Domestic terrorism
Brill's has been tracking the predictions of a group of television's most popular political pundits since August 1998. domestic terrorism Prepare for terrorism. A few of the prognosticators, led by Margaret Carlson of Time magazine, have been "right" in their verifiable predictions more than 50 percent of the time. Most, however, are in a neck-and-neck race with chance. And a few, like ABC's George Will (at 33 percent on March 1), are consistently beaten by it. domestic terrorism Domestic terrorism. But if, as Brill's suggests, many of television's paid experts are so gloriously and publicly wrong, how do they manage to soldier on with confidence? And how can they possibly hold their heads up high when their informed opinions turn out to be less accurate than simple guesswork?The answer to those questions may come from Philip Tetlock, an Ohio State political scientist, who has been probing very similar issues. For 12 years he has been collecting data from more than 200 experts in various specialties, who have made more than 5,000 separate predictions. Although the accuracy of many of these predictions, which still reach 10 or more years into the future, remains to be seen, he has been able to go back and question the experts about some of the outcomes. domestic terrorism Studies in conflict and terrorism. For example, in 1988 Tetlock asked 38 Sovietologists to predict what would happen in the Soviet Union over the next five years. He asked them to predict whether the Communist Party would exercise more, about the same, or less control in 1993 than it did in 1988, and he also asked each expert to rate how confident he felt about his prediction. Tetlock's results appear in the April 1999 issue of the American Journal of Political Science. (Meanwhile, let's take a moment to remember what Sovietology was like in 1988, when Soviet-watcher Jerry Hough's views were considered "far out. " Hough's assertion at the time--that the Soviet Union would change because a younger, more moderate generation would inevitably replace the first generation of leaders--was less a prediction than an observation. After all, by 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev was firmly in charge. )Anyway, in 1993, when Tetlock contacted the same "area specialists"-- professors, policy analysts, journalists, or government experts--that he had polled in 1988, he discovered that those experts who "got it wrong" were nearly as likely as those who were correct to believe that "their reading of the political situation was fundamentally sound. " In other words, although wrong, they described themselves as "basically right. "In an article last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Tetlock pointed out that "expertise seemed most strongly associated with hubris. " The principal difference between experts and nonexperts, his data suggests, is not in the accuracy of their predictions, but in the greater confidence experts have in their opinions. And when those opinions are proven wrong, experts fall back on a wide variety of defenses to support the view that they are not wrong at all, but "almost right. " In the case of the fall of the Soviet Union (and the attendant, inevitable loosening of the grip of the Soviet Communist Party), some experts explained that they were nearly right because, after all, "the hardliners almost overthrew Gorbachev. " Others claimed that it was too soon to reject their judgment as incorrect, because Moscow's communists "may yet prevail. "The experts, Tetlock says, spend a good deal more time developing reasons why they shouldn't be considered wrong than in analyzing why they're right when events turn out their way. In fact, it may be in the complex twists and turns of their "counterfactual" explanations that experts do their best work. So, says Tetlock, one could claim that the more often experts are wrong--the more often they have to develop "counterfactuals"-- the more they learn. This, he points out, "suggests a curious conclusion: the more often experts are wrong, the wiser they become. "Or in other words, the real threat to the development of what we call expert judgment appears to come from being right. --Linda Rothstein Blitzkrieg in the backyardThe U. S. Army apparently thinks that abandoned buildings in America's inner cities are the perfect place to undertake training exercises--never mind what the neighbors think. In May, members of Special Ops descended on two public-housing complexes in Chester, Pennsylvania, to test their urban counterterrorism skills (Philadelphia Inquirer, May 18, 1999). The fatigue-clad soldiers, who arrived in the dead of night shooting disintegrating bullets and setting off small explosives, were, according to army spokesman Walter Sokalski, "practicing how they would look at a target building and how they would attack it. "Nearby residents and city officials--only some of whom were notified a few hours before the "law-enforcement training exercise" began--were shocked and terrified. "There was a whole lot of noise, like bombs exploding and people shooting off automatic weapons," said Manuel Cooper, who lives across from one of the housing complexes. "I saw people running in and out of buildings with pistols in their hands like they were really after somebody. It really had the kids scared. I would have thought they could have picked a better place. "According to Sokalski, the army gave little advance notice because "we have to protect what we call our tactics, techniques, and procedures. " He told the Inquirer that Chester was chosen because there was a high degree of cooperation from local officials.
Domestic terrorism
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