In the last few years, I’ve found myself reading mainstream punditry less and less. I still scan the representative political sites, but I read a lot less off what they offer, at least the opinion/prediction stuff. I’ve stopped watching TV news entirely. I have no idea where CNN is on my dial and I have not watched Fox for so long I have no idea what makes up their lineup. I’m vaguely aware of a shakeup last year. The primary reason is bias. That would be my bias. I found in the last few years I tend to put too much weight on punditry I find agreeable and dismiss that which is unpleasant. I really thought Mitt Romney, for example, had a chance to win in 2012 because my only news source was Drudge and the punditry sites.

That bias thing has become something that pops up in my head whenever reading anything about politics. Almost all political coverage is about telling us what will happen next. There’s a small amount of time covering what happened in the past. In fact, it seems that modern times is as much about erasing the past as it is about anything else. That came to mind when looking at this piece in the NYTimes. Granted, I rarely read this guy, but I never would have remembered his errors unless he wrote about them. In fact, no one ever remembers the batshit crazy predictions and prognostications of the pundit-ocracy. I suspect most people, like I used to do, skim the stuff they wish was not true and soak in the stuff they hope is true. Since nothing ever changes that much, it all gets flushed down the memory hole.

This post by Steve Sailer is a good insight into the bullshit business. Most predictions about tomorrow are wrong because they start with the assumption tomorrow will be noticeably different from today.

Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair amount of competence in this tournament derives from having a sense of just how long it takes for stuff to happen. Since the game looks at typically annual time frames so that it can determine winners and losers in a reasonable amount of time, I bet a lot of losers have a tendency to say, “Yeah, that will probably happen” without estimating how long it could take for it to happen.

Then there is the bias toward bias. Fox News knows their audience is made up of rightward folks who wants confirmation and leftward folks and leftward folks who want to do battle with the right by yelling from the couch or through a proxy. Therefore, having people predict bad things for the Cult of Modern Liberalism is good business.  Then of course, there’s the peanut gallery effect. The more yells and screams that come from the crowd over one set of predictions or opinions, the more of that we are sure to get. Even if money is not the currency, just the sound of folks chanting your name is enough to buoy the prognosticator.

Knowing all of this, I wonder if my expectations of the near future will improve. By that, I mean will events unfold more like I expect or will my willful ignorance of the chattering classes make me less informed? I now devote much more of my leisure time to reading old books and studying odd stuff. I’m now reading an 18th century novel and a book on Bayesian probability. I have followed the health care stuff, for example, very little beyond the initial hilarity. Will my expectations about how it unfolds in 2014 be better without having kept up or worse? For the record, I doubt much of anything changes and some other event sucks all the air out of that room, at least for a while.

I predict I’ll never know.

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