Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [106]
Consider, for example, the time-frame defense, or what we might call “I was wrong, but wait until next year.” The gist of this excuse is that I am right but the world is running behind schedule; however mistaken my beliefs might look at this moment, they will be borne out eventually. This was the explicit argument of many Millerites, who, in the words of one scholar of the movement, “continued to set times [for the Advent] for the next seven years. Some earmarked the end for October 23 at 6:00 pm, others for October 24. There were high expectations for exactly a year after the Great Disappointment on October 22, 1845, with 1846, 1847, and the seven-year point of 1851 also heating up the millenarianism.” While Hiram Edson had claimed that Miller had been right about the date but wrong about its significance, these other Millerites claimed that they had been right about the impending end of the world but just a bit off on the timing. In essence, they downgraded a crisis of faith to an arithmetic mistake.
The time-frame defense is a perennial favorite among political analysts, stock-market watchers, and anyone else who has ever tried to forecast the future (which is all of us). George W. Bush availed himself of it in 2006, when he claimed—in response to opinion polls indicating that 70 percent of Americans disapproved of his handling of the Iraq War—that he would be vindicated by “the long march of history.” As that line suggests, one implication of the time-frame defense is that, however wrong I seem, I am actually more right than those who currently look it: I am a visionary, able to see the lay of the land from a more distant and loftier (i.e., Godlike) perspective. The trouble with the time-frame defense is that, while it is almost always available, it is very often ludicrous. By its logic, the journalist who infamously reported the death of Mark Twain thirteen years early was prophetically right.
A second and similarly popular Wrong But maneuver is the near-miss defense. Here the claim is not that our prediction will come to pass eventually, but rather that it almost came to pass. (“I was wrong, but only by a little.”) This was, in essence, Hiram Edson’s claim: Christ might not have come down to earth—but, hey, he had entered the most holy compartment of heaven. The near-miss defense can also take the form of claiming that, but for some trifling incident (heavy rain in New Hampshire on voting day, a tractor-trailer causing a traffic jam on the interstate, a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil), my forecast would have been absolutely correct. Boiled down to its indisputably true but patently absurd essence, the argument of the near-miss defense is that if I hadn’t been wrong, I would have been right.
A variation on the near-miss defense is the out-of-left-field defense. The claim here is that I was on track to being absolutely right when—bang!—some bizarre and unforeseeable event derailed the natural course of things and rendered me unexpectedly wrong. One problem with this excuse is that just about any event can be defined as unforeseeable if you yourself failed to foresee it. Another problem is that it presumes that, absent this left-field factor, the outcome would have been exactly as you predicted. As Philip Tetlock writes, “It is almost as though [people who invoke the out-of-left-field defense] are telling us ‘Of course, I know what would have happened. I just got back from a trip in my alternative-universe teleportation device and can assure you that events there dovetailed perfectly with my preconceptions.’”
Unlike the other Wrong Buts, the out-of-left-field excuse was not of much use to the Millerites, who could hardly go around claiming that God’s Almighty Plan had been unexpectedly derailed. (For God, one assumes,