Crystal balls

When I listen to news programmes, I’m often struck by how many pundits can be found to make confident predictions about what’s going to happen next. And how consistently wrong many of them seem to be. Someone else has been thinking about the same thing:

Certainly one of the most striking things about the current crisis is the number of people who completely failed to anticipate it, and have nevertheless since gone on to offer many wise words about what the future holds in store.

Better still, Maciej Cegłowski has done something about it, posting testable predictions on the Wrong Tomorrow web site. It’s a useful reminder that “news” isn’t just a more or less accurate account of stuff that has either actually happened, or can reasonably be expected to happen in the near future, given the available facts, but is bulked out with huge quantities of filler in the form of speculative predictions. I’m with those who suspect that most of these predictions, especially ones about such complex issues as what the economy’s going to do over the next year are pretty much worthless. This isn’t obvious because the news is, by definition, about what’s happening now, memories are short and most people listening to an authoritative talking head have already forgotten that the confident prediction he or she made a couple of months ago turned out to be hopelessly wide of the mark.

I don’t know that Wrong Tomorrow will have much impact. If the idea of holding armchair generals to account ever caught on in the mainstream news media, though, I think it would have a massively improving effect. Imagine a world where giving a pundit airtime was conditional on any predictions made being logged and scored for accuracy – as time went on, they could be introduced to the viewer, listener or reader in these sort of terms:

We asked Professor Bernard Madeup of the Luton School of Economics (prediction accuracy rate so far 35%) for an assessment of where the G20 economies will go from here…

It would be nice to think that would sort the men from the boys, although it would probably only lead to an epidemic of bet hedging. But it would be worth a shot – I’d much prefer to see TV or Radio getting tough and rigorous with facts and ideas, rather than humiliating people (even very annoying ones) on screen, in the perverse belief that there’s something admirably tough-minded in the cult of the celebrity bully.

Thanks go to the Overcoming Bias blog for bringing Wrong Tomorrow to my attention.