Thursday, February 26, 2009

The more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her..........tended to be.

Fox once smelled my body as I was sleeping in our farming when I was a ten year boy. However I was terrible scared but we had a great dog named ‘Johnny’ to save me from that bad smell? But what is relevant today yes there is a point. 

Liking and disliking certain things become a kind of institution to act with time if one is mature to listen, learn and live with it. This comes to my mind when I was reading an interview which is more like bubble bust in expert thinking forget the processing of thinking. See below:   

First from Philip Tetlock interview

  • “Ironically, the more famous the expert, the less accurate his or her predictions tended to be. 
  • What makes some forecasters better than others?
  • The most important factor was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they thought. You know the famous line that [philosopher] Isaiah Berlin borrowed from a Greek poet, "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing"? The better forecasters were like Berlin's foxes: self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were willing to update their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence, were doubtful of grand schemes and were rather modest about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters were like hedgehogs: They tended to have one big, beautiful idea that they loved to stretch, sometimes to the breaking point. They tended to be articulate and very persuasive as to why their idea explained everything. The media often love hedgehogs.
  • How can we nonexperts test our own hunches?
  • Listen to yourself talk to yourself. If you're being swept away with enthusiasm for some particular course of action, take a deep breath and ask: Can I see anything wrong with this? And if you can't, start worrying; you are about to go over a cliff.

Before this interview I was of course reading an another experts interview who is the only hero in Tamil Nadu perhaps in India with honest if the law  degree with which he attempts for making comments!

Just see one comment (though it was in 2005):

  • “So, the time is right but the person over there is wrong again. By wrong person, I mean Sonia Gandhi [Images], who is the real authority, the real power. So, there is a wrong person there. One can rest assured that it will be wrongly administrated. I will not welcome an Emergency if this government imposes it. But if a person like Vajpayee or Advani, real nationalists- not necessarily them but someone like them- does it at some point of time, I will welcome it. That's my present mood. I want to be honest when I give my opinion”. 

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