EXPERTS ARE ALWAYS WITH us. And so, of course, are their predictions. Few are ever astonishing, but many are safer than others. For example, this week an important politician will say something impressively stupid. Bank on it. Experts are supposed to be better at this sort of thing, but, as discussed below, Philip Tetlock reported (in Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?) that after surveying 28,000 predictions by more than 280 experts, “a dart-throwing chimpanzee” could have done as well.

Although there is a safe prediction one might make about dart-throwing chimps.

By RONALD BAILEY [Reason] –The price of oil will soar to $200 per barrel. A bioterror attack will occur before 2013. Rising food prices could spark riots in Britain. The Arctic Ocean will be ice-free by 2015. Home prices will not recover this year. But who cares about any of those predictions: The world will end in 2012.

The media abound with confident predictions. Everywhere we turn, we find an expert declaiming on some future trend, concerning nearly every activity. Should we pay much attention? No, says journalist Dan Gardner in his wonderfully perspicacious new book, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, And You Can Do Better. Gardner is previously the author of The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn’t—and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger.

In Future Babble, Gardner acknowledges his debt to political scientist Philip Tetlock, who set up a 20-year experiment in which he enrolled nearly 300 experts in politics. Tetlock then solicited thousands of predictions about the fates of scores of countries and later checked how well they did. Not so well. Tetlock concluded that most of his experts would have been beaten by “a dart-throwing chimpanzee.”

Continued at Reason | More Chronicle & Notices.