"POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY: The Perils of Prognostication"

Read the full book review by John T. Jost online in Science magazine. (cience 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1876 - 1877; Subscription necessary.)

From the review of Expert Political Judgment: How Good is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock

Philip Tetlock's Expert Political Judgment will be sobering. The results of his painstaking research are complex, nuanced, and contingent, but the bottom line is clear enough. Tetlock's data "plunk human forecasters into an unflattering spot along the performance continuum, distressingly closer to the chimp than to the formal statistical models." In fact, "it is impossible to find any domain in which humans clearly outperformed crude extrapolation algorithms, less still sophisticated statistical ones" (emphasis in original). Worst of all, those experts with the poorest track records are the most likely to show up on TV screens and blogsites everywhere.