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Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better

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Gardner's "Future Babble" is a much needed antitode to the endless stream of nonsense that we hear from pundits who claim to be able to predict the future. Broadly speaking, Gardner distinguishes between two types of experts: Hedgehogs, who know a given subject extremely well, are very confident about their predictions and are almost always wrong, often spectacularly so; and Foxes, whose opinions about the future recognize the difficulties and complexity of forecasting and are nuanced accordingly. The Foxes are only a bit more apt to be on target than the Hedgehogs, but they will at least acknowledge their errors, recognize the limitations of their art and adjust their opinions to account for new facts. They are also routinley ignored because they are boring.

Unfortunately, people crave certainty, so they lionize experts who make bold, articulate predictions about what will happen five, ten, fifteen, even fifty years from now, a proposition that is inherently suspect when you consider that chaos theory shows that even small changes in initial assumptions will dramatically change long-term outcomes. Fortunately for the experts and their livelihood, listeners do an incredibly poor job of holding experts accountable for their gross errors. We remember the rare hits and ignore the many, many misses, a point that Gardner illustrates elelgantly and repeatedly.

With wit and broad knowledge of his subjects, Gardner skewers numerous still famous "experts" who have routinely been wrong about things like the price of oil, the scarcity or abundance of commodities, population growth, Y2K, the collapse or persistence of the Soviet Union, and a host of other problems. He also explains the psychological reasons--confirmation bias, negativity bias, anchoring bias, hindsight bias, optimism bias, and even "bias bias"--that enables experts to maintain their self-confidence despite their manifest errors, and that causes the rest of us to keep hanging on their every word despite the fact that they are usually wrong. We are drawn to those who are "often in error, but never in doubt" rather than those who recognize that predictions are very hard to make, especially about the future.

Gardner's survey of experts who remain highly esteemed to this day--and the howlers they have propogated over the decades--makes us wonder why on earth anyone still listens to these people. And yet they do, and corporations and news networks pay them enormous amounts of money for being repeatedly and ridiculously wrong. Imagine if your doctor's diagnoses were as off base as the predictions that famous experts routinely make--you'd soon get a new doctor (assuming you survived).

As a reality check, just ask yourself how many talking heads predicted in January that in the first quarter of 2011 we would see the fall of kleptocracies in Egypt and Tunisia, unrest throughout the Arab world, a civil war and an international military intervention in Libya, and an earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan. And those are short term (missed) predictions--how can we possibly take anyone seriously when they try to read the tea leaves five, ten or fifty years out? If you think that works well, try planning your picnics based on 10-day weather forecasts. We'll keep listening, though, as the same talking heads who completely missed all of these huge short-term developments will confidently tell us what's bound to happen next--they might be right (even a blind hog finds an acorn now and again), but odds are they will be dead wrong. Gardner's timely book reminds us not to be fooled by Broad Speculations, and his book is a wonderful grain of salt that every thinking person should take before listening to an expert pontificate about the future.

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.

William Holmes in his review did a wonderful job of summarizing what this book is all about and since I agree with that summary I won't repeat it. I bought this book because the topic was appealing to me and I had read Gardner's previous book "The Science of Fear" and loved it.

Future Babble is hilarious and that makes it a wonderfully enjoyable read, but that's just a bonus because thesis itself is powerful and very well supported. It matters because the topic is incredibly important. What more could you ask for?

His case is devastating and frightening at the same time. How people like Paul Erlich and his supporters (to take one example) can continue to insist they were right in the face of the total failure of their predictions is a testament to human hubris. That we can be so blind to our own thinking is bad enough. What makes it worse is that apparently the more you know the worse it gets.

This book belongs in the library of every thinking person. We can sit around and rationalize why this expert or that expert is likely to be correct in their predictions of the future (such as both sides on the climate debate), but we need to face some facts. The historical record in this regard is a so bad it is actually funny. Gardner does a better and more enjoyable job of explaining why than any other author I've encountered.

Big thumbs up for this one!

Dan Gardner eloquently illustrates that Socrates was correct in saying the wise know what they don't know but that most people will ignore the wise if provided a confident sounding alternative.

Gardner provides an up to date summary of research in psychology and many, many well documented examples of both the failings of over confidence and the human propensity to fall for the confident story, especially ones own.

An excellent read and resource for anyone needing reminding of the madness of crowds or a counter to over confident forecasters.

