So I’ve been reading psychologist Philip Tetlock’s treatise on Expert Political Judgment. It’s a nifty piece of work, well worth your time. Recommended! Except for one pervasive twitch: Tetlock demands receipts. He badgers political commentators to go on record predicting the future, complete with percentages indicating how confidently they’re prophesying on this or that event or trend. And he wants them to comment on a wide variety of events and trends. The author wants to grade experts to find out who commands the right stuff as prognosticators. And he’s wroth with those who take a humbler approach to their trade—declining, with baseball philosopher Yogi Berra, to hold forth too glibly on what the future portends.

Including yours truly, I suppose. Tetlock takes issue with “radical skeptics” who deny the possibility of accurate, quantifiable foresight. Guilty as charged. But also prudent. After all, skepticism is the soul of the scientific mindset. The best any of us can do is gaze through a glass darkly in hopes of glimpsing the rough contours of what’s to come. It’s hard enough to predict future outcomes even in the world of science, governed as it is by laws of nature that purport to make scientific inquiry orderly, replicable, and reproducible by contrast with the hurly-burly of human affairs. The world of politics is a world of complexity—of countless ill-defined variables that interact in unforeseeable ways.

No one can know the precise value to assign each variable at work in the political world. Change one or more variables and you deflect the coming sequence of events. The future ricochets off onto a different tangent than the keenest seer could have predicted. That’s what happens when one event depends on the event that came before and shapes the one that lies ahead.

Moreover, competitive affairs unfurl in a realm of clashing wills where competitors try to thwart one another, imposing their will on unwilling opponents for strategic and political gain. They have every incentive to act unpredictably in hopes of ruining their opponents’ schemes and getting their way. In short, competitive interaction is an inherently, deliberately complex domain befogged by chance, uncertainty, and intractable willpower, along with dark passions such........

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