A while back Robin Hanson mentioned that somebody should design a mechanism keep to track of pundits’ ‘scores’. Robin notes that there is no feedback mechanism to help the public figure out how accurate pundits’ predictions have been. Moreover, given the way the media works, it’s not clear they have an incentive to find accurate/reliable pundits, rather than entertaining and/or provocative ones. Currently, ‘pundits’ don’t suffer a reputational cost for their blunders. (Anybody recall weapons of mass destruction?) An academic way to go, of course, is to write a critical journal article (also nice at tenure time). For example, the economist/philosopher Erik Angner has written a very nice paper (2006), ‘Economists as Experts: Overconfidence in theory and practice,’
Keeping score
Keeping score
Keeping score
A while back Robin Hanson mentioned that somebody should design a mechanism keep to track of pundits’ ‘scores’. Robin notes that there is no feedback mechanism to help the public figure out how accurate pundits’ predictions have been. Moreover, given the way the media works, it’s not clear they have an incentive to find accurate/reliable pundits, rather than entertaining and/or provocative ones. Currently, ‘pundits’ don’t suffer a reputational cost for their blunders. (Anybody recall weapons of mass destruction?) An academic way to go, of course, is to write a critical journal article (also nice at tenure time). For example, the economist/philosopher Erik Angner has written a very nice paper (2006), ‘Economists as Experts: Overconfidence in theory and practice,’
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