I'm an Expert. Don't Trust Me.

I’M EXPERT.DON’T TRUST ME.

Phil SimonV2V

July 15, 2014

Hi. I’m Phil.

@philsimon 2

WHO AM I?

• Award-winning author of six books that don’t suck, most recently The Visual Organization

• Huge Breaking Bad fan (more on that later)

• Often called an expert of some kind @philsimon # 3

ˈekˌspərtNounA person who is very knowledgeable about or skillful in a particular area.

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EXPERT

You’d think that experts would be pretty good at predicting the future.

And you’d be spectacularly wrong.

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“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”–Yogi Berra

• 284 experts • 28,000 predictions about the

future over the course of 20 years

• Expert predictions were wrong nearly 50 percent of the time

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LET’S ASK PHILIP TETLOCK

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“We don’t like their sound. Groups of guitars are on the way out.”—Decca Recording Company executive, 1962

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“We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell.” –Anonymous publisher

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“An expert is one who knows more and more about less and less until he knows absolutely everything about nothing.”―Nicholas Murray Butler

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“I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.”

–Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995

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“An expert is a man who has stopped thinking–he knows!”–Frank Lloyd Wright

• Experts are terrible at predicting the future.

• Keep that in mind when one tells you that your idea/book/movie/startup will fail.

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SO WHAT?

ABOUT ME

www.philsimon.com

@philsimon

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