Friday, September 27, 2013

Mistake Bank Bookshelf: Tim Harford’s “Adapt”

Tim has been a frequent inspiration to this site for the past few years, initially for his TED talk entitled “Trial, Error and the God Complex.” His 2011 book Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure is this week’s selection.

His background is in economics; he writes the “Undercover Economist” column for the Financial Times, and in Adapt the 2008 financial crisis is an exception of the failure-begetting-success theme that he strikes throughout the book. He also takes up the on-the-ground action of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the changing composition of the Fortune 500, and the invention of the toaster as examples of adaptation all around us.

The lens used to investigate these events is that of complex adaptive systems – the methods used by biological evolution. It’s a fascinating book and an important addition to the Bookshelf.

Here’s a section describing a famous project by the psychologist Philip Tetlock:

[Tetlock] rounded up nearly three hundred experts – by which he meant people whose job it was to comment or advise on political and economic trends. They were a formidable bunch: political scientists, economists, lawyers and diplomats. There were spooks and think-tankers, journalists and academics. Over half of them had PhDs; almost all had postgraduate degrees. And Tetlock’s method for evaluating the quality of their expert judgment was to pin the experts down: he asked them to make specific, quantifiable forecasts – answering 27,450 of his questions between them – and then waited to see whether their forecasts came true. They rarely did. The experts failed, and their failure to forecast the future is a symptom of their failure to understand fully the complexities of the present.

[Tim has a new book out called The Undercover Economist Strikes Back.]

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