Expert Political Judgment

How Good is it? How can We Know?

By: Philip E. Tetlock

Narrated by: Anthony Haden Salerno

The intelligence failures surrounding the invasion of Iraq dramatically illustrate the necessity of developing standards for evaluating expert opinion. This audiobook 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 judgment 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 audiobook 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.

©2005 Princeton University Press (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

How to Think Objectively

This book is recommended for anyone who wants to improve their method of thinking. It is also recommended for anyone who wants to understand why our intuition cannot be the sole source of our thinking and methods.

The narrator is as bad as the text is good

This book is amazing and should be read by every thoughtful person.

The narrator, on the other hand, is terrible. I listened as I read along within the book and was regularly distracted by his misreading words and his total inability to read logical notation. For example, he reads:

"~p" as "equivalent to p" and "(p is true | q is false)" as "p is true divided by q is false."

Such mistakes are simply inexcusable, especially for a high-level book like this.

That said, the text itself is absolutely amazing, but I can't imagine anybody really internalizing the message through audiobook alone.

In noise her voice was like a whisper. Inaudible.

in the noisy environments it was completely impossible to understand this guy. I thought he was a hoarse woman at first

A book I come back to time and again

This is an easy recommendation, the book covers the fascinating topic of assessing actual political prediction. It is a ground breaking work.

The backdrop used relates to Isaiah Berlins wonderful work ‘The Hedgehog and the Fox”, where Hedgehog’s focus and justify a single great idea, and Foxes incorporate many small ideas to predict future political outcomes.

The question asked is “ Which form is better?”, here we see a beautiful analysis of the different forms and approaches to political prediction against a backdrop of rigorous statistical analysis.

The results and observations are fascinating/ this this is a highly recommended read. Enjoy.

Highly engaging. Listen at 2x speed

This was a fascinating book with a great respect for impartiality. He plays with conceptions within epistemology and provides satisfying sunlight on his approach, going deeply into the math. I found it best to listen to the conclusions and then here about his process, though he presents his discussion in the other order.

I found the readers voice unbearable at 1x speed. I strongly encourage at least 1.5x, if not 2x. For some reason, this really seemed to help.

Five-star book, one-star reading

Groundbreaking and important book. But, while Tetlock argues convincingly that predicting the future is harder than we might think, predicting that the narrator will mispronounce the word “causal” at every opportunity remains disappointingly easy.

This is not a book to listen to.

I loved “Superforecasting,” but found this book impossible to listen to while running, cleaning, or commuting to work. The book constantly references appendixes that ate mot readily available. Tetlock’s ideas in this book are best communicated through a 5-to10 page article. Tetlock spends hours restating his findings without offering anecdotes or a narrative to make this book entertaining.

Not as expected

long-winded and very unstructured. Sounds if it was written for Academics not the public. Don't download.