’m not surprised because hedgehogs have worse incentives—internal incentives, that is, there are no external incentives AFAICT.
I have read Dawes on medical experts being beaten by improper linear models (i.e., linear models with made-up −1-or-1 weights and normalized inputs, if I understand correctly) whose factors are the judgments of the same experts on the facets of the problem. This ought to count as the triumph or failure of something but it’s not quite isomorphic to outside view versus inside view.