'Experts' predictions barely beat random guesses...'
There is an old saw that liberals often act based on emotion. I need to add this to my list posted earlier on conservatives. But consider the last eight years or even the years from Reagan till now. If deal makers, investors, prognosticators, politicians and many others considered their actions from an emotional point of view where would we be now? For the purpose of debate, I am throwing emotions into a sort of golden rule type of thinking here. What did all the investors and others base their buying and trading decisions on: reason, the market, financial industry, the experts, housing always goes up, regulatory policy, naivete, basic human honesty? Did ideas about how well capitalism works replace the person (people) in the process. Ideas have power, people think they work even though they are only ideas.
Below is some interesting stuff, reminds me of how my mother picked more winning horses than my father who knew everything about everything. Mom just looked. So I ask if experts know nothing who do we rely on? Mom?
'Why the experts missed the crash'
"...Some 25 years ago, he began an experiment to quantify the forecasting skill of political experts.
By the time he finished in 2003, Tetlock had signed up nearly 300 academics, economists, policymakers and journalists and mapped more than 82,000 forecasts against real-world outcomes, analyzing not just what the experts said but how they thought: how quickly they embraced contrary evidence, for example, or reacted when they were wrong. And wrong they usually were, barely beating out a random forecast generator."
Philip Tetlock on expert predictions on the economy - Feb. 18, 2009
"Now think again: making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head. We like to see ourselves as rational but the author of a new study of the brain tells we can do nothing without our emotions."
Now think again: making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head - Times Online
"On the day when Saddam was caught, the bond market went up in the morning, and it went down in the afternoon. So here we had two headlines "Bond Market Up on Saddam News," and in the afternoon, "Bond Market Down on Saddam News" and then they had in both cases very convincing explanations of the moves. Basically if you can explain one thing and its opposite using the same data you don't have an explanation. It takes a lot of courage to keep silent." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
There is an old saw that liberals often act based on emotion. I need to add this to my list posted earlier on conservatives. But consider the last eight years or even the years from Reagan till now. If deal makers, investors, prognosticators, politicians and many others considered their actions from an emotional point of view where would we be now? For the purpose of debate, I am throwing emotions into a sort of golden rule type of thinking here. What did all the investors and others base their buying and trading decisions on: reason, the market, financial industry, the experts, housing always goes up, regulatory policy, naivete, basic human honesty? Did ideas about how well capitalism works replace the person (people) in the process. Ideas have power, people think they work even though they are only ideas.
Below is some interesting stuff, reminds me of how my mother picked more winning horses than my father who knew everything about everything. Mom just looked. So I ask if experts know nothing who do we rely on? Mom?
'Why the experts missed the crash'
"...Some 25 years ago, he began an experiment to quantify the forecasting skill of political experts.
By the time he finished in 2003, Tetlock had signed up nearly 300 academics, economists, policymakers and journalists and mapped more than 82,000 forecasts against real-world outcomes, analyzing not just what the experts said but how they thought: how quickly they embraced contrary evidence, for example, or reacted when they were wrong. And wrong they usually were, barely beating out a random forecast generator."
Philip Tetlock on expert predictions on the economy - Feb. 18, 2009
"Now think again: making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head. We like to see ourselves as rational but the author of a new study of the brain tells we can do nothing without our emotions."
Now think again: making the right decision calls for the heart as well as the head - Times Online
"On the day when Saddam was caught, the bond market went up in the morning, and it went down in the afternoon. So here we had two headlines "Bond Market Up on Saddam News," and in the afternoon, "Bond Market Down on Saddam News" and then they had in both cases very convincing explanations of the moves. Basically if you can explain one thing and its opposite using the same data you don't have an explanation. It takes a lot of courage to keep silent." Nassim Nicholas Taleb
