Public Intellectuals and Weathermen

Posner’s main criticism of public intellectuals was that they lack accountability.  Although very few public intellectuals have a good record of  predictions, this doesn’t deter the public from reading their work or hearing what they have to say. Since there is no recourse or penalties, public intellectuals aren’t extremely worried about being incorrect and for those reasons the public doesn’t take their predictions too seriously.

In reading Posner’s critique I couldn’t help but to compare public intellectuals to weathermen.  Both public intellectuals and weathermen reach out to the general public with information they are interested in and both groups struggle with the accuracy of their predictions.  Many public intellectuals are often incorrect with their predictions but still survive as Posner puts it, “the falsifications of their predictions.”  The public protects themselves by not taking their predictions too seriously.  I think the same goes for weathermen.  As many times as their predictions have been incorrect, we will still tune in to our favorite weatherman or weatherwoman to hear their forecast, and if that forecast happens to be incorrect we aren’t too upset. They have almost built the reputation where we expect them to be incorrect and when they aren't we are pleasantly surprised. So in a sense, the public is also protecting themselves by not taking those that provide weather forecasts seriously either.  When it comes to record keeping neither the public intellectual nor weathermen post their successes vs. failures so it’s very hard for the public to have access to that information and make associations between credible resources and those that aren't.

Now I understand that there are some very big differences between the way that public intellectuals and weathermen make predictions, but I thought the similarities were worth mentioning.  The folks that predict the weather obviously use a much more scientific approach and are most likely right more times than they are wrong.  Additionally there is much more at stake for weathermen to be accurate in their predications because although the public doesn’t keep score, I’m sure that the news stations do, at least to some extent.  Additionally the folks that predict the weather through the public outlets have much more influence over the general audience than public intellectuals do.  If a weatherman tells you its going to storm, you are highly likely to plan accordingly whereas if a public intellectual is predicting dates for when the word is going to end, you are much less likely to take that prediction seriously. 

            Posner mentioned creating a public scorecard for public intellectuals which I think is a great idea, and I would also like to see those same scorecards created for weatherman.