NRO's Derbyshire (yeah, the clown of NRO) evaluated his predictions for 2005 from a year ago. He was proud to agree with Philip Tetlock's quotation:
It is the somewhat gratifying lesson [that] people who make prediction their business — people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables — are no better than the rest of us. When they're wrong, they're rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake.
So true. Especially when the experts specifically work to assure only predictions that are comfortable for the "Great Leader".
But Derb is too modest with evaluating his own predictions...
These were a couple of his predictions for 2005:
4. In the U.S. government, the first signs of the Second Term Crack-Up will appear, possibly in the form of a sex or money scandal...
5. The Iraqis will fail to take charge of their own affairs. The U.S. will muddle on, offering increasingly implausible excuses for our continuing presence there. The U.S. public will get increasingly fed up with the whole business. The first congressional resolution to cut off funding for Iraq will be proposed, but quickly defeated.
He marked himself wrong on the item 4. He dismissed the Plame scandal because
(a) nobody could remember who was who or what malfeasance was supposed to have been committed, and (b) there seemed to be no sex or money involved.
Hmmm, what about
these things:
- The administration has been paying conservative commentator Armstrong to promote its agenda. No money involved?
- Former male escort Jeff Gannon had to resigned from the fake news agency that employed him to ask Bush fake questions. No sex involved?
- Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay got into trouble. Not because of money?
And the following things are certainly
not the signs of any crack-up:
- Failure of Schavio bill.
- Nomination (and withdrawal) of Harriet Miers.
- Letting News Orleans flood.
Regarding Iraq, violence is uncontrolable, too many Iraqis die. So who is "in charge"? Derb got it well right with "increasingly implausible excuses".
Along the predictions, here come a few of usual Derb "pearls":
Even the Palestinians seem to have lost interest in the Palestinians, to judge from their failure to engage in any sensational internecine murder recently.
[Iraq] doesn't loom very large in public consciousness. It's just something droning away in the news background, touching only the lives of people with kin in Iraq, and of course a few fired-up ideological partisans. Outside those small circles, nobody's much bothered... [Our] losses are — horrible but unavoidable word — "acceptable," and in an age when nobody gives a fig about federal spending, the financial cost doesn't register. [We] could go on like this for years, and probably shall...
10. Millions of people in Africa will die from violence and disease, and nobody will care much.
Correct. Duh. Yawn.
And for a serious desert, let's compare two adjacent thoughts of Derb:
It is not unlikely, however, that one or other of these places has done something on the quiet to harm us, something we shall not find out about for a while — selling nukes to terrorists, perhaps.
[...]
[The] absence of any major terror attack on U.S. soil for the fourth calendar year in a row suggests that the intel folk may be doing something right.
So perhaps terrorists are not that much into annual "fireworks" on the US soil, they are just content with some quiet buissiness and increasing the US casualties count in Iraq.