Peter Schiff Wildly Wrong
Peter Schiff is the guy Siriuslylong keeps TRYING to defend.
Maybe he should read the following book which takes on Peter Schiff among others
and demonstrates how wrong many of their predictions have been.
No More Stupid Forecasts!
By Michael Edesess
July 5, 2011
"Successes on the front page, failures in the back
No one escapes unscathed from Gardner’s review. Peter Schiff, for example, who has been lionized for having insistently predicted the financial crisis, is shown to have made many other forecasts that were dead wrong — including predictions of crises that didn’t happen."
Eat, Drink, & Be Merry, for Tomorrow We (Might) Die, March 20, 2011
by William Holmes.
Gardner's "Future Babble" is a much needed antitode to the endless stream of nonsense that we hear from pundits who claim to be able to predict the future. Broadly speaking, Gardner distinguishes between two types of experts: Hedgehogs, who know a given subject extremely well, are very confident about their predictions and are almost always wrong, often spectacularly so; and Foxes, whose opinions about the future recognize the difficulties and complexity of forecasting and are nuanced accordingly. The Foxes are only a bit more apt to be on target than the Hedgehogs, but they will at least acknowledge their errors, recognize the limitations of their art and adjust their opinions to account for new facts. They are also routinley ignored because they are boring.
Unfortunately, people crave certainty, so they lionize experts who make bold, articulate predictions about what will happen five, ten, fifteen, even fifty years from now, a proposition that is inherently suspect when you consider that chaos theory shows that even small changes in initial assumptions will dramatically change long-term outcomes. Fortunately for the experts and their livelihood, listeners do an incredibly poor job of holding experts accountable for their gross errors. We remember the rare hits and ignore the many, many misses, a point that Gardner illustrates elelgantly and repeatedly.
With wit and broad knowledge of his subjects, Gardner skewers numerous still famous "experts" who have routinely been wrong about things like the price of oil, the scarcity or abundance of commodities, population growth, Y2K, the collapse or persistence of the Soviet Union, and a host of other problems. He also explains the psychological reasons--confirmation bias, negativity bias, anchoring bias, hindsight bias, optimism bias, and even "bias bias"--that enables experts to maintain their self-confidence despite their manifest errors, and that causes the rest of us to keep hanging on their every word despite the fact that they are usually wrong. We are drawn to those who are "often in error, but never in doubt" rather than those who recognize that predictions are very hard to make, especially about the future.
