(Interestingly, that guy in the picture behind Corso (next to the “Lee Corso is a Penis” sign), looks very much like the Thinking Bulldog. Image from Deadspin)

If you are interested in foreign policy with an emphasis on military operations, and I’m sure you are, Belmont Club is essential daily reading.  The site also has many other posts on interesting topics, to wit:  The Black Swan, which is ostensibly a discussion of Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions, but  is more about the pundits and the consistent inaccuracy of their prognostications.

It’s interesting to think about Barack Obama’s trip to South Asia and the Middle East after watching Philip Tetlock’s wonderful January 2007 video on the efficacy of forecasting. Tetlock asked himself why pundits never lost their reputations by making bad predictions. Tetlock came to the conclusion that political punditry was so unaccountable because no one was keeping score.  So to find out its real value he began to compile a sample of 28,000 predictions by 284 experts over 18 years to see which of them came true. The results were disappointing.

I try to avoid thinking about Barack Obama, but the point certainly also applies to the college football punditocracy.  How can these clowns be so consistently wrong and yet continue to keep their jobs and get high ratings?  Read on….

Expert predictions barely outperformed simple statistical prediction schemes such as those which assumed no change or that the latest rate of change would continue. In other words, experts could not predict the future with any clarity, but we consulted them anyway because of the need to appear in control of even future events.

Now I’m as glad as anybody when Corso slips on the chicken head instead of the bulldog head in Columbia, because everybody knows Corso is an idiot.  But this guy is onto something if you think about hanging on every word of Tony Barnhart on the radio, or reading and re-reading the musings of Sunday Morning Quarterback Dr. Saturday on the likely fortunes of the Georgia Bulldogs this fall.  It’s hard not to take comfort in a favorable prediction from the likes of Herbstreit, Schlabach, & Company because we feel the future is in control because the “experts” say AJ Green can beat Eric Berry deep.

But one type of expert was clearly worse than others; the kind he termed the “hedgehog”. They made the least accurate predictions of all. “Hedgehog” in this context denotes someone who bets on extreme outcomes based on a theoretical construct, such an ideological position. Hedgehogs** are those who “just know” what is going to happen with the certainty of a true believer. They are guided by the “big thing”.

Exhibit “A” — The Hedgehog, who I heard on the radio saying Notre Dame would go 9-3 this year.  (Image from The Bulldawg Blawg)

This explains why Alabama fans think they’ll go 12-0 this every year, and how Mark May can predict Hawaii will beat Georgia because the defensive line will be unable to generate a pass rush.   Surely you know Georgia fans or fans of any team whose fananticism renders them completely unable to objectively pick against their favorite team or for their hated rivals.  Tech will, however, go 3-9 this year I can assure you.

It was better Tetlock found, for predictors to be consciously aware of the unkown; to be informed not only by knowledge but anti-knowledge – what we don’t know. The experts who did that, who were open to the idea that the world was messy, full random and complex influences — he called the “foxes”.

“As we know, there are known knowns.  There are things we know we know.   We also know there are known unknowns.  That is to say we know there are some things we do not know.   But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

So it turns out that Rumsfeld was right.  And heaven knows foreign policy is a heck of a lot easier than picking college football games.  But then there is this to keep in mind on Saturday morning:

Normally [the foxes] were more boring than the hedgehogs. Hedgehogs tended to categorically tell people what was going to happen or not happen, while foxes were often only willing to offer probabilities and forecast over short horizons. Tetlock argued that while the foxes predicted things better, the public was much more willing to listen to the hedgehogs, especially when they could tell a good story.

This is what keeps Granny, Trev and Terry Bowden pulling in the big paychecks.  They probably know a little bit more about college football than the educated fan or hardworking blogger, but the sports media is about entertainment, not accuracy.  Herbstreit is up there because he’s a handsome devil, a good communicator, and makes defensible analyses of the games.  Granny may be a moron, but he’s hilarious and, like Corso, not afraid to express and defend to ludicrous extremes the most ridiculous, and wrong, predictions.   It’s about entertainment and eyeballs on the commercials.  And when Corso is wrong on every single game, the check still clears on Monday.  This is not a bad thing, mind you. 

So, remember that these clowns on the TV called “experts” are more likely to be wrong than pretty much anybody else who looks at things carefully, and that you’re there to enjoy the antics, not put any stock (or God forbid cash) in the opinions of the talking heads.  

**The term “Hedgehog” is taken from a poem by the ancient Greek Archilocus who wrote “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”.   Not that you didn’t already know that.