Future Babble
Why Expert Predictions Fail - and Why We Believe Them Anyway
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Narrated by:
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Walter Dixon
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By:
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Dan Gardner
About this listen
In Future Babble, award-winning journalist Dan Gardner presents landmark research debunking the whole expert prediction industry and explores our obsession with the future.
In 2008, as the price of oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; it then plunged to $30. In 1967, they said the USSR would be the world’s fastest-growing economy by 2000; by 2000, the USSR no longer existed. In 1911, it was pronounced that there would be no more wars in Europe—we all know how that turned out.
The truth is that experts are about as accurate as dart-throwing monkeys. And yet, every day we ask them to predict the future—everything from the weather to the likelihood of a catastrophic terrorist attack.
Here is the first book to examine this phenomenon, showing why our brains yearn for certainty about the future, why we are attracted to those who predict it confidently, and why it’s so easy for us to ignore the trail of outrageously wrong forecasts. How good you are at predicting the future doesn’t depend on your education or experience. It depends on how you think: like a fox or like a hedgehog. Foxes know a little about a lot of things. They have doubts. They often sound wishy-washy. And you don’t see them on television much. On the other hand, hedgehogs know a lot about one thing. They are absolutely certain. They are confident. Almost every popular expert you can think of is a hedgehog. And they are experts at explaining away predictions they made that turned out to be wrong. For real insight into what is coming next, you need to consult foxes and think like one, too. Future Babble explains in detail what that means, and how you can tell foxes and hedgehogs apart.
n this example-packed, sometimes darkly hilarious audiobook, journalist Dan Gardner shows how seminal research by UC Berkeley professor Philip Tetlock proved that the more famous a pundit is, the more likely he is to be right about as often as a stopped watch. Gardner also draws on current research in cognitive psychology, political science, and behavioral economics in delivering this reassuring message: The future is always uncertain, but the end is not always near.
©2011 Dan Gardner (P)2011 Gildan Media CorpListeners also enjoyed...
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50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True
- By: Guy P. Harrison
- Narrated by: Erik Synnestvedt
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Maybe you know someone who swears by the reliability of psychics or who is in regular contact with angels. Or perhaps you're trying to find a nice way of dissuading someone from wasting money on a homeopathy cure. How do you find a gently persuasive way of steering people away from unfounded beliefs, bogus cures, conspiracy theories, and the like? Longtime skeptic Guy P. Harrison shows you how in this down-to-earth, entertaining exploration of commonly held extraordinary claims.
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Skepticism, so Dull & Condescending
- By Mr Conway on 03-11-13
By: Guy P. Harrison
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Climate Shock
- The Economic Consequences of a Hotter Planet
- By: Gernot Wagner, Martin L. Weitzman
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 4 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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Wagner and Martin Weitzman explore in lively, clear terms the likely repercussions of a hotter planet, drawing on and expanding from work previously unavailable to general audiences. They show that the longer we wait to act, the more likely an extreme event will happen. A city might go underwater.
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Nuance, balance, risk management.
- By John Christens on 11-23-23
By: Gernot Wagner, and others
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A Gift to My Children
- A Father's Lessons for Life and Investing
- By: Jim Rogers
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller
- Length: 1 hr and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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What makes for a successful investor? More important, what makes for a happy and meaningful life? According to legendary investor Jim Rogers, the road to financial success and the road to a meaningful life are one and the same.
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Just What I Expected
- By OregonCustomer on 12-19-11
By: Jim Rogers
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The Real Global Warming Disaster
- Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?
- By: Christopher Booker
- Narrated by: Ric Jerrom
- Length: 16 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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This original audiobook considers one of the most extraordinary scientific and political stories of our time: how in the 1980s a handful of scientists came to believe that mankind faced catastrophe from runaway global warming, and how today this has persuaded politicians to land us with what promises to be the biggest bill in history. Christopher Booker interweaves the science of global warming with that of its growing political consequences, showing how just when the politicians are threatening to change our Western way of life beyond recognition, the scientific evidence behind the global warming theory is being challenged like never before.
