Can You Forecast Better than a Dart Throwing Chimp?

The fox knows many little things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing - Archilochus

Cover Story

Philip Tetlock has spent many years studying the ability of experts to predict important events in their sphere of interest and come to the not entirely astonishing conclusion that they aren't much good at it. Soviet experts, for instance, missed the possibility that the Soviet Union might stop existing. On the other hand, they're exceptionally good at promoting themselves: being wrong is no impediment to fame, it seems.

Tetlock has discovered that people fall into two groups that he labels 'hedgehogs' and 'foxes', Hedgehogs have one big idea and tend to interpret the world in terms of it. Foxes have lots of ideas and are more flexible in the face of change. Unsurprisingly foxes are better at predicting stuff; but does that make them better investors?

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Where Two Strangers Never Meet: Self-Serving Bias

"If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two strangers just the same"

IF … Rudyard Kipling

Problematic Pronouns

We all probably know someone who believes that their successes are entirely down to their own levels of skill and whose failures are someone else’s fault.  To some extent most of us will meet them in the mirror each morning.  This is self-serving bias in action.  As Donelson Forsyth explains it:

“Those told they failed attribute performance to such external factors as bad luck, task difficulty, or the interference of others, and those told they succeeded point to the causal significance of such internal factors as ability and effort.”

Now, what do you think will happen to a corporation if you put someone with a bad case of self-serving bias in charge?  Beware the CEO with a bad case of the personal pronouns, that’s what I say. And let's not talk about global warming.

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