The "Jeane Dixon Effect" [View all]

[jberryhill]

Jeane Dixon is popularly known as the psychic who "predicted the assassination of JFK", and is probably the best known demonstration of what is known as "confirmation bias".



If you want to do well in the prediction business, you do the following:

1. Make a lot of predictions
2. Promote the ones that "came true" or ones for which you can shoehorn the facts into it "sorta, kinda" happened.
3. Make sure your predictions contain enough "slop" in them that you can more easily do #2.

This has been the stock in trade for psychics and soothsayers for a long time.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeane_Dixon#The_Jeane_Dixon_effect

John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, coined the term 'the Jeane Dixon effect', which references a tendency to promote a few correct predictions while ignoring a larger number of incorrect predictions. Many of Dixon's predictions proved erroneous, such as her claims that a dispute over the offshore Chinese islands of Quemoy and Matsu would trigger the start of World War III in 1958, that American labor leader Walter Reuther would run for President of the United States in the 1964 presidential election, that the second child of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his young wife Margaret would be a girl (it was a boy), and that the Russians would be the first to put men on the moon.

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Demonstrating that someone "is really good at predicting stuff" is not done by rattling off a list of predictions which came true, or which are too vague to have "come true" or not.