The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This book fills that need. Here, Philip E. Tetlock explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events, and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making.

Product Description: What if the Persians had won at Salamis? What if Christ had not been crucified? What if the Chinese had harnessed steam power before the West? Disparaged by some as a mere parlor game, counterfactual history is seen by others as an indispensable historical tool...read more

Product Description: Why do citizens in pluralist democracies disagree collectively about the very values they agree on individually? This text highlights the inescapable conflicts of rights and values at the heart of democratic politics.

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Product Description: It has been half a century since the publication of An American Dilemma, Gunnar Myrdal’s seminal work on race in America. This book is an attempt to contribute to a fresh understanding of this dilemma by viewing the issues of race as they are now, not as they were a generation or so ago...read more

Product Description: Drawing on a multitude of data sets and building on analyses carried out over more than a decade, Reasoning and Choice offers a major new theoretical explanation of how ordinary citizens figure out what they favor and oppose politically...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: If chances of a superpower nuclear war have recently diminished, the chances of international conflict have not--as demonstrated in Iraq, Sri Lanka, and the former country of Yugoslavia. Working under the aegis of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, a panel of distinguished scholars examine social and behavior sciences and the contributions they make in understanding factors which may promote or inhibit international conflict...read more

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Product Description: There is a broad global consensus on the imperative to avoid nuclear war, but that consensus provides little guidance for policy. A primary reason is the lack of understanding regarding how a nuclear war might occur or how one could be prevented...read more