Predicting the future

We all predict the future. When we read a story, educators tell us that we are unconsciously trying to guess what comes next in the story. It's part of the fun of reading. Sometimes the author will give us hints about what is coming next such as using the writing technique of foreshadowing.prediksi jitu akurat mbah sukro hk malam ini 

Here is an example of how the average person might make a prediction. Someone buys an old, used car. A friend says, "You just wasted your money. It'll break down within the year (prediction). You would have done better buying a new one. " We are not only good at making a lot of predictions we are also good at covering our tracks when the prediction doesn't pan out. If the car is purring along after a year, the friend might say, "Of course, it lasted longer than a year. You took better care of it than most people. " After two years, the friend might be saying, "Well, I guess you just got lucky and got a better-than-average care. " Very few people would say, "I was flat wrong about my prediction because your car is still running. "

Of course, we mortals act like this. That's because we are not professional prognosticators. We all know that the pros do a much better job at making predictions. That is why they are interviewed for the knowledge they have to share.

Oops, maybe they aren't all that good. Several years ago, a psychologist decided to check out how well professional forecasters actually do. Philip Tetlock is a professor at the Haas School of Business in Berkeley. He decided to find out if experts who actually made their living in the field of politics and economics could predict events accurately in their field of study. He found people who regularly offered advice and made public comments on a variety of trends in their specific fields of expertise. He chose 284 experts to study. Over the course of the study, the experts had made an amazing total of 82, 361 forecasts.

Let's see how these experts did. Would you pass the envelope, please. Okay, let's look at the results of these super mortals. Oh - something must be wrong here. The results are unimpressive. Did they do only slightly better than you or I would have done? No. Did they do the same as Jane and John doe might have done. Nope. Omagosh. They actually did worse than the average person would have done by just guessing.

The study also found that the more the experts knew the less reliable they were at guessing what would happen to the world in the future. Dr. Tetlock explained this by saying that experts very quickly reach a point where their expertise does not give them any further advantage over non-experts. He does not believe specialists in any field can outperform nonspecialists who are intelligent and can stay abreast of events and ideas. His study also showed that forecasters who were well known experts would tend to exaggerat the confidence they had in their forecasts. He concluded that "Experts in demand were more overconfident than their colleagues who eked out existences far from the limelight. "

This is terrible. Why do our experts do so poorly? The best guess is based on human nature. People love to be right but hate being wrong. So, when we make a guess (forecast) we "fall in love" with our choice. No matter how it turns out we stick with the choice, justifying it right to the bitter end. This seems to be exactly what plagued the experts.

You would think that really smart people would learn from their mistakes. Even though experts are smarter than most of us, they are also human and subject to the thinking errors that affect all humans. One (of the many) thinking errors that might explain why smart people don't learn from their failed predictions is called confirmation bias. This error describes how most people tend to dismiss new information that doesn't fit with what they already believe. So if experts really believe their predictions actually come true most of the time, then they will automatically refuse to accept the failures.

Other psychologists think that maybe too much information may also be a handicap for accurate predictions. By having more information than the rest of us, an expert can marshal more facts to support her predictions. Although these predictions may be more appealing to the average person, they are still subject to the same failure rate.