Are experts useless?

(I’m trying to get back into the habit of posting once a week or more, so do forgive me if the articles seem a little rusty or unoriginal while I get back into the swing of things!)

There are good reasons to be sceptical of experts. In Phillip Tetlock’s book Expert Political Judgement, he shows that lots of “experts” basically just don’t know what they’re talking about. In his famous prediction tournaments, Tetlock encouraged experts to make forecasts about various events (e.g. ‘Will the Soviet Union collapse by 1990?’), and showed that they didn’t do particularly well at all. As Tetlock shows in his book Superforecasters, experts were trounced by ordinary people who put lots of effort into making accurate predictions.

‘Not particularly well at all’ is being generous, in fact. The thing people often say at this point is that the experts did as well as the proverbial dart-throwing monkey, although Tetlock apparently isn’t the biggest fan of this interpretation of the data. Perhaps they d…