Political scientist Philip Tetlock, in his work on superforecasters, has shown that base-rate
thinking is often more reliable than the supposed wisdom of experts. Most of the world, most of the time, does not change very quickly. So there is an advantage to considering broadly common historical probabilities and simply refusing to impose too much structure on a problem.
That said, there are some cases where base-rate thinking clearly goes askew. Base-rate thinking obscured the ability to foresee the highly unusual 2008 financial crisis, for example. If applied in, say, 2014, base-rate thinking would not have predicted the election of Donald Trump.
As for the health-care establishment, epidemiologists understand exponential growth rates very well. But many medical professionals think in terms of what are called “
normal” statistical distributions. If someone visits your office with what appears to be a typical flu case, it is usually exactly that. The result is that there is not much surge capacity in America’s hospitals and public-health institutions.
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