Stardate 20011115.0438 (On Screen): Andrew Sullivan has been collecting particularly egregious examples of big-name pundits who reluctantly (read "eagerly") pronounced this war a failure before the fall of Mazar-e Sharif and the collapse of Taliban military power. It makes for amazing reading, and it also makes you wonder about the motivation of the people involved. Of course, many of these are people who make their living by being seen as experts; their job is to tell us what's going to happen.
There's an interesting scam which some shady stockbrokers have used. It goes like this: you get a mailing list and divide it into halves. One half receives a free advisory from you that the market will rise, the other that it will fall. Whichever actually happens, you discard the other half. Then, again, you divide the list in half and do the same thing. This goes on for maybe five times, after which you've got 1/32nd of the list where you made the correct prediction five times in a row. Those people then get the hard sell, on the grounds that you were absolutely prescient. Of course, you weren't; it's just that they lucked into being in the group where you were right five times, but they're balanced by all the people who received wrong predictions from you. But they don't know that; because they don't see all the others. All they see is five predictions in a row which came out correct -- and quite often they will sign up for your newsletter or give you money to invest or whatever.
I have to wonder whether some of these pundits may have been following the same strategy turned around: they cast the dice and decided to predict that the war was a failure; if they were right, their futures as analysts were secure. As it turns out, now they look like fools -- but it was a gamble, and their careers are not over because of it. I suspect some of them were simply misguided, but some may indeed have been doing this at least subconsciously. (discuss)
