In: Economics
Tetlock's article hones in on experts and how they prognosticate and often make inaccurate predictions and aren't held accountable. What are the two types of experts that he refers to and what are some of their distinctive characteristics? (be brief in your response)
Predictions is one of the pleasures of life. This is because we people are so much keen to know the future. Also people tend to see the future as indeterminate and the past as inevitable. And that's the only reason we have numerous so called " Experts" in the market who are paid for maiking such predictions.
Philip E. Tetlock evaluates the judgement of economic and political experts by rigourously testing their ability to make accurate predictions.
According to Tetlock, people who appears as experts on television, giving judgements and predictions on political and economic issues are no better than all of us. They have the same repertoire of self jurisdiction that everyone has. He also adds that that when these experts are wrong they are rarely held accountable for it.
The accuracy of these experts simply has an inverse relation with his or her self confidence, his deapth of knowledge etc. The more known expert the person is, the less reliable their guesses are likely to be.
But that is just one side of the coin. Despite this all, political and economic experts have highly pertinent information and advice in many areas of public policy. The main problem with these experts is that political actors seize on their most extreme judgements and overlook their areas of general agreement. This is because they want the predictions to be easily interpreted by the viewers. Due to this they show what people can understand and that's why these experts are often underated on their judgements.
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