Keeping Score

Back in early 2003, before the Ir aq war started, my father and I discussed the possibility of war and whether we supported it or not. I was tentatively in favor, but on two conditions: (i) that the Bush administration had sound reasons for going to war, and (ii) it knew what it was getting into and had thought carefully about how it was going to handle the aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s overthrow. I had grave concerns about whether those conditions were true, and didn’t like our chances if they weren’t.

Well, my concerns turned out to be well-founded, unfortunately. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I successfully predicted the future, but my predictions turned out to be more accurate than a lot of what passed for political commentary at the time. Which is a very telling mark on the state of commentary. I’m reasonably well-educated, but certainly no expert on foreign and current affairs. I should be totally outclassed by people whose job it is to keep up with this sort of thing.

What kills me is to see that writers who were wrong back then, and have continually been wrong since, still have an audience. And they’re still making predictions and telling us what the U.S. should be doing next, as if they had any credibility. It would be awesome if there was a way of keeping score on how accurate pundits are, and if the scores of each were posted in any publications the pundits produced.

That would be tricky to pull off, since many pundits, right or left, are weaselly and either don’t make predictions that are specific and measurable enough to be able to be proved wrong. But I’m sure it could be done. For example, I would have asked these questions, among others, in 2003:

1. How many U.S. troops will be stationed in Iraq 
     in the year 2006?
   a. Less than a thousand
   b. 1000-25,000
   c. 25,000 – 150,000
   d. Over 150,000

2. How much money will the U.S. have spent on the war 
     by the year 2006?
   a. …
   b. …

3. How many American servicemen and women will have been 
     killed in Iraq by the year 2006?

Actually, I would ask two versions of such questions; one to predict the future for the next calendar year, and the other to make a longer-term prediction; say for five years. If we recorded peoples’ predictions every year, then we’d have an objective record of who was accurate and who wasn’t. Then hopefully, the inaccurate commentators would decline in influence, on the grounds of sucking at their jobs, and everybody knowing it.

Keeping score like this would be good for writers and readers. It would force writers to take their jobs a little more seriously. A lot of commentators, right and left, are simply preaching to the choir and saying what they and/or their supporters want to hear. Likewise, many people read from sources that say what the people want to hear, and it would be good for them to know the weaknesses of such sources.

I’m actually speaking from experience here, somewhat. I generally lean liberal, but I have a good enough memory to have a sense of who’s consistently right or wrong, and when I see that arguments that I like on the surface turn out wrong enough, I start to discount them.