Bush's Black Swan?
David Brooks is dead on in today's NY Times, but the point that goes underemphasized here is that the experts are usually wrong, not because they aren't well-versed or out of mal intent, but because expertise in many fields is a false promise, it's unattainable. Complexity makes expertise unattainable. The experts' plan has just as much chance of working as an outlying plan - perhaps even less so, because the experts are likely to all be relying on data or ananalytical framework derived through consensus. Consensus has a tendency to overlook certain data or institutionalize an analytical flaw, either of which could render the whole exercise worthless. Bush saw this and placed the Black Swan trade.
posted by Donny Baseball at 10:00 AM
2 Comments:
"Bush saw this and placed the Black Swan trade."
No... it was more like a desperation trade. Bush doubled down when he had nothing to lose and it paid off. You are judging Bush's decision making by the end results instead of the quality of the decison. What if the chance of success was only 1%?
With respect to experts, expertise is not a false promise and it is not unattainable. What people don't realize is that when it comes to forecasting, experts make mistake too. Prediting the future is just too hard, even for the experts.
All fair points TS, although neither you or I truly know the quality of the decision making process. But as for me, simply taking the Baker Report and doing the opposite counts as a high quality decision making process. But that's just me!
I guess I should have been more clear, I didn't mean expertise simply as knowledge, but knowledge that can translate into significantly better forecasting or decision-making. Plus I'm only talking about highly complex systems/problems.
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