lunes, octubre 04, 2004

Honestidad en los pronósticos

Por casualidad, encontré esta serie de artículos en la más reciente edición de Time que trata sobre las tendencias a futuro en diversos campos y las personas que formulan predicciones sobre el futuro. Este tipo de notas aparecen por lo menos una vez al año en todas las revistas de interés general y en muchas especializadas.

El futuro siempre es un tema llamativo. No sólo se trata de interés ocioso. Predecir lo que sucederá es algo requerido en toda clase de ámbitos y actividades, desde el emprendedor que quiere saber si su producto venderá hasta el inversionista que distribuye su capital según las perspectivas de ganancias que ofrecen diversos instrumentos financieros. Nuestro gran problema es que somos miserablemente malos para pronosticar.

El artículo introductorio a la serie de Time reconoce esto:

Albert Einstein remarked in 1932 that "there is not the slightest
indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable." Thomas Edison thought
alternating current would be a waste of time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt once
predicted, when he was Assistant Secretary of the Navy, that airplanes would
never be useful in battle against a fleet of ships. There's nothing like the
passage of time to make the world's smartest people look like complete idiots.
So let's look at a few more. In 1883 Lord Kelvin, president of the Royal Society
and no mean scientist himself, predicted that "X rays will prove to be a hoax."
When Gary Cooper turned down the Rhett Butler role in Gone With the Wind, he is
said to have remarked, "I'm just glad it will be Clark Gable who's falling flat
on his face and not Gary Cooper." "Everything that can be invented, has been
invented," announced Charles H. Duell, commissioner of the U.S. Patents Office,
in 1899.
Why is predicting the future so difficult? After all, if history is
just one damn thing after another, shouldn't the future be more of the same? But
over and over again, even our most highly educated guesses go disastrously
wrong. (Here's Coco Chanel on the miniskirt, in 1966: "It's a bad joke that
won't last. Not with winter coming.") Of course, the smart play would be not to
try to guess what's coming next. But that's not how we're wired. Trapped as we
are in the one-way flow of time, not predicting the future would be like driving
a car without bothering to glance through the windshield from time to time. We
desperately need prophets, even false ones, to help us narrow the infinity of
plausible futures down to one or at least to a manageable handful. We look at
the present and see the present; they see the seeds of the future. They are our
advance scouts, infiltrating the undiscovered country, stealing over the border
to bring back priceless reconnaissance maps of the world to come.


Como pueden ver, el autor nunca contesta la pregunta de por qué es tan difícil predecir el futuro (nota a mi mismo: prohíbido usar el término complejo o variantes del mismo). Yo tampoco tengo la respuesta. Pero estoy seguro que está relacionada con el hecho de que nunca regresamos a pronósticos pasados para ver por qué acertaron o fallaron. En una de esas podríamos detectar sesgos sistemáticos y recurrentes, lo cual nos podría ayudar a formular mejores (o menos malos) predicciones.

Propongo una ley no escrita: Por honestidad y decencia, toda publicación que presenta pronósticos debería llevar a cabo el ejercicio de evaluar pronósticos pasados. De lo contrario, estaríamos sujetos al nietzcheano eterno retorno a nuestros errores.


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