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People get paid a lot of money to be experts on things, so one would assume they're much more knowledgeable than the average Joe or, at the very least, a blindfolded monkey throwing darts. Sadly, in many cases this just isn't true, and the so called "expertise" in question amounts to little more than a shot in the goddamn dark. Here are a few cases of experts that probably shouldn't inspire as much confidence as they do. #6.
Stock Market Experts
Many of us find the stock market too intimidating to put money into, or at least we would if we had the money to invest in the first place. How do you decide what stocks to pick? We can't even pick where to go for lunch half the time and we understand lunch.
That's when you call in a professional, or if you're not rich, you buy a pre-set package of stocks and bonds that a professional has pre-picked for you, and then sit back and, uh... Watch your stocks grow more slowly than if you picked them at random. Yes, as it turns out, the majority of professionally managed funds picked by stock market experts (70 to 85 percent) actually underperform the Dow or S&P indexes, which are technically supposed to represent the average performance of the market to begin with.
If you do have to peddle your nest egg off to someone else, try to hand it to Warren Buffet, whose Berkshire Hathaway stocks have outperformed the index by 11.14 percent on average for over 30 years. So it's not like financial advisors can't know what to pick. They usually just don't. But hey, there is some good news: When going up against a bunch of dudes throwing darts at a chart to randomly pick their stocks, the stock professionals performed better. Barely. #5.
Wine Tasters
One thing we all can be sure about is that people that make their living writing about wine must be able to sniff out differences between wines much better than us plain ordinary folk. Sure, Joe Consumer actually likes cheaper wines better, but that's because Joe Consumer is a stupid Philistine. The experts can tell the difference between a 2006 and 2007 Stag's Leap Cabernet Sauvignon in their sleep because everyone knows 2006 was a pedestrian year for Napa Valley reds.
Hell, they are so good they can tell the difference between two bottles of the same wine. In one experiment, wine experts were given two bottles of the same wine, only one was labeled a "vin de table" (France's version of "Night Train") and one was labeled a "grand cru" (top-rated vineyard since 1855). Want to guess what happened? According to the article: "Whereas the tasters found the wine from the first bottle 'simple,' 'unbalanced,' and 'weak,' they found the wine from the second 'complex,' 'balanced,' and 'full.'" Not only were their tasting skills put to shame, it didn't even occur to them that nobody buys a $40-plus bottle of wine for a university experiment.
Not only can professional wine tasters be convinced that the same bottle of wine was both award-winning and hobo juice, but they could even be convinced that the same bottle was both red and white with the cunning use of food coloring. That's not to say the whole idea of wine tasting is a crock- it just seems like a field where judging with one's eyes is a temptation too easy to fall into. For example, in the 1976 Judgment of Paris, French experts picked American wines as superior to their own, recoiling in horror when they found out. #4.
Art Critics
Despite being the battle cry of the bad artist, it's really true that art is subjective. So we don't expect art critics to be able to tell us which art is the "best." We do expect them to at least be able to tell the difference between a Van Gogh and a Picasso, or a Vermeer and a Gary Larson.
The good news is that one of those expectations is correct. Hans van Meegeren was an ordinary mild-mannered artist in the 1930s, who painted unimpressive portraits until one day an art critic called him "unoriginal." Determined to deliver the most ferocious professional scrotum kick in history, Meegeren hatched a daring plan to paint a completely new painting in the style of the artist Vermeer, let all the critics fawn over the newly discovered Vermeer, and then show them all for fools when he revealed he had painted it. Sure enough, his knock-off was hailed by critics as a Vermeer masterpiece, bought for the modern equivalent of $6-million and featured as the centerpiece of a prestigious gallery exhibition. Van Meegeren, realizing he liked money, ditched the plan to reveal himself and began painting more Vermeers. After the war, he was arrested for selling "stolen" Vermeers to the Nazis.
