Future Babble

January 10, 2011
Gardner, a columnist and senior writer for the Ottawa Citizen (The Science of Fear), examines the misguided trust people place in media forecasters and "legions of experts" who make meaningless predictions about the future. He reviews the findings of psychologist Philip Tetlock, who had 284 experts from a range of disciplines make 27,450 predictions on political and economic trends, concluding they produced about the same results as random guesses. Biologist Paul Erhlich is one of his main targets. In 1968's The Population Bomb, Ehrlich predicted mass famines. In fact, Gardner points to America's "epidemic of obesity" and growing calorie intake worldwide. Gardner also probes economic and environmental worries, and warnings of wars, climate change, the Y2K hysteria, and the weather, which he says can be forecast with accuracy only at most two days out. Successful predictions are celebrated, Gardner says, while the wrong ones are forgotten. Yet he might have done well to remember more of those accurate predictions, and to focus more on Tetlock's conclusions about those experts who show greater accuracy and on how the public might recognize them. Instead, he writes off accurate predictions as "likely... a coincidence."

January 1, 2011

"Everybody knows everything anyway," muttered old Jack Kerouac. Wrong: Nobody knows anything, writes Ottawa Citizen columnist Gardner (The Science of Fear, 2008), least of all the experts.

When it is possible to be wrong, people are wrong. There's no news in that. What is news is that nearly every expert prediction about the shape of future things is off the mark. By the accounts of the experts of the time, anyone born in the Great Depression was doomed to a life of want and scarcity, though instead they got peace and prosperity—indeed, writes the author, "there has never been a more fortunate generation." So why can't the pundits get it right? Gardner is strong on the observational but weaker on the whys and wherefores, relying on—yes—expert testimony that analyzes a body of "27,450 judgments about the future" to suggest that most forecasters are generally wrong, no matter what their politics, their relative pessimism or optimism or their experience. Those who succeed are "comfortable with complexity and uncertainty"—in other words, they're seasoned enough to qualify and hedge their predictions enough to escape criticism. Gardner takes a few jabs at such pundits as Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, who claims a 90 percent correct prediction rate (see The Predictioneer's Game, 2009), which Gardner heartily doubts. The author also revisits famed prognostications concerning peak oil and coming world famine. Yet, in the end, the book lacks hard data and phrases big questions to come up with the answers it seeks—just in the manner of your run-of-the-mill futurist.

Here's an expert prediction: This so-so book, despite its modest merits, will sink like a stone. Now watch it hit the bestseller lists.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2011
We humans have an apparently insatiable appetite for predictions about the future, but the experts to whom we turn for predictions often do an exceedingly poor job of forecasting. Why? Drawing upon the research of psychologist Philip Tetlock, whose 20-year study of expert predictions suggested that experts were about as accurate in predicting the future as dart-throwing monkeys, as well as insights from cognitive science, Ottawa journalist Gardner argues that the problem is not lousy experts so much as our deeply rooted human need for certainty. Wanting definite, unqualified answers about the future, we encourage experts to make bold, unconditional predictions that often turn out to be wrong; but we are quick to forgive and forget. (Recall, for example, the many predictioneers who forecast clear economic sailing through the fall of 2008). Like his earlier work, in which Gardner also explored the challenge of dealing with uncertainty (The Science of Fear, 2009), this selection urges (and demonstrates) a calm, rational perspective; a healthy skepticism; and an effort to make peace with lifes uncertainties.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)