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Yeah, I think I'll go strongly the other direction on this.
"Terry Bradshaw may predict the Browns to beat the Bengals, but at a certain time we'll know the winner and if the Bengals win the sun will rise the next morning and his being wrong about it will have no effect on anything."
The problem is, this isn't true at all. It's not true in football, it's not true politics, it's not true across many dimensions of life. And the world we live in is worse off for it.
Terry Bradshaw is one guy out of many many people giving opinions, I wouldn't say that his opinion alone is the basis that people's futures ride on, but when Brandon Staley goes for it on 4th down, and Terry Bradshaw says that he's the reason the Chargers lost (everytime that happens, a guys livelihood is on the line), when the Rams lose a game and Terry Bradshaw says the Jared Goff is the reason why they lost (a guys livelihood is on the line). (I don't know if Bradshaw actually had those particular take, I made them up as example, though I do remember various talking heads making them, just not which particular talking head).
Every little statement like this affects public perception, and public perception affects reality. We humans are highly susceptible to group think.
The presumption is that that the guy on TV knows what he's talking about, knows the factors that goes into whether the Browns have what it takes to beat the Bengals [1], I agree that for the most part no one really cares, I'm saying that we should, if in reality, these guys are actually just full of shit constantly. That's actually extremely useful information.
This obviously applies to politics as well, no matter what happens on Tues, the Wednesday morning QBs will come out, it's extremely useful to understand that most of them are full of shit.
[1] Somewhat hilariously, these picks typically aren't even against the spread, to the degree that these guys can't even figure out to just pick the obvious favorites... truly wasting all of our time.
I don't see what this has to do with anything I said. I'm talking about predictions, not post-mortem analysis.
The ability to make falsifiable predictions is how we know we understand things about the world we live in.
Not understanding the world we live in has real consequences.
I’m arguing for more discourse around predictions, in response to your argument for less discourse around predictions.
I suspect we agree that the discourse could be much better than it actually is.
TLDR, I actually like Nate Silver’s schtick quite a bit, and wish we had more people trying to do it across more areas of interest.
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