Then in 1964, Swedish art critics were fooled into praising the works of Pierre Brassau with descriptions like "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." Brassau's methods? He "preferred eating the paint to placing it on a canvas." Because Brassau was a fucking chimpanzee. |
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Actually 0.5 is lowest possible probability if there are 2 choices. If sportswriter has ability to predict outcome for 0.4 probability then he has ability to predict winner in 0.6
I can't believe actuaries didn't make the list...
I think that just means you don't really understand what actuaries are for.
They're just trend analysis. They're not saying "this is going to happen". They're saying "Hey insurance companies, these are roughly your costs".
I had thought that Mona Lisa looked like a cow...
Only rain is mentioned in the weather forecast. What about temperature, how cloudy it will be, and how windy it will be? There are a lot more aspects to weather forecast then whether or not it will rain.
I agree...
Predicting out to a week what the general weather will be like still isn't a hard science. Taking general climate into consideration alone will do %90 of the work for you.
You also have to take location into account.
While it may not rain everyday where I live (the Midwest), coastal areas have a much higher chance.
About the wine, a 'vin de table' is rather cheap but doesn't have to be bad at all. Especially when you buy vin de table in a wine district in i.e. France. Wine houses do have quota on how much wine with a certain label is to be produced in a year. A part of what is left over is sold locally without a label, i.e. to local restaurants. If you happen to go to the Bordeaux area in France and you find some time, go to Pauillac and visit the small village of Artigues a few kilometers inland. There, buy yourself some 'vin de table' on the street or in the little wine house. You'll get a Rothschild class wine for almost nothing, the Rothschild chateaux are nearby. ;-)
Besides that, historically the 'vin de table' was one of the finest wines a restaurant would offer. It was a business card so to speak. If you buy 'vin de table' in a supermarket and you are not in a wine district you most probably will get a mass produced blend. Avoid it if it doesn't have a label or brand. Stick to wine houses that mass produce decent wine under their own label. You'll pay a little bit more for far better quality.
And PS, don't bother buying gallons of 'vin de table' in France on the street to take it home. The quality does not last very long. The wine you buy is fresh from the barrels. As soon it is in a bottle c.q. contacted air chemical reactions start. Wine houses that bottle wine for export use professional methods where contamination is avoided. The better wines you buy are bottled right after harvest and ripe in the bottle. When you buy 'vin de table' on location it hasn't been bottled and you should consume it within days.
I too thought wine tasters were poseurs -- until I met real ones. These guys used to play a game called "optioning", which was essentially five multiple-choice questions about wine poured from a hidden bottle. Questions like the name of the vineyard, the mixture of grape varieties, and the year of the vintage. Several of them would consistently get 4 or 5 out of 5, every time, for a dozen wines in a row. (And a as "dozen in a row" suggests, yes, they only got one sip for each quiz.)
I'm much less experienced, but can now generally tell, say, a Cab Sav from a Shiraz by the aroma ("nose") and you know what? I enjoy wine much more as a result.
Wine tasting is something you do in context. In a restaurant the wine taster picks the best wines to go with a meal. That's not a trick but experience. Since the market changes constantly the wine taster is busy picking the right bottles to put on the wine card. I've never met wine tasters that blindly taste wines to determine what brand, label and year it was. First, there is absolutely no use. Second, taste changes by what you've been eating/drinking before so wine X will taste different if you've had some of wine Y just before. It's all relative and you cannot neutralize taste with a piece of bread or water. Anyway, it's almost impossible to taste five wines in succession and than determine the characteristics. Determining basic properties of a wine is not that hard and not very impressive IMHO.
Art critics have to be full of crap, because ever since "looks just like it would in real life" became passe in art, there's nothing else to talk about. So they have to go with extremely subjective opinions and feelings, leaving most casual viewers behind. Trust me, I've got a fine arts degree and I can make up that kind of stuff on demand.
How's that job at McDonald's treating you?
The same Swedish critics, when they found out just what they had been complimenting,pointed out that the chimp's art was still the best there.
Mr. Bean, bumbling into being taken as an art critic, "I look at pictures."
As people who work on Wall Street say, ""Everyone on Wall Street lies."
