“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing” (ancient Greek parable)
In the 1950s (and again in 1968) the biologist Paul Ehrlich predicted that the world was facing population growth that would lead to widespread famine. Today – an obesity epidemic later – he has graciously conceded that his prediction may have failed, and been a little too pessimistic. Paul Ehrlich is one of many examples of experts who have been very wrong and won’t admit it. They are described in Dan Gardner’s book Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – and Why We Believe Them Anyway (2011). The erroneous experts often defend themselves by asserting that their predictions made people act, and this therefore changed the course of history. Haven’t Ehrlich’s dire projections contributed to cementing the norm of a maximum of two kids per family in our part of the world?
Dan Gardner makes sure to point out that for every pessimistic prediction that hits wildly off the mark, you can find a positive one. Nor is there any difference on experts’ accuracy based on political observance. Left-wing experts felt sure that Reagan would lead us to nuclear war by continuing the arms race with the Soviet Union, like a gun-crazy cowboy. And then there was the neocon Richard Perle, who in 2003 felt sure that some important square in Baghdad would end up named after President Bush.
Future Babble is a very funny book, packed with predictions so ludicrous that they make Richard Perle look like the donkey from Winnie the Pooh. Read for instance the words of John Maynard Keynes when after the Wall Street crash in 1929 he wrote that this would have no major consequences for London: “We find the look ahead decidedly encouraging”.
Experts have promised us the paper-less society, the colonisation of space and sea, self-guided cars and house-cleaning robots. What has become of all that? I know full well that we now have self-guided vacuum cleaners, but I also know that the manual somewhat discouragingly states that is a ”supplement to regular vacuum cleaning”. As a result, I have for quite some years looked forward to the promised household robot that I don’t have to vacuum in front of.
We will get all that; in many cases the experts are simply out too early. Generally experts – whether naïve optimist or cultural pessimists – are right the same way as a broken watch, which always manages to show the right time once every twelve hours. We would be better off flipping a coin. Future Babble makes a powerful argument for adding being royally sick of experts to being royally sick of journalists and politicians.
The misleading consensus
The book’s point is that it isn’t just the single, particularly charismatic experts that are wrong. Hordes of them are. There was consensus about Paul Ehrlich’s famine scenario, that Reagan was a dangerous man, and that it was a good idea to invade Iraq. The more experts agree, the more they persist in marginalising those who disagree; they are all ignoramuses that just refuse to see the light.
In December 2007, Business Week asked 54 economists for their forecast for 2008. Not a single one of them warned about the future recession. A year later, the magazine again asked the economists about their thoughts for the year ahead, and they joyfully delivered. They didn’t allocate so much as a footnote to mentioning how wrong they had been the previous year.
The mass media carry a large part of the responsibility for how the sea of information is full of flounders. When did you last hear a journalist ask an expert: “You were wrong when you predicted X, and when you stated Y – why should we believe in what you say now?” Very few do that – that would require research. Of course, there are exceptions that prove the rule. One of the more illustrative examples comes from the 2011 parliamentary election in Denmark. Here, three commentators – all former spin doctors – predicted that the Liberal Alliance party would have no chance of getting into Parliament; something that would require at least 2.0 per cent of valid votes. The commentators were so cocksure that they all staked something on the election outcome. One journalist promised to eat his old hat, if the party came above the qualifying threshold, and the two others promised to appear on TV wearing cardboard donkey ears. They all had to deliver on their wagers, because Liberal Alliance got in Parliament with 5.0 per cent of the votes. Perhaps the experts featured on TV should always wear donkey ears so that people could learn to take their predictions with a grain of salt. That would be public service.
Even though we know that experts generally are wrong, we keep listening to them. According to Gardner we are well aware that the future is uncertain and the world chaotic. Still, we are so scared of this uncertainty that we cling to any straw, which is what any confident prediction truly is. We use experts to find meaning in random events and order in chaos, but this is and remains an illusion. Is all planning and forecasting then meaningless? No. Experts are different, Gardner shows, in the sense that some experts are less wrong than others.
Foxes and hedgehogs
That experts usually are wrong when predicting the future isn’t just a claim based on anecdotal evidence. It has been documented in Philip Tetlock’s survey covering 27,450 predictions from 284 different experts since 1985. They did no better than a chimpanzee with a Tarot deck could have done. Or fortune cookies. And at least you can eat those afterwards.
However, the study did show that there’s a lot of difference in the quality of expert opinions. Many of the experts in the analysis would have done better if they just had flipped a coin, while others at times came rather close. The experts who are most wrong are those who have the greatest difficulties with complexity and uncertainty. They insist on viewing the issue in terms of some overarching theory. These experts, which Tetlock and Gardner call “hedgehogs”, are also the most self-assured.
The experts that are least wrong, who they call “foxes”, display the opposite characteristics. They gather their information from many different sources and have very low faith in their personal abilities to predict the future. This sort of doubting expert is a rare guest in the mass media, which favours the self-assured, dramatic proclamations and don’t care for long strings of reservations. The higher the media profile, the less often the expert is right, Tetlock shows. The foxes know better what they don’t know and in general have a more questioning, Socratic attitude towards the issue.
Dan Gardner claims several times that the future never can be predicted. ‘Never’ is a hedgehog word, but in spite of this, we must view the author of Future Babble as an archetypal fox, who makes me draw the following conclusions about how we as decision-makers in an uncertain world should relate to experts:
- Use the cocksure experts with the magnificent theories (the hedgehogs) as pure entertainment – science fiction also proves excellent inspiration.
- Put more credence in the boring experts with all the reservations (the foxes); reward those who admit uncertainty with the attention they perhaps deserve. Even if you really just want a clear recommendation that you can then ignore.
- Ask your expert to estimate the likelihood of the presented scenario. Or to explain all the elements that could lead to the scenario not coming true (reducing confirmation bias).
- Ask yourself what harmful effects the expert’s recommendations could have if things don’t go as predicted.
- Make wagers with experts. It must ultimately have a positive effect on the quality of expert predictions if they stake something on what they say (you might of course lose, but if you wager with a hedgehog the likelihood is small).
- Trust your instincts about what is right. We are living in the information age, but our brains remain in the Stone Age. So think, but not too much.
- Acknowledge that the prediction you need is most likely wrong. Things will turn out right in the end, anyway …
Dan Gardner: “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe them Anyway”. Virgin Books 2011.
About the author
Signe Dahl Lumholt is a professional blogger and owner of a company that works with online marketing. She has a master’s degree in communication and a business degree in logistics. She is a member of the Danish Academy of Futures Studies.
If you are not a current subscriber to SCENARIO or a member of The Copenhagen Instititute for Futures Studies, then get in touch with us or subscribe here.
