(2020-12-28) Yglesias How To Be Less Full Of Shit

Matthew Yglesias: How to be less full of shit. In terms of my personal growth, I think the most important book I read in 2020 was Philip Tetlock’s which came out five years ago...somehow the title of Superforecasting turned me off of reading it when it first came out. But it’s a really good book.

It’s got a lot to say about the people who are good at predicting things, which turns out to be a somewhat complicated subject. But to me the most gripping and broadly relevant insight of the book is pretty simple, so simple in fact that once it was pointed out to me, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t always known it.

But it goes like this: people who are good at predicting things actually try to check whether or not their predictions are any good. It’s just like anything else in life. Unless you actually pay attention to what you’re doing, you won’t do it well. So how do you do that? (feedback loop)

here’s how a disciplined predictor of things would behave:

• If you’re inclined to offer a prediction, make sure to write it down. And be really specific about what you’re predicting. (claim)
• And even though there’s necessarily going to be an air of false precision to it, give your prediction a numerical possibility.
• Then go back periodically to check whether the things you predicted would happen did, in fact, happen.

I’m not particularly interested in trying to train myself to become a superforecaster. But this is interesting nonetheless because basically nobody does it.

Twitter is full of bullshit

I’ve been thinking about Tetlock’s book over the past couple of months as I witnessed a bunch of people worry that Donald Trump was going to pull a coup, then some saying that his post-election antics were an attempted coup, while others dunk on the coup-worriers and say the whole thing was hysterical.

First you define terms: “coup” is a colorful and not totally inappropriate term, but what we were discussing here was not a military seizure of power but a judicial effort to throw out absentee ballots and flip the election result.

Then you ask exactly what the prediction is. Ex ante there was some chance that Trump would just win the election. There was also some chance of a huge Biden landslide. The coup prediction was that conditional on neither of those being the case, there was some odds of the Trump Coup happening.

So then, what odds exactly? 90 percent chance of coup? 10 percent chance?

But nobody tried to engage in anything like that, because the people “predicting” things on Twitter are mostly just BSing.

I’ve been trying to discipline myself to actually say what I mean rather than toss off vague predictions — what’s true about this whole “stop the steal” mishegas is that the quantity of Republican Party politicians who’ve gone along with it is a disturbing portent, not that it ever seemed likely to succeed.

But that really is my main takeaway from the study of predictions: don’t predict so much stuff! Predictions are commonly used as one form or another of bad faith rhetorical device in punditry.