Future Babble is about a phenomenon that every one of us is familiar with but routinely ignore: experts get things wrong as much as they get things right when it comes to predictions. All of us know it; we complain about the weather man, scoff at the analysists who predict the winner of the Super Bowl before the season starts, and like to have good laughs over those expert predictions that we know now were wildly off the mark. But we routinely ignore it; we listen to the weather man, are intrigued by listening to anaylists predict Super Bowl winners, etc.
The "why" question can be broken into three questions: WHY do experts (who are, after all, experts) get things wrong, WHY do we listen to them despite knowing that many have gotten it wrong in the past, and WHY do experts persist in making predictions even though they (and we) know that expert predictions often go wrong?
Dan Gardner attempts to explain all of these and the answers take us through such fields as evolutionary psychology, behavioral economics, and (very, very basic) chaos theory. First question: why do experts get things wrong? Simply put, the world is very, very complicated and our brains are evolved to seek patterns. Especially when dealing with the social world - human history, politics, macroeconomics - the more we find out about how the world works, the more we understand that minute factors can have major and very unpredictable effects. Wars can start based on politicians slips of the tongue during speeches, the price of oil can be effected by civil wars breaking out in oil-producing region, which in turn can be affected by any number of things. Etc. Etc. But, experts are experts for a reason: they try to understand the world. But sometimes, understanding the world means seeing patterns that really aren't patterns. And the irony is that sometimes, the more data an expert has, the more chances there are to see those patters. (It is here where our author uses the analogy of hedgehogs, who know a lot about one area, and foxes, who know a little about many areas. Foxes, he reports, tend to do better with prediction partly because they take more things into account, and partly because they are more likely to make tentative predictions rather than absolute ones.)
Next, why do we crave listening to expert prediction despite the fact that we know the track record of expert prediction? Because another evolutionary trait of ours is a desire for certainty and control. Humans tend to do poorly when they feel they can't make sense of their environments (which is why torture is not as much about inflicting pain as on taking away victims' control and letting them feel helpless; it is also why people move more toward authoritarian religions in times of crisis and toward liberal religions in times of ease). The same desire for order that drives experts to predict is the same drive for order that makes us crave knowing what will come next. Despite the fact that we often know that expert prediction will often turn out wrong, we can't help ourselves; our love for the feeling of control and certainty is often just too strong.
Lastly, why do experts persist in making predictions even though THEY know the track record of expert predictions? The fault is both on the expert and the listener. As to the expert, they are just doing what they do. Experts are experts because they like analyzing data and trying to make sense of it. No papers get published reporting lack of correlation between variables; you become an expert by finding correlations between variables (even to the point where 'data mining' - or the 'finding' of correlations that are more about manipulating the data - is becoming a concern in academia). And where is the fault on the listener? Quite honestly, we crave expert predictions and very seldom remember those that failed (to hold those experts accountable). What's more: we not only crave prediction, but the stronger the better! We like confident prediction - "x will happen in 10 years" rather than "there is a 75% probability that x will happen in 10-13 years."
I found this book to be not only stimulating (if pessimistic) but entertaining. But I also found it to be a bit repetitive, quite honestly. While it is fun to listen to long stories of expert prediction gone wrong - the incessant prediction of an oil drought in the 1970's, the pessimism toward America's future in the 1980's, the hubris of the market analysists in the mid 2000's, it gets tiresome when it is done chapter after chapter after chapter. Secondly, while the insights into this book were intriguing, many of them are covering ground gone over in previous books like
The Black Swan: Second Edition: The Impact of the Highly Improbable: With a new section: "On Robustness and Fragility",
On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, and
Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets. If you've read books of this ilk - behavioral economic works that discuss cognitive mistakes humans often make - not much in this book will be new to you.
Otherwise, the book is a decent read. The author's explanations are clear, the examples (if you are interested in hearing funny stories of bad expert predictions) are well chosen, and the authors ability to explain concepts from many different fields makes for an intriguing read. I predict this will get to about 55 on the Best Seller list by the end of 2011 and fall off by the beginning of 2012...unless, of course, I am wrong.
