Inside the Nudge Unit

Philip Tetlock has documented how, very often, political and policy experts aren’t very good at getting it right. 3 In particular, experts who have strong views of the world, with clear-cut but rigid theories, tend to make predictions that turn out to be wrong. In contrast, experts who make more accurate predictions tend to have much messier views of the world. They change their minds when new evidence comes along. They’re often full of doubt, so they don’t make great pundits on TV. But they’re more likely to get it right, because the world is, after all, a complicated place.