(2007-12-10) Caplan My Defense Of Experts Against The Leading Expert

Bryan Caplan: My Defense of Experts Against the Leading Expert. Forget “the Best of 2007”; Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment may well be the best book ever written on political psychology. (See here for an earlier discussion). I say this even though I’m a big defender of experts, and Tetlock’s book is usually interpreted as a grand debunking of experts’ pretensions.

Tetlock underestimates experts in general, and does too little to discourage demagogues from misinterpreting his results.

Tetlock deliberately avoids asking experts what he calls “dumb questions.” But it is on these so-called dumb questions that experts’ predictions shine, relative to random guessing.

Furthermore, even if the experts are no better than Tetlock finds, he does too little to discourage demagogues from misinterpreting his results as a vindication of populism. There is only one major instance in which Tetlock compares the accuracy of experts to the accuracy of laymen. The result: The laymen (undergraduate Berkeley psychology majors – quite elite in absolute terms) were far inferior not only to experts, but to chimps.

As the book is written, it is too easy for a casual reader to think that Tetlock’s main point is that political experts are no better than astrologers. If I were Tetlock, I would have tried harder to immunize readers from this misinterpretation.

However bad experts seem, laymen are far worse.

P.S. Don’t miss Stephen Miller‘s “Conservatives and Liberals on Economics: Expected Differences, Surprising Similarities,”

Liberals and Democrats are usually more likely than conservatives and Republicans to favor government intervention in the economy, and are more suspicious of business. However, the differences between conservatives and liberals are often fairly small, and the data indicate that conservatives, too, are wary of free markets, bordering on being hostile to them – especially when it comes to particulars, rather than abstractions.