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The message made my blood boil
- By George on 10-14-14
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How Democracy Ends
- By: David Runciman
- Narrated by: David Runciman
- Length: 7 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the end of World War II, democracy's sweep across the globe seemed inexorable. Yet today, it seems radically imperiled, even in some of the world's most stable democracies. How bad could things get? In How Democracy Ends, David Runciman argues that we are trapped in outdated 20th-century ideas of democratic failure. By fixating on coups and violence, we are focusing on the wrong threats. Our societies are too affluent, too elderly, and too networked to fall apart as they did in the past. We need new ways of thinking the unthinkable....
By: David Runciman
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The Bet
- Paul Ehrlich, Julian Simon, and Our Gamble over Earth's Future
- By: Paul Sabin
- Narrated by: Anthony Haden Salerno
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1980, the iconoclastic economist Julian Simon challenged celebrity biologist Paul Ehrlich to a bet. Their wager on the future prices of five metals captured the public’s imagination as a test of coming prosperity or doom. Ehrlich, author of the landmark book The Population Bomb, predicted that rising populations would cause overconsumption, resource scarcity, and famine—with apocalyptic consequences for humanity.
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Why can't we even discuss Global Overpopulaion???
- By Leslie deGraffenried on 10-19-15
By: Paul Sabin
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The Myth of the Rational Voter
- Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies
- By: Bryan Caplan
- Narrated by: David Drummond
- Length: 8 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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The greatest obstacle to sound economic policy is not entrenched special interests or rampant lobbying, but the popular misconceptions, irrational beliefs, and personal biases held by ordinary voters. This is economist Bryan Caplan's sobering assessment in this provocative and eye-opening book.
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Refreshing
- By Lyle Wincentsen on 05-12-11
By: Bryan Caplan
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American Sketches
- Great Leaders, Creative Thinkers, and Heroes of a Hurricane
- By: Walter Isaacson
- Narrated by: Cotter Smith
- Length: 9 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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In this collection of essays, Walter Isaacson reflects on the lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and various other interesting characters he has chronicled as a biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, in most cases, but that is not the secret of their success.
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Not Really Sketches
- By DAVID on 11-04-11
By: Walter Isaacson
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Shortcut
- How Analogies Reveal Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas
- By: John Pollack
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 7 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Analogies are far more complex than their SAT stereotype and lie at the very core of human cognition and creativity. Once we become aware of this, we start seeing them everywhere - in ads, apps, political debates, legal arguments, logos, and euphemisms, to name just a few. At their very best, analogies inspire new ways of thinking, enable invention, and motivate people to action. Unfortunately, not every analogy that rings true is true. That's why, at their worst, analogies can deceive, manipulate, or mislead us into disaster.
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Analogies???
- By Frederick on 08-16-15
By: John Pollack
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Success and Luck
- Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy
- By: Robert H. Frank
- Narrated by: Robert H. Frank
- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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How important is luck in economic success? No question more reliably divides conservatives from liberals. As conservatives correctly observe, people who amass great fortunes are almost always talented and hardworking. But liberals are also correct to note that countless others have those same qualities yet never earn much. In recent years, social scientists have discovered that chance plays a much larger role in important life outcomes than most people imagine.
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Not what is advertised
- By Andre on 04-18-17
By: Robert H. Frank
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The Great Mental Models
- General Thinking Concepts
- By: Shane Parrish
- Narrated by: Shane Parrish
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts is the first book in The Great Mental Models series designed to upgrade your thinking with the best, most useful and powerful tools so you always have the right one on hand. This volume details nine of the most versatile all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making, your productivity, and how clearly you see the world.
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A dissapointing debut
- By Peter on 04-14-19
By: Shane Parrish
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Dark Winter
- How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell
- By: John L. Casey
- Narrated by: David Stifel
- Length: 5 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Climate change has been a perplexing problem for years. Casey's research into the Sun's activity, which began almost a decade ago, resulted in discovery of a solar cycle that is now reversing from its global warming phase to that of dangerous global cooling for the next 30 years or more. This new cold climate will dramatically impact the world's citizens.