This is an extremely readable and thought provoking book. Gardner's exhaustive research builds an extremely persuasive case for the book's sub-title. He also explains why we keep coming back for more useless forecasting babble. Although some of his examples could be more succinctly summarized, most are very entertaining and enlightening. Gardner illustrates the book's core message around the dismal failure of expert predictions with examples of both overly rosy predictions and darkly apocalyptic forecasts missing the mark by miles. He's especially effective at pillorying the many bestselling prophets of doom. These include the authors of such pessimistically dire works as, The Population Bomb, How to Prosper in the Coming Bad Years, The Limits to Growth, The End of Affluence, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, and Blood in the Streets.

Future Babble cites numerous studies showing the repeated and colossal failure of expert predictions in every field (except for short term weather forecasts). He quotes Scott Armstrong "an expert on forecasting at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania" on his "seer-sucker theory: No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers." Here's another of Gardner's examples: "The now-defunct magazine Brill's Content, for one, compared the predictions of famous American pundits with a chimpanzee named Chippy, who made guesses by choosing among flashcards. Chippy consistently matched or beat the best in the business."

Future Babble draws heavily on the comprehensive research of Philip Tetlock, professor of psychology, business, and political science at University of California Berkeley. His authoritative study encompassed 284 experts "giving 27,450 judgments of the future." Tetlock concluded that the experts would have been beaten by "a dart-throwing chimpanzee." Gardner observes that "the simple and disturbing truth is that the experts' predictions were no more accurate than random guesses." An especially interesting finding in these days of media sound bites, blogging, and viral videos is Tetlock's use of Google hits to determine the fame of each of the 284 experts. His findings: "the more famous the expert, the worse he did."

Future Babble concludes with very wise advice from British/American journalist and broadcaster, Alistair Cooke, for dealing with life's uncertainty: "In the best of times our days are numbered anyway. And so it would be a crime against nature for any generation to take the world's crisis so solemnly that is put off enjoying those things for which we were designed in the first place. The opportunity to do good work, to fall in love, to enjoy friends, to hit a ball, and to bounce a baby."

We can see the video on YouTube. Economics expert Peter Schiff in 2006 and 2007 was convinced he was right about the looming global financial crisis. He was of course right. The YouTube video also shows other experts were as convinced that no financial crisis would occur, but were wrong. However, the video does not show that Schiff had been making the same sort of forecast for many years before, when they were of course wrong. The video is a demonstration of the core of Dan Gardner's Future Babble: predictions by experts are no better than random guesses, and experts who are certain of their predictions usually make the worst forecasts. Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better. One wonders if climate change experts are different.

The book's core ideas are based on the results of Philip Tetlock's years-long experiment with 284 experts who made 27,450 judgements about the future, and so is very sound indeed. Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?. Gardner is a Canadian journalist who has won numerous awards for his writing, including for another book published in eleven countries and seven languages. The book is easy to read - there are even some sentences without a verb (gasp) - but is also thoroughly grounded in scholarship (there are twenty pages of notes and seven pages of bibliography).

The book covers four major questions and provides interesting examples of them (sometimes incorporating Gardner's own interviews with the experts). To begin, why are the expert's forecasts often wrong? Essentially, the future of social phenomena is more difficult to forecast than the future of physical systems like an eclipse of the sun, because people are involved. He explains that social predictions are like predictions about billiard balls on a table that can think, that have `eyes, self-awareness and complicated psychological motivations. And further imagine that each of the billiard balls knows the other billiard balls are also self-aware.' Thus forecasts of `no change' are usually better than experts' forecasts.

Next, surely the experts eventually realise their forecasts are wrong? No; instead, the experts display `cognitive dissonance'. Humans try to make their perceptions and memories fit together, and if this self-identity is threatened, memory biases or forgetting creep in, and the forecasts are denied (after all, self-identity is at stake). This dissonance is even more pronounced when there is strong commitment to a forecast when it is made, and this occurs most strongly if the forecaster has a `One Big Idea' basis for all the forecasts. For example, politicians and expert pundits on television are more committed to their forecasts than the rest of us, and so they tend to forget that they made their forecasts when the forecasts turn out to be wrong. Another example is that Schiff (who was mentioned above) continues to make the same kind of gloomy forecasts even today, when the GFC has moved on (see YouTube for these modern forecasts). Even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day.

Gardner uses the Isaiah Berlin distinction between hedgehogs and foxes to illustrate his point. Hedgehogs do not change in a new situation - they curl up into a ball with defensive spikes. In contrast, foxes run about and look for new evidence about what to do. Experts with prior and public commitment are hedgehogs, while foxes make the better forecasts.

