The title of this blog comes from research conducted by Penn professor Philip Tetlock. He discusses the predictions of pundits and political “experts.” One of the biggest problems with those predictions, he says, is that they are rarely looked at after the fact, except when they turn out to be correct. So if a pundit makes ten big predictions over the course of ten years, and one turns out to be correct, he will spend the rest of his career about he was the guy who predicted that one thing, forgetting the other nine things.
In my quest to Think Like a Fox, I am going to try and break that paradigm - when I make specific predictions about the future, I will try and revisit them later to see how I did, and try and break down whether and why I was right or wrong.
In that spirit, we are exactly one (leap) year away from Election Day 2012. I am going to make a few predictions about the result, and I’ll cycle back next year to see how I did. In each prediction, I’m going to lay out my reasoning and try and lay out some reasons why I could possibly be wrong. In all likelihood I’ll end up looking kind of silly, but that’s kind of the point. Or, I’ll be right, in which case you can all bow down to your new Seer of Seers.
