University of California, San Diego
The Department of Psychology is Honored
to Present a Talk by
Philip Tetlock
University of California, Berkeley
"EXPERT POLITICAL JUDGMENT: HOW GOOD IS IT? HOW CAN WE KNOW?"
Presented on April 28, 2005
Location: The Crick Conference Room
Mandler Hall, room 3545
- Abstract:
- Have you ever wondered why so many political disagreements -- be they
on national security or trade or welfare policy -- are so
intractable? This presentation will report the results of a 20-year
research project that solicited the thousands of predictions from
hundreds of experts on dozens of countries. The resulting data shed
light on fundamental questions: (1) To what extent, does expertise
translate into predictive accuracy (how well do experts perform
relative to guessing strategies (proverbial dart-throwing chimps),
simple statistical models, and more formal time-series and regression
models?); (2) How do experts react when futures judged highly likely
fail to materialize and futures judged highly unlikely do
materialize?; (3) Do data on aggregate expert performance conceal
systematic individual differences in both predictive accuracy and
willingness to change one's mind in a roughly Bayesian fashion in
response to disconfirming evidence?; (4) Is it possible to construct
a composite portrait of "good judgment" in complex, path-dependent
environments in which there are almost always politically plausible
methods of escaping disconfirmation?
For More Information About This Speaker:
- http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/tetlock.html
Dr. Tetlock's faculty webpage at UC Berkeley.
- http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/pdf/tetlock.pdf
Dr. Tetlock's vita. (PDF File.)
