“Expert, textpert choking smokers
don't you think the joker
laughs at you?
See how they smile
like pigs in a sty
see how they snide
I'm crying
Semolina Pilchard climbing up the Eiffel Tower
elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
man, you should have seen them
kicking Edgar Allen Poe.”
----John Lennon “I Am The Walrus”
David Epstein, in a recent article published in The
Atlantic Magazine, reports on “The peculiar blindness of
experts.” (1) The article is about why generalists triumph in
a specialized world and is adapted from a book written by Epstein on
the subject. In it he convincingly demonstrates that “credentialed
authorities are comically bad a predicting the future. But reliable
forecasting is still possible.
Epstein begins his essay highlighting the much
publicized feud between Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, he of The
Population Bomb fame and economist Julian Simon in the 1980's.
After reviewing Ehrlich's atrocious record of prognostications, he
turns to Simon who countered that more people meant more ideas and
that the world is much more complex than Ehrlich would have us
believe, meaning that the possibilities of avoiding ecological
disaster are much greater than simply calculating the consequence of
exponential population growth against a rather fixed food supply. In
fact, Epstein, points out, both men were wildly wrong but, in their
error, both men—like Donald J. tRUMP—doubled down on the error.
The men agreed on a bet on predicting five commodity
prices over a ten year period as a substitute for population growth.
Ehrlich famously lost the bet but “When economists later
examined metal prices for every 10 year window from 1900 to 2008,
during which time the world population had quadrupled, they saw that
Ehrlich would have won the bet 62 per cent of the time. The catch:
Commodity prices are a poor gauge of population effects, particularly
over a single decade. The variable that both men were certain would
vindicate their worldviews actually had little to do with those
views... Yet both men dug in.” (2)
For instance, “Ehrlich's starvation predictions
were almost comically bad. And yet, the very same year he conceded
the bet, Ehrlich doubled down in another book, with another
prediction that would prove untrue: Sure, his timeline had been a
little off, he wrote, but 'now the population bomb has detonated.'
Despite one erroneous prediction after another,
Ehrlich amassed an enormous following and received prestigious
awards. Simon, meanwhile became a standard-bearer for scholars who
felt that Ehrlich had ignored economic principles. The kind of
excessive regulations Ehrlich advocated, the Simon camp argued, would
quell the very innovation that had delivered humanity from
catastrophe. Both men became luminaries in their respective domains.
Both were mistaken.” (3)
Simon was right, Epstein writes, in that human ingenuity
had increased food production to unexpected levels but “wrong in
claiming that improvements in air and water quality validated his
theories. Ironically, those improvements were bolstered through
regulations pressed by Ehrlich and others.” (4)
Epstein tells us that in 1984 a study was commissioned
by the National Research Council under the direction of Philip E.
Tetlock then, at age 30, the youngest member of the Council's
committee on American-Soviet relations. Tetlock had noticed that the
experts on the committee not only engaged in animated arguments that
wildly contradicted one another but, their views having long since
become ossified, they became “impervious to counterarguments”
(5) Sound familiar?
“Tetlock decided to put expert political and
economic predictions to the test. With the Cold War in full swing,
he collected forecasts from 284 highly educated experts who averaged
more than 12 years of experience in their specialties. To ensure
that the predictions were concrete, experts had to give specific
probabilities of future events. Tetlock had to collect enough
predictions that he could separate lucking and unlucky streaks from
true skill. The project lasted 20 years, and comprised 82,361
probability estimates about the future.
The result: The experts were, by and large, horrific
forecasters. Their areas of specialty, years of experience, and (for
some) access to classified information made no difference. They were
bad at short-term forecasting and bad at long-term forecasting. They
were bad at forecasting in every domain. When experts declared that
future events were impossible or nearly impossible, 15 percent of
them occurred nonetheless. When they declared events to be a sure
thing, more than one-quarter of them failed to transpire.” (6)
The failure of the
nation's intelligence community to predict the fall of the Soviet
Union, or former CIA Director George Tenet's famous Slam-Dunk
proclamation regarding WMD's in Iraq leap immediately to mind. There
have been many, many others.
But a subgroup of
scholars did much better on the tests. “Unlike Ehrlich
and Simon, they were not vested in a single discipline. They took
from each argument and integrated apparently contradictory
world-views...The integrators outperformed their colleagues in pretty
much every way, but especially trounced them on long-term
predictions. Eventually, Tetlock bestowed nicknames (borrowed from
the philosopher Isaiah Berlin) on the experts he'd observed: The
highly specialized hedgehogs knew 'one big thing,' while the
integrator foxes knew 'many little things'. (7)
Hedgehogs, like Ehrlich and Simon, keep their noses
close to the ground. They know a lot about few things and are prone
to extrapolating this knowledge unto the world, if not the universe.
Looking through the lens of specialty, they lose peripheral vision.
Foxes, in contrast, struggle to maintain their peripheral vision by
“accepting ambiguity and contradiction” and by listening
to the arguments from many points of view and modifying their
conclusions accordingly. Confronted with unforeseen outcomes foxes
tend to adjust, hedgehogs dig in, doubling down on error.
The elites that run any large enterprise suffers from
Hedgehog syndrome, a malady that permeates all too many institutions.
Experts are drawn from the same schools, from the same
'stink-tanks', from the supporting industries. They gather together,
form committees and a certain group-think takes command,
severely limiting viable options. It is a malady any manager of any
enterprise worth its salt confronts.
The antidote is, of course, to seek generalists, liberal
arts graduates and curmudgeons of assorted stripes and introduce
them into the mix, perhaps make them dominant—since hedgehogs will
simply dismiss and retrench.
But it is one thing to understand the limits of
expertise. It is quite another to replace them with an ethic of
ignorance. The disdain of Caesar Disgustus for the advice of
'experts' is well known and, in a measure, justified. From 'Ole
Two-Cows' famous reliance on his gut reaction, to the breathtaking
ignorance that permeates the present ReSCUMlickan incarnations
conservatives have elevated those who hold expertise in contempt.
But it is one thing to supplant or replace the hedgehog with the fox,
it is another to replace the hedgehog with a king-hell rat.
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe.
“An Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh
Impeach and Imprison.
_______________- Epstein, David. “The Peculiar Blindness of Experts” The Atlantic Vol. 323 No. 5, June 2019Pages 20-22.
- Ibid pp 20-21
- Ibid page 21
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid
- Ibid. page 22
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