On February 20th, Tetlock’s superforecasters predicted only a 3% chance that there would be 200,000+ coronavirus cases a month later (there were). Predicting the coronavirus was equally hard, and the best institutions we had missed it. But the world is full of noise, and tiny chance events can have outsized effects, and there are only so many polls you can scrutinize, and even geniuses can only do so well. I believe they’re operating at close to optimum – the best anyone could possibly do with the information that they had. ![]() This isn’t intended to criticize Silver or Tetlock. UPenn professor Philip Tetlock has spent decades identifying “superforecasters” and coming up with complicated algorithms for aggregating their predictions, developing a prediction infrastructure that beats top CIA analysts, but they estimated a 23% chance Britain would choose Brexit just before it happened. Nate Silver is maybe the best political predicter alive, and he estimated a 29% chance of Trump winning just before Trump won. One way people have summed this up is that the media (and the experts they relied on) did a terrible job predicting what would happen. The constant attempts to attribute “alarmism” over the virus to anti-Chinese racism. The New York Times, weighing in with articles like “The pandemic panic” and “Who says it’s not safe to travel to China”. The Daily Beast complaining that “coronavirus, with zero American fatalities, is dominating headlines, while the flu is the real threat”. The Vox tweet saying “Is this going to be a deadly pandemic? No.” Washington Post telling us in February “Why we should be wary of an aggressive government reponse to coronavirus (it might “scapegoat marginalized populations”). Real Clear Politics has a list of highlights. In case you’ve been hiding under a rock recently (honestly, valid) the media not only failed to adequately warn its readers about the epidemic, but actively mocked and condescended to anyone who did sound a warning. Like: how much ink and paper is there in the world? Are we sure it’s enough? But also: how do you become better at saying what you don’t know? Vox asks What Went Wrong With The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage? They conclude that the media needs to be better at “not just saying what we do know, but what we don’t know”.
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