Thirdly, why do the rest of us believe these forecasts by fallible experts? One reason is that many experts are so plausible. They seem very assured, admit to no uncertainty and appear on television. Gardner illustrates his point with Paul Ehrlich who has made many, many wrong forecasts about population and other things, but who has admitted to no mistakes and has won awards from scientific societies. Another reason we believe experts who are certain is that we do not like uncertainty. For example, when times are uncertain, superstitions like astrology become more popular. A final reason that we believe experts' alarming forecasts is that other forecasts that an event will not happen are easily forgotten, and are not likely to be reported in the media. Gardner tells about an expert who predicted that the Y2K would not be serious but was virtually ignored by the media.

Finally, what can we do about this sorry situation about experts' forecasts, aside from reading Future Babble? We could ask for degrees of probability around several forecasts, and adopt robust policies that would be useful in many different future outcomes. Gardner ends with a case study of a relatively successful Canadian forecasting unit that operates on the basis of his principles: use as much evidence from as many sources of information as possible, think about how the forecasts are being made, and be humble. In other words, be a fox and not a hedgehog.

The book is very thought-provoking. Indeed, it got me thinking about climate change. Consider forecasts made by convinced alarmists and deniers. First, is climate change a social phenomenon where experts are likely to make predictions that are no better than guesses? Well, not really, although the levels of carbon we emit are a result of social decisions. Nevertheless, there is uncertainty about CO2-induced global warming. For example, many of the scientific papers cited in Gore's An Inconvenient Truth were not as supportive of him as he thought.An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It. The Climate Caper by atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge, addresses this uncertainty. The Climate Caper: Facts and Fallacies of Global Warming. In brief, climate change may not exactly fit Gardner's first question above about a social phenomenon, but forecasts about it are not the same as forecasts of physical tides and eclipses - uncertainties do exist.

Second, cognitive dissonance about forecasts seems to be occurring. For example, Ross Garnaut recently found that alarmists were even more convinced of their position than ever before, despite opposing evidence such as: the dismissal of Mann's hockey stick and the consequent re-emergence of medieval warming; no predicted `hot spots' have appeared in tropical latitudes; outputs of 66 runs of 22 greenhouse climate models cannot be reconciled with actual observations; the costs of a implanting a carbon price now are less than the future benefits; and satellite-measured global warming has levelled off since 2002. Indeed, Professor Scott Armstrong, a forecasting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, has unsuccessfully asked for anyone to present a climate change forecast that is based on the scientifically-proven principles of forecasting. (By the way, Armstrong's own research confirms many of the findings of Tetlock noted above. For example, he showed that IPCC global mean temperature 1 to 100 year projections from 1850 were no better than `no change' forecasts.) Given this apparent dissonance, perhaps some people might like to handle the issue of predictions as Gardner suggests: ask for several forecasts with levels of uncertainty that are not developed by alarmists or deniers themselves, and develop policies that are robust across several scenarios.

Another thought-provoking book can be read alongside Future Babble. Ian McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary is about the neuroscience of our two brain hemispheres.The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Chapter 2 covers how the two hemispheres have to work together but do different things; for example, the right brain considers possibilities, and the left brain grabs and holds tight to a single solution that fits what is already known. The problem is that the left brain becomes dominant, holding on to its solution and thinking that what it knows is the whole of knowledge; while it should return to the right brain for a more complete and contextualised, gestalt response. The result is a bureaucratic obsession with narrow self-interest and a mechanistic view of the world. McGilchrist cleverly applies his understanding to centuries of art and culture in the western world.

Like Gardner's book, McGilchrist's starts a reader thinking beyond its covers. I wonder if its thesis explains what happened to Channel 9 and Qantas over recent years, when the firm's founding vision of serving a wider public (with its intrinsic motivations) was narrowed to a focus on the bottom line (with its extrinsic motivations)? As well, could it explain why the climate change alarm and denial are so narrow? They are not much concerned with both the benefits and costs of several alternative policies, and are not concerned with other issues like world hunger or poverty. But note that Born Lomborg does correctly address these concerns at

In conclusion, many people will not want to read these two well-written and thought-provoking books, such as politicians, stock exchange punters, economists, alarmists and deniers of some events, and well-presented pundits in the media who are sure of their predictions. But the rest of us sometimes may feel like Matthew Arnold, `swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.' So we should definitely be like a fox and read these two books, for our own sakes.

I can't say enough good things about this book. The fundamental idea behind this book is powerful. I really think the world would be a better place if people appreciated this idea/concept. The book is very well researched. The writing is excellent and entertaining. I read it from cover to cover in one sitting, and I couldn't have spent my Saturday in a better way. I'm shocked this isn't a bestseller. Buy this book without a second of hesitation!

