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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Jim Cramer is right 50% of the time, and wrong 50% of the time, but makes more money than any of us because of his flair.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

In the case of the Iraq war wrong people got promoted and right people are still in obscurity.http://www.radaronline.com/...

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Robin Hanson's avatar

My point is that getting something surprising right is far from enough to be "feted with speaking engagements and special television appearances." The fact that someone somewhere remembers you is not the same.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I'm not really sure I'd count that as "ignored". I know about Xanadu, and I can't personally name a pundit who's famous for "getting Iraq right". It's probably safe to say that Xanadu is well-known among people interested in such matters.

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Robin Hanson's avatar

Eliezer, how about the whole Xanadu group predicting in 1985-1990 that the web would soon arrive?

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Some examples of unusual predictions gotten right by ignored folk? (If it's not too much bother.)

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

One area in which this could be tested is sports punditry. The outcomes are objective, but the difficulty would be defining "outlandish" predictions. Although one way would be to look at pundits predictions of scores and then compare how the distribution of predictions compares with the distribution of outcomes. Given what's said above we would expect the predictions to be more dispersed than the outcomes.

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