March 2013: Of Foxes and Hedgehogs
Predictions are tough, especially when they involve the future. Yogi Berra Philip Tetlock, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is a rock star to statistics geeks but less well known by the general public. Newly tenured at UC Berkeley in 1984, Tetlock began a twenty-year study in which 284 experts in many fields – government officials, professors, journalists, and others, and with many opinions, from Marxists to free-marketeers, were asked to make 28,000 predictions[1][2] about the future. His major finding: they were only slightly more accurate than chance. ...
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