Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Tim Harford describes a very interesting incident in How to Make the World Add Up . It’s about an art expert named Abraham Bredius. The man’s speciality was Vermeer. He was a proven expert who had spotted many frauds of Rembrandt and Vermeer paintings over a career spanning decades. And yet he got fooled by a fraud Vermeer painting titled Christ at Emmaus .   Harford’s digs into how an expert could have been fooled by a painting like Emmaus . Sure, anyone can be fooled, make an odd mistake. But this painting didn’t even look anything great, not remotely comparable to any of Vermeer’s masterpieces. So how could someone Bredius fall for it?   The short answer: it fed into Bredius’ history; what he wanted to believe.   Now for the longer version. Bredius had a fascination for Vermeer’s religious works. Only two existed. The first one had been identified by Bredius himself. The second one he’d declared to not be a Vermeer. Other experts had disagreed, and the con...

Was the Brexit vote the “wrong” choice? The experts certainly think so; but then again, did the experts see the financial crisis of 2008 coming? If they couldn’t see the greatest financial catastrophe since the Great Depression, should we really believe their doomsday predictions now? In Thinking, Fast and Slow , Daniel Kahneman said that the reason experts fail may not be arrogance. Rather: “The reason is that the person who acquires more knowledge develops an enhanced illusion of her skill and becomes unrealistically overconfident .” Overconfident and arrogance: it’s a critical difference. Arrogance is without basis; overconfidence is a problem of degree. Note how this rules out the seemingly obvious solution of calling oneself useless. If you consider yourself terrible, would you have any confidence in your forecasts?! In fact, as Philip Tetlock wrote in Superforecasting , what we need is a different kind of humility: “The humility required for good judgment is not s...