Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | I | Interfaces

Comment: experts who don't know they don't know.

Article Excerpt
Sadly, the conclusion that Green and Armstrong reach--that experts should not be used for predicting conflict outcomes--is not a surprise. Decades ago, Armstrong taught us that expertise beyond a minimal level does not improve judgmental accuracy across a variety of domains (Armstrong 1980). More recently, Tetlock (2005) drove home that point in a study of hundreds of political experts who made thousands of forecasts over many years. Like Green and Armstrong, Tetlock found the expert forecasts to be frequently inaccurate. In support of Armstrong's previous work, Tetlock suggests that avid readers of The New York Times should be able to predict political events as well as highly trained experts.

Green and Armstrong also demonstrate that nonprofessionals mistakenly expect superior performance from experts relative to what they expect from novices. Although it is true that neither novices nor experts were more accurate than chance...