13 décembre 2005

Message aux commentateurs politiques

Selon la critique de Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, de l'auteur Philip Tetlock, parue dans la dernière édition de la revue The New Yorker:

People who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us (at predicting). When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. (...) Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote.

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