Philip E. Tetlock: Expert Political Judgment, Princeton University Press 2005

What a great book about good judgment.

The book explores scientifically "expert judgment", where an expert is defined as "a professional who makes his or her livehood by commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends of significance to the well-being of particular states, regional clusters of states, or the international system as a whole."

The primary intent of the book is to offer a comprehensive, multidimensional, state of the art research report on the modes of thinking of experts "monitoring complex (international and political) events as they unfold in real time" (p. 238). Much as this is, even more follows. What the book amounts to and what I find particularly explosive is the valuable illumination it yields on the logic and psychology of judgment in complex emergent environments.

The book deals with events such the collapse of the Soviet Union - events we all had some views on, and also hindsight. The book elaborates powerfully the various biases and multilayered forms of self deception that accompany much of human comprehension of unfolding events. It reads as a textbook on the project of "Know Thyself" and presents a wellcome, empirically based challenge to explore one's own thinking.

"We need to start thinking more deeply about how we think. We need methods of calibrating expert performance that trancend partisan bickering and check our species' deep-rooted penchant for self-justification." (p. 2)

"What expert think matters far less than how they think. If we want realistic odds on what will happen next, coupled to a willingness to admit mistakes, we are better off turning to experts who embody the intellectual traits of Isaiah Berlin's prototypical fox - those who 'know many little things', draw from an eclectic array of traditions, and accept ambiguity and contradiction as inevitable features of life - than we are turning to Berlin's hedgehogs - those tho 'know one big thing', toil devotedly within one tradition, and reach for formulaic solutions to ill-defined problems." (p. 2).