Centerfield

My First Post

Hello. My name is Oberon. This is my first post at Centerfield.

You may know me from hundreds of snide remarks in the Comments Section. I am a self-described “small government liberal.” I used to blog at North Georgia Dogma, n/k/a Toys In The Attic. I’m an attorney, married, no kids, two little dogs. I like blogs, beer and BSG 2.0, and only once in my life have I gotten in a hot tub and regretted it. Enough about me.

My first post is not about policy or politics. Or hot tubs. It’s about Centrism. Centrism can be summed up in four words: “I could be wrong.” Instead of comparing three poles of Left vs. Center vs. Right, let’s compare just two: Ideologues vs. Centrists.

Ideologues find a single idea to explain the world, like religious fundamentalism, Marxism or FSMism. They alter facts to fit their beliefs. They never entertain the possibility they could be wrong.

Centrists know the world is complicated. We alter our beliefs to fit the facts. No matter how firmly we believe, we know we could be wrong.

But Centrists tend to get it right.

Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” proves that Ideologues wrongly predict the future. Just as Princeton University professor Burton Malkiel proclaimed in his 1973 book, A Random Walk Down Wall Street, that "a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper's financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts,” Tetlock concluded, after a 20 year study, that experts in many fields are no better than average people at making predictions, and sometimes are even worse.

Which experts do best? Tetlock found the following pattern:

Low scorers [that is, experts who most often make wrong predictions] look like hedgehogs: thinkers who “know one big thing,” aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that one big thing into new domains, display bristly impatience with those who “do not get it,” and express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient forecasters, at least in the long term. High scorers look like foxes: thinkers who know many small things (tricks of their trade), are skeptical of grand schemes, see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises but rather as exercises in flexible “ad hocery” that require stitching together diverse sources of information, and are rather diffident about their own forecasting prowess.

Ideologues are hedgehogs. Centrists are foxes. I’d rather be right than certain, and that makes me Centrist, albeit a liberal small-government hot tub aficionado Centrist.

Then again, I could be wrong.

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For more on Tetlock’s book, see this New Yorker article.