The fourth factor is whether winning and losing are clear. This is big. Clear metrics make it possible to create feedback loops that analysts can use to improve their predictions in the future. In sports, winning and losing is obvious. In foreign policy, it isn't. Is al Qaeda on the path to defeat? Is Iraq on the way to stabilization? Will the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeed? Who got it right or wrong? It's hard to say. And the answer today may be different in a year, a decade, or a century. Today's headlines and tomorrow's history books are rarely the same. It's hard for analysts to get better at predicting when they don't know if their past predictions were ever any good.
Deception is the fifth and final factor. University of Louisville Coach Rick Pitino may be holding a little something back for the tournament -- a new play, a different substitution. But this is small-bore stuff compared to what states and transnational actors do to conceal their real intentions and capabilities.
So much for the extremes. The big news is just how much the middle of the predictability spectrum is growing. Smart people are finding clever new ways of generating better data, identifying and unpacking biases, and sharing information unimaginable 20 or even 10 years ago. The result: A growing range of human activity has moved from the world of "analysis-by-gut-check" to "analysis by evidence." Nobody predicted just how much can be predicted now.
My three favorite examples of this prediction revolution are election forecasting, medical decision-making, and studies of ethnic conflict.
In the 2012 presidential election, the New York Times's Nate Silver wielded math and polling data to beat the experience and gut feel of longtime election pundits who forecasted a Romney victory. Conservative columnist George Will said his "wild card" was whether Minnesota would go to Romney, edging the Republican to a 321-electoral vote win. Peggy Noonan blogged on the eve of the election, "While everyone is looking at the polls and the storm, Romney's slipping into the presidency." Romney was slipping all right -- in the polls she wasn't watching. It was a big, public triumph of big data and good analysis over reasoning-by-anecdote-and-wishful-thinking that made old school pundits look old.
Evidence-based medicine has shown how doctors' experience and judgment are often wrong. Harvard Professor David S. Jones's new book, Broken Hearts, recounts how two of the most common treatments for heart disease, coronary bypass surgery and angioplasty, have been widely used for years because doctors believed -- falsely, it turns out -- that these procedures would extend life expectancy. Physicians reasoned that patients suffering from blocked arteries would live longer lives if the clogs could somehow be removed or circumvented. Bypass surgery did this by grafting veins or arteries from another part of the body into the heart vasculature. Angioplasty involved inserting a balloon into the blocked artery to compress and shrink the blockage, and then inserting a mesh-like stent to keep future clots from forming. In 1996, doctors performed a peak of 600,000 heart bypass operations. In the 2000s, more than a million angioplasties were performed annually. Yet when randomized clinical trials were conducted, results showed clearly that, except for a few of the sickest patients, these surgical treatments did not extend life expectancy any more than medication and lifestyle changes. And surgery imposed significant side-effect risks, including brain damage.
In political science, new large datasets and field experiments are revolutionizing how we think about ethnic conflict. For years, scholars and policymakers assumed that ethnic cleavages were the primary cause of civil wars. But that's because they never considered how many ethnic cleavages did not cause civil wars. When Professors Jim Fearon and David Laitin did the math, they found that civil wars were more often caused by weak government capacity, low levels of economic development, and mountainous terrain than religious or ethnic differences.
The prediction business isn't perfect. Big hairy outliers still happen with alarming frequency. But March Madness reminds us that not all guesswork has to be guesswork. Gut feel is overrated. And increasingly, it's not the only game in town.
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