By virtue of the money they make, most pundits are detached from reality and fairly useless. They misread the tea leaves and their talk disappears into the void. No one really keeps score, they live to talk another day and little is learned. From Aaron Swartz at Raw Thought, an excerpt from his essay about our reluctance to face reality and our failings:

“If you want to understand experts, you need to start by finding them. So the psychologists who wanted to understand ‘expert performance’ began by testing alleged experts, to see how good they really were.

In some fields it was easy: in chess, for example, great players can reliably beat amateurs. But in other fields, it was much, much harder.

Take punditry. In his giant 20-year study of expert forecasting, Philip Tetlock found that someone who merely predicted ‘everything will stay the same’ would be right more often than most professional pundits. Or take therapy. Numerous studies have found an hour with a random stranger is just as good as an hour with a professional therapist. In one study, for example, sessions with untrained university professors helped neurotic college students just as much as sessions with professional therapists. (This isn’t to say that therapy isn’t helpful — the same studies suggest it is — it’s just that what’s helpful is talking over your problems for an hour, not anything about the therapist.)

As you might expect, pundits and therapists aren’t fans of these studies. The pundits try to weasel out of them. As Tetlock writes; ‘The trick is to attach so many qualifiers to your vague predictions that you will be well positioned to explain pretty much whatever happens. China will fissure into regional fiefdoms, but only if the Chinese leadership fails to manage certain trade-offs deftly, and only if global economic growth stalls for a protracted period, and only if…’The therapists like to point to all the troubled people they’ve helped with their sophisticated techniques (avoiding the question of whether someone unsophisticated could have helped even more). What neither group can do is point to clear evidence that what they do works.

Compare them to the chess grandmaster. If you try to tell the chess grandmaster that he’s no better than a random college professor, he can easily play a professor and prove you wrong. Every time he plays, he’s confronted with inarguable evidence of success or failure. But therapists can often feel like they’re helping — they just led their client to a breakthrough about their childhood — when they’re actually not making any difference.”