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Global Warming Is A Hoax
- By Catamount on 11-20-17
By: John L. Casey
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Blunder
- Why Smart People Make Bad Decisions
- By: Zachary Shore
- Narrated by: Zachary Shore, Kevin Pariseau
- Length: 8 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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We all make bad decisions. It's part of being human. The resulting mistakes can be valuable, the story goes, because we learn from them. But do we? Historian Zachary Shore says no, not always, and he has a long list of examples to prove his point.
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helpful extension of the genre
- By Andy on 07-11-09
By: Zachary Shore
What listeners say about Future Babble
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Future Navigator
- 04-17-16
A must read for all futurists and visionaries
Great to get the facts that most predictions are wrong. Quite funny that people still like to hear experts give more predictions even when the last one was wrong.
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Overall
- Christopher
- 08-24-11
Sobering and Informative
I'm a bit surprised at the other 2 reviews listed here and I fear they may have missed the point. In particular, judging a book based on what it "implies by omission" is inexplicably poor logic. Defending unfulfilled predictions based on the idea that they may one day come true is similarly difficult to digest.
Dan Gardner points out in this book that expert predictions are wrong far, far more often than we'd like to think (equivalent to a monkey throwing darts) and yet people put far too much trust in those predictions time and time again. He does not recommend any particular course of action to remedy this (other than reasonable caution), but so what? He points out this error and points out that it continues to be made despite scads of evidence showing why we should consciously try to avoid making it. He shows why we make this mistake. He explains the science behind the book, which is solid.
He does not imply (even by omission) that we should not plan for the future. He merely points out that using expert predictions has proven to be an ineffective tool for decision making. For example, we SHOULD develop and improve renewable, environmentally friendly energy sources because it makes perfect sense to do so, not because some "expert" predicts huge oil shortages.
We all love to have answers and we all love to believe we have insider knowledge of what the future holds. This is a serious weakness that can be and is exploited by people time and time again. You are far better off with no answer at all than you are with a wrong answer. At least understanding that we don't know what the future holds is a reasonable position to take, and we can move forward ready for anything.
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- Steve from MD
- 08-10-11
Just plain babble
I wanted to like this book and thought I would correct the previous reviews. Unfortunately this is just bad science and not well researched. Some parts are accurate but lots suffer from the same problems he complains about. Yes predicting the future is difficult. However, anypne can selective cherry pick data to make a point. Yes there are lots of biases that may cause this problem. One which he does not seem to recoginize, despite talking about the origins early in the book is publication bias. People do not buy books that are about happy and cheerful outlooks. People want to read about disasters and problems. There are better books out there, I would pass on this one.
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Overall
- Karen
- 05-04-11
Future Babble Babble
Besides being endlessly repetitious, I disagree with Gardner’s premise that expert predictions, especially those of what he terms“hedgehogs” who have a certainty about their predictions, are almost always wrong. Gardner’s reasoning lacks (1) an accurate frame of reference and (2) is completely non-scientifically supported. For example, Paul Ehrlich, predicted massive famines, resource depletion and environmental degradation as a result of overpopulation (and endless growth). Gardner emphatically claims, over and over, that Ehrlich was wrong, because his predictions of human and environmental catastrophes that were supposed to occur in the 1970’s didn’t happen.
If you read Ehrlich carefully, he does not state with certainty that everything he predicts will come true in the 1970’s – only that it will come true, eventually. Simple logic will tell you that. The human population cannot continue expanding indefinitely. The earth is finite. Sooner or later, human numbers will outstrip both food supply and the ability of the earth to produce enough food. Sooner or later petroleum, copper, titanium, etc. are all going to run out, and it will not be possible to produce the products that depend on them, except at exorbitant cost. The more people, the less resources per capita and the bigger the gap between the “haves” and the “have-nots”. This is not a recipe for a peaceful and stable future.
Ehrlich’s message is really that we have to be aware that there are limits to growth and to our consumptive way of life. What Gardner does not state but implies through omission, is that we can blithely go on with whatever profligate agenda we have in mind, and something will always come along to mitigate our effects. I don’t personally believe this. Sooner or later the piper will have to be paid, and fundamentally Ehrlich is right.
Gardner has his own ax to grind, and he does so ceaselessly. Perhaps his form of babble makes him the biggest hedgehog of them all.
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6 people found this helpful