"I don't mean to be that guy, but criminal profilers are very good at what they do if you watch forensic files enough you might know that. Secondly they said the unabomber was a guy that lived in the woods do to the materials that he made the bomb with cause they traced them back to a rural store" Qouting MatchedPlayer
LMAO, I can't believe you are actually using A TV Program for your argument. Do you actually believe that CRUD? Do you actually believe that that is how the FBI or any other government agency works? Wow I feel sorry for America's Future, if people actually believe that they would be that meticulous for every Murder. LOL, In reality, When someone is killed, they "ASSUME" who did it and then build a case to support that assumption. Do you know how many people get accused before the actual person is found? If real life were like TV, we wouldn't need TV for entertainment. So please have a cup of reality and join the rest of humanity.
Except that Forensic Files isn't a drama like CSI, its a doc*mentary-style show that has real FBI cases, dumbass.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_Files
Aximus, it's still a TV program, and as much as I want to believe that what they say is accurate, it's probably bulls**t.
And didn't that episode air AFTER the Unabomber was arrested? You know, after all of that information became readily available?
PS: It's a wikipedia article.
the FBI blew it big time with the Olympic Park bomber. And in the case of the DC snipers, they probably let political correctness get in the way of good judgement. If you're trying to convince me that your profession is a science then be pure about it and make the unpopular predictions.
All kinds of critics are full of s**t!
That's exactly their work, to categorize and discriminate things that eventually are subjective, like anything I can sense is subjective.
There are those, and then there are those who, through their constant exposure to the field they work in, actually know a bit more about this s**t than your average Joe. Ultimately, it's definitely subjective, but I'd pick an informed subjective opinion over a completely random one in many cases. There's also a big difference between snobby little s**tes that proclaim themselves 'experts' or 'critics' on something to get a whiff of prestige, and those who simply know a lot because they actually care about the thing in question.
I agree. The reason they're critics by profession is because people DO give a damn what they think. And most likely their opinions are pretty sound. But at the end of the day, first-hand experience beats hearsay.
The section on wine experts misquotes the study, which is quoted from The New Yorker. The New Yorker article says, "a student in oenology at the University of Bordeaux, did a study in which he served fifty-seven participants a midrange red Bordeaux..." He did not serve wine experts (which would be interesting), he served "participants", which usually in such studies are ordinary people.
Used to drink Night Train when Iwas down and out in Brooklyn! It really hits the spot. Talk about Gallo knowing its market!
Sports writer for sure.
i want it noted i live in kansas. If you can accurately predict the weather 86 percent of the time a day in advance your ahead of the curve. And possibly a witch. The weather here is one slow motion mind f*&^ that starts when you leave the house for the morning.
wtf?!? what about telemarketers?
A great (and very entertaining) example of how full of s**t art critics are is a movie by the name "Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock?" I'd explain why, but honestly the Wikipedia entry is pretty good. Just go watch it; if you liked this article, you'd enjoy it.
This article was on the Diggnation podcast :P I was watching Diggnation and I was thinking 'WTF, I have read that article!
My father, a newspaper editor, specifically listed sports writers as one of the categories of men I was forbidden to date. Also on the list were DJs, frat boys and redheads. Over the years I dated DJs, frat boys and redheads, but never a sports writer. I was a rebel, not a fool.
Redheads are people too. Sports writers, no.
How many f**kin sportswriters could you possibly know? They're not exactly a common profession.
I think you miss the point of some of these professions. Art critics are, first and foremost, writers, as are sports writers. The point is attracting the readers to the ideas, not being accurate. If you want someone who can accurately identify a Vermeer, go to a chemical analyst, not a critic; if you want someone who can predict the outcome of a sports game, go to a statistician, not a sports writer. Also, I'd be interested in knowing who said that the monkey was a great painter, and how respected those people were as art critics, in general.
If that's really the case, then why even have "Sports"-writers or "Art" critics? Why aren't they just average joes having their opinions published? The fact is that THEY put weight on their own critiquing/predictive abilities and therefore THEY are held up to that standard.