Random House India
    The cover of the book “Indianomix.”

    This is an exclusive excerpt from Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya’s book “Indianomix,” to be published by Random House India on Dec. 6. This excerpt is adapted from the second section of Chapter 4, “Heads or Tails?”

    Sure, India could be a dangerous place for women. Whether it’s domestic violence, neglect of the girl child, sex-selective abortion, or the continuing prevalence of dowry, all of which are widely reported almost every day, life in India does seem tough for its women. But is it worse than in other countries we suspect might also be dangerous for women? Can you quantify such things?

    In June 2011, newspapers carried the headline that India is, in fact, the ‘fourth most dangerous’ country in the world for women. It was just ahead of Somalia. Afghanistan was the worst, followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Pakistan.  What was this conclusion based on? Was it an analysis of the relevant statistics that were compiled into an index? No. It was based on a survey of 213 experts conducted by TrustLaw, a service providing information on women’s rights that’s run by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The experts spanned the spectrum from academics, aid professionals, journalists, policymakers, and development specialists. They were asked for their opinion on what they thought the most dangerous places in the world were, with a series of separate follow-up questions on dimensions of women’s safety such as health, access to economic resources, cultural or religious discrimination, sexual violence, and the risk of being subjected to human trafficking.

    The final number was arrived at by adding together and weighing the responses of all of these experts. So, would it be correct to say that a survey found India to be the fourth most dangerous place in the world for women? No. A more accurate, though less spicy, way of putting it would be that among a survey of experts, India showed up in fourth place when these experts’ opinions on how dangerous different countries are for women were added together. It doesn’t necessarily mean that, in any statistically meaningful sense, India (or any other country) is actually fourth (or first, or tenth) most dangerous. A survey like this is only as valuable as the level of faith you put in experts and the methodology of  adding opinions together into one composite number.

    Psychological research tells us that human beings instinctively dislike uncertainty. We want definite answers to questions that are intrinsically difficult to tackle. We like easily digestible and understandable information, such as lists of the ‘Top 10’: whether it’s billionaires or most dangerous countries. Information that helps us understand and analyse our difficult world is particularly sought after, especially if it’s cloaked in the garb of expert truth. If you’ve watched toothpaste ads, you’ll recall seeing the virtues of this or the other toothpaste brand being extolled by a serious-looking ‘expert’ (usually an actor, the fine print tells you) clad in a white lab coat. And don’t forget the talking heads on TV, who are almost always well groomed and snazzily dressed, as if that had anything to do with the quality of their information or insight.

    And if understanding the present weren’t hard enough, we also want to know what’s going to happen in the future, whether it’s the outcome of an election, the performance of the stock market, or our own personal futures. Often, the real test of expertise is a prediction about the future. Any reasonably intelligent person should be able to look backward and form a judgement, but it’s left up to the ‘real’ experts to be able to look forward into the future and make predictions about it, aspiring to an omniscience once reserved for the gods.

    From astrology to tarot, human history is littered with our attempts at better predicting the future. More recently, these include more scientific (or at least apparently so) methods like polls and expert predictions. Philip Tetlock, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is most famous for a 20-year study in which he tracked the predictions of hundreds of experts in many different fields spanning the range from business to international relations and then compared the actual outcomes to the predictions. He published his results in a landmark 2005 book called Expert Political Judgement: How Good Is It? How Can We Know. In the study, he found that the predictions of experts were no more accurate than if you’d just tossed a coin instead. In fact, sometimes tossing a coin would give you a better prediction than listening to an expert. As Tetlock colourfully puts it, even a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard would do better than most experts. You could probably do even better than the monkey, but that would be just by mechanically extrapolating a trend from today into the future. (The simplest form of extrapolation is what’s known in mathematics as ‘linear extrapolation’. Basically, if you have two points, you put a straight line through those points and make a prediction assuming that the next data point will also lie along that same straight line.)

    There are innumerable examples of what Tetlock has in mind. Here’s one from March 2012. A much publicized paper by economics professor Dan Johnson of Colorado College and Ayfer Ali created a complicated statistical model with many variables to predict how countries would do in the medal tally of the winter and summer Olympic Games. They have a very large data set spanning games from 1952 to the present. The authors find some interesting correlations between variables, such as the intuitive ideas that rich countries win more medals than poor countries and that countries with snowy winters do better in the winter games. Where they falter is when they claim that their statistical model can provide ‘surprisingly accurate predictions’ of medal tallies in future games. But as Roger Pielke Jr, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder, showed, the interesting correlations that Johnson and Ali found didn’t translate into good predictive power. In line with Tetlock’s research, Pielke showed that the naïve assumption that a country would win as many medals next time as last time performs better than the complicated statistical model.

    The news doesn’t get any better. If statistical models perform poorly at making predictions, experts do even worse. Tetlock identifies two main types of experts, depending on their personalities, the first being ‘hedgehogs’, single-minded devotees to a particular big concept or idea, which they stick to through thick or thin. While performing worst of all, they also tend to be the experts with the highest media profile, whether it’s conventional media such as newspapers and TV or social media such as Twitter and the blogosphere. Such people exude confidence, don’t mince words, and boldly tell you what’s going to happen. More often than not, they’re wrong. The second type of expert, who does a little better than tossing a coin and that, too, way better than the hedgehogs, are what Tetlock calls the ‘foxes’. Foxes are pragmatic and not ideological. They’re willing to change their minds, or even discard a cherished theory, if the facts point in a different direction. Foxes are circumspect, cautious, and will make predictions only grudgingly, knowing well that the chances are high that they might be wrong. Not surprisingly these are the folks you don’t see as the talking heads on TV. The wisdom of a fox doesn’t translate into a good sound bite or a 140-character tweet like the certainty of a hedgehog does.

    Despite Tetlock’s well-publicized and much discussed research, which has been popularized and extended in Dan Gardner’s book, Future Babble, surveys based on expert opinions of dubious value, to say nothing of ubiquitous expert commentary, are still trotted out and garner much media attention. A fiercely competitive media environment, as in India or the US, which places a heavy premium on sounding and looking confident while pontificating, accentuates this tilt towards hedgehogs. In the battle for public attention, the bold, if reckless, predictions of a confident hedgehog are an easier sell than the thoughtful fox who tells you that they don’t really know what’s going to happen. If the predictions match the ideological persuasion of the TV host or the intended audience, so much the better. Yogendra Yadav, the polling guru, believes this is one reason why the quality of political punditry in India hasn’t improved although the quantity has exploded.

    The advent of social media in India, especially Twitter, Facebook and blogs, has definitely democratized the channels of communication between those who want to get their views out and those who’re looking to be informed and engage in a dialogue. In the old media, an expert commentator will usually have the right institutional connection, the right family background, or be well-networked—often all three.

    In the social media, anyone with a computer and an internet connection can proclaim themselves an expert. Ironically, the welter of so many new voices competing for attention has, if anything, increased the premium on being a hedgehog and made the foxes even more invisible than before. If you have to be strong, decisive, and articulate in a two-minute sound bite on television, it’s exponentially more important when you have to get your point across in 140 characters. The medium isn’t given to nuances. At least in India, if you’d like to have your voice heard on Twitter, turning into a hedgehog is your best bet.



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