Wrongology

Dan Gardner, Future Babble. Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better (Dutton). "Gardner, a Canadian journalist and author of The Science of Fear, takes as his starting point the work of Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Beginning in the 1980s, Tetlock examined 27,451 forecasts by 284 academics, pundits and other prognosticators. The study was complex, but the conclusion can be summarized simply: the experts bombed. Not only were they worse than statistical models, they could barely eke out a tie with the proverbial dart-throwing chimps". Una divertente recensione da parte di Kathryn Schulz, un'altra esperta di wrongology, autrice di Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error. nytbr. Da leggere anche la sua intervista su un blog del nyt.