Expert Failure Quotes

The hedge fund known as "Long Term Capital Management" collapsed last fall through overconfidence in its highly leveraged methods, despite I.Q.'s of its principals that must have averaged 160. Smart people aren't exempt from professional disasters from overconfidence. Often, they just run aground in the more difficult voyages they choose, relying on their self-appraisals that they have superior talents and methods.

All my life Ive known better than to depend on the experts. How could I have been so stupid, to let them go ahead?

The CIA would come in and paint the most scary picture possible …. We were going to be second rate; the Soviets were going to be number one. They had charts on the wall, they had figures, and their conclusion was that in 10 years, the United States would be behind the Soviet Union in military capability, in economic growth. It was a scary presentation. The facts were 180 degrees wrong. These were the best people we had, the CIA’s so-called experts.

The remarkable failure in our time of political and military prediction. It is curious to reflect that out of al the ‘experts’ of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939

everything is too important ever to be entrusted to professional experts, because every organization of such professionals and every established social organization becomes a vested-interest institution more concerned with its efforts to maintain itself or advance its own interests than to achieve the purpose that society expects it to achieve.

If experts were usually right, socialism would prevail.

I think the people in this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong.

There are domains in which expertise is not possible. Stock picking is a good example. And in long-term political strategic forecasting, it's been shown that experts are just not better than a dice-throwing monkey.

No single piece of macroeconomic advice given by the experts to their government has ever had the results predicted.

One hallmark of our era is the collapse of public trust in government and experts of all kinds. But it’s hard to fault the public when so many experts and their policies have failed in such spectacular fashion. The inflation that progressives helped to cause, failed to anticipate, and then ignored is one more example of earned public distrust.

The foresight of financial experts was, as so often, a poor guide to the future.

Venture-capital firms invest in trends by projecting returns. But most projections are pretty much bogus, and research shows that experts are no better at predicting the future than dart-throwing monkeys.