Stuart Robbins kept an ear on George Noory's "Coast to Coast AM" radio show throughout 2010 to hear what we should expect in 2011, as predicted by professional "psychics" and random callers to the show. At the end of 2011, he went back to compare the predictions to reality and found (once again) that they were wrong far more than they were right -- the "pros" had a hit rate of 2.6% while the audience more than doubled that, at a paltry 5.7%.
Of course, accountability is not part of the psychic vocabulary. As with others who make predictions -- whether it's about personal matters, the stock market, the presidential campaign, sporting events, or anything else -- there's rarely an attempt to go back later and see how well they did, or to call them out when it's abundantly clear their guesses were next to useless. That's why it's good to have someone like Robbins who takes them to task.Labels: skepticism