Swagger and certainty

There's a thriving industry of punditry out there. People have noticed that pundits, those that peer into the future and guess what is going to happen, are not booted out the door when they are wrong -- not even when they are very wrong. What's going on? Philip Tetlock of Stanford University took a look.

First, he looked at what might correlate with whether a pundit tends to be right or wrong most of the time. It wasn't education level, daytime occupation, or ideology. It was fame. The more the pundit is feted by the media the worse his accuracy. Say what?

Media doesn't care about accuracy. They don't punish for being wrong. They want bold, decisive, swagger, and certainty. And the pundits that deliver on swagger are the ones who are driven by a Big Idea and work to make everything around them fit that idea. They have no doubt about their Big Idea, dismiss evidence that undercuts it, and embrace evidence that supports it -- "belief defense and bolstering" (reminds me of most Fundies). This leads them to overpredict. The accurate pundits are "cognitively flexible, modest, and open to self-criticism" and work from the data. There speech is properly full of uncertainty -- which makes for a good forecast but doesn't make for good television.