The book is thought provoking. Many assume that people act rationally which made outcomes predictable. We now know that people are mostly irrational due to being emotionally driven. But humans still hope someone can decipher the chaos and explain in a simple way what is happening now and what will happen. Daily we hear "experts" describe patterns where there are none (stock market chartists), treat random results as if they are meaningful (physco-babble), and replace the complexity and uncertainty of reality with simple narratives (political pundits). Humans think linearly. But the impossible (black swans) that could never happen, happen all the time- Chernobyl, fall of USSR, tech bubble, housing bubble, Katrina, 9/11, $4 gasoline, black president, Fukushima, bankruptcy of General Motors, and the bailouts. That is why logic fails to predict the future.
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The majority of people are self-delusional. Those who look for confirmation are ensnared by "experts" who make predictions. Their college degrees, awards, and prestigious job titles are only worth the paper they are written on. The more vocal and known they are, the higher their failure rate. Afterwards, their excuses are: they weren't that wrong, no one could have foreseen what interfered and changed the outcome, it will still happen in the future, or their prediction caused people to act differently and thus they saved everyone form the outcome. Estimates of population, food and oil supply, crime, working conditions, and war have always been revised later. But true believers never acknowledge failed prophecies. They hear what confirms their own concept and ignore the rest. Peter Schiff got a lot right but a lot wrong. The best an individual can do is to see what actions would benefit him if the future turns right, and what actions would benefit him if the future turns left. Whatever appears on both lists is probably the right thing to do. Everything else is just a coin toss.

It is frustrating to not be able to give this book 10 stars, or 20, or 50. Of the almost 2,000 books I have read over my 60 years, "Future Babble" is, without a doubt, in the Top Five. It is a stellar piece of work from the first page to the last, and there is virtually no "down time" anywhere in between.
Gardner's research is painstakingly thorough and detailed, and his prose is consistently on-target, tantalizing, and hard-hitting.
He makes it irrevocably clear throughout the book that people who hold themselves out as having the ability to predict the future are shams.
The only fault I have with the book is that he spends only half of one paragraph skewering weather forecasts. I have always found it amazing how, day after day, meteorologists change their forecasts: On Monday, they say Saturday will be sunny. By Wednesday, they say Saturday will be partly cloudy. By the time Saturday arrives, we have full-blown thunderstorms, and maybe even a tornado or two. Yet no one seems to mind. People tune in every day to get their "fix" of forecasts. "Weather psychics" (meteorologists) continue to make their predictions. Why? Because the public is addicted to wanting to know what the future holds, even if the predictions are wrong just as often as they are right.
And this is what Gardner explains throughout the book: The reason that "forecasters" (whether they are claiming to predict the future in politics, the economy, or the weather) continue to thrive is because the public is addicted to wanting to know what the future will hold.
Being a fan of Philip Tetlock, a professor who has spent multiple years proving statistically that political prognosticators are not particularly accurate in their predictions (and whom Gardner refers to frequently in this book), I purchased a DVD of Tetlock's that highlighted a presentation he gave in 2007 on his work - again, emphasizing that people who try to predict stuff just aren't all that accurate. At the end of his presentation, he opened it up to questions. The moderator began peppering Tetlock with questions about what the experts were saying would happen with the war in Iraq (which had just begun). Tetlock graciously tried to sidestep the questions, explaining over and over that it didn't matter what the experts thought, because, as he had just spent his whole presentation trying to make clear, statistical evidence had shown they really couldn't accurately predict the future. The moderator was unswayed, though. He continued to press for an answer: What did the experts say would happen in Iraq?
Back to "Future Babble." As an added bonus, Gardner spends the last chapter helping us readers make better sense of how we can think about the future and even plan for it on our own, so that all of us can stop relying on soothsayers.
Overall, I cannot recommend this book enough. I think it should be read by every man and woman who is able to read - and should be read to everyone else who can't read.

This is a very enjoyable book. Gardner shows example after example of "experts" making awful predictions. As Yogi Berra might say, they don't know what they know.

Gardner breaks media analysts into two categories, hedgehogs and foxes. The hedgehogs are often wrong, but never in doubt. The foxes are more careful--read the part about Robert Shiller--and consequently don't get on TV as much. Another positive feature of the book is Gardner's lack of partisan or ideological bias. He criticizes pundits and so-called experts from Paul Erlich on the left to Dick Morris on the right. Before you buy that gold the stockbroker on CNBC tells you to get, read Future Babble. It might save you some money.