Origins of feku: If they weren't around, we would invent them

‘Feku’ is an interesting new addition to the mainstream vocabulary. It had a sub-cultural existence for long but now that it is being used in the context of political leaders, the word is ready for pan-Indian acceptability and usage. In a country of confidence tricksters, soothsayers, astrologers, clairvoyants and television and other media experts, it was a bit late achieving the mainstream status. In India we still don’t have a satisfying generic term for people making confident, loud and usually inaccurate and largely stupid assertions on events around them and of the future; ‘feku’, once it gets popular, is certain to take care of that problem.

So who is a ‘feku’? ‘Feku’ is primarily a personality type found in all spheres of human activity. People of this type are highly effective in taking other people for a ride with dubious claims. They are good at convincing others that they have profound insight of affairs of the world around them and thus are in a position to control the flow of events in the future. They claim predictive powers and they make great promises. And both prove to be rubbish almost all the time. But we are suckers for them. We still fall for Ponzi schemes, money doubling games, routine frauds, words of seers, stock market predictions, words of experts in politics and economics and politicians making tall claims. In short, feku is a gas bag who plays on your mind and dupes you with convincing big talk.[caption id=“attachment_910995” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Throwing up knowledge. Reuters[/caption]

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The cruder species of fekus-the con men-have always been around us and won’t go away, but what is of interest in this article is the new breed - the fekus who have barged into popular consciousness in the wake of the proliferation of the media. But wait, we are not trying to demean media experts here and questioning their knowledge. In India, most of them are careful about making predictions, barring the election time when they tend lose the sense of proportion, and refrain from going overboard with their imaginative analyses. Yet, it is difficult to miss the growing tribe of fekus around us who masquerade as experts.

A little bit of research into the universe of experts-indeed, a lot of work has gone into deciphering the phenomenon called experts worldwide-throws up many interesting facts. Let’s begin with Dan Gardner, the author of Future Babble.

In 2007, experts said it would be smooth sailing in 2008; then came the global financial hurricane. In 2008, as oil surged above $140 a barrel, experts said it would soon hit $200; a few months later, it plunged to $30. This is how it always goes. In the 1960s, experts said the Soviet economy would be bigger than the American economy by 1997; in 1997, the Soviet Union did not exist…Let’s face it: experts are about as accurate as dirt-throwing monkeys - says the jacket of the book. Inside, there are hundreds of cases of similar predictive failures presented with scholarly expertise by Gardner.

Here’s what he says about the 2008 financial crisis: With very few exceptions, economists did not foresee the financial and economic meltdown of 2008. Many economists didn’t recognise the crisis for what it was even as it was unfolding. In December 2007-months after the credit crunch began and the very moment that would officially mark the beginning of the recession in the United States-BusinessWeek magazine ran its annual chart of detailed forecasts for the year ahead from leading American analysts. Under the headline A Slower But Steady Economy, every one of fifty-four economists predicted US economy won’t “sink into a recession” in 2008. The experts were unanimous that unemployment wouldn’t be too bad, either, leading to a consensus conclusion that 2008 would be a solid but unspectacular year.

Similar was the fate with dire expert predictions in case of the Y2K, global food scarcity, AIDS epidemic, the fate of South Asia and a host of other cases. Closer home, experts predicted with all confidence, backing it up with pre-poll survey reports, that the BJP would come back to power in 2004. The Congress, in doldrums since 1996, had a snowball’s chance in hell to stage a comeback. The results were a slap on the face for them. Not only did the Congress perform better than the BJP, but also it formed the government at the Centre. They had made similar predictions about the Congress earlier too, starting from 1977, to be proved wrong repeatedly. Economists have been painting doomsday scenarios for the Indian economy for a long time. It survives. Gardner points out that economists are the category of experts who are likely to go wrong almost always.

In 1984, according to Gardner’s book, the Economist asked sixteen people to make ten year forecasts of economic growth rates, inflation rate, exchange rates, oil prices and other staples of economic prognostication. Four of the test subjects were former finance ministers, four were chairmen of multinational companies, four were economics students at Oxford University, and four were, to use the English vernacular, London dustmen [garbage collectors]. A decade later, the magazine reviewed the forecasts and discovered they were, on average, awful…The dustmen tied the corporate chairmen for first place, while the finance ministers came last.

In the now-defunct magazine Brill’s Content, for one, compared the predictions of famous American pundits with a chimpanzee named Chippy, who made guesses choosing among flashcards. Chippy consistently matched or beat the best in business, the book mentions.

In an experiment spanning over 20 years, Philip E Tetlock, professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania sought to unravel the mystery of experts and drew some unflattering-for the experts that is-conclusions. His book Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? makes some telling points.

Even a monkey throwing darts at a dartboard would do better than most of these experts, he concludes after studying the pattern and quality of predictions.

Tetlock, borrowing the personality types from an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, identifies two main types of experts: the hedgehogs and the foxes. The first view the world through a single big defining idea and stick to it come what may. They are not cowed down by uncertainties and complications the subject holds. But these are the people who deliver impressive sound bites and tell compelling stories, and are confident and dramatic. If they make long-term predictions, they are invariably wrong. Thus they have a high media profile.

In the fiercely competitive media environment, as in India or US, which places a heavy premium on sounding and looking confident while pontificating, accentuates the tilt towards the hedgehogs, say Vivek Dehejia, professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada and Rupa Subramanya, an economics journalist, in their book Indianomix - Making Sense of Modern India.

Foxes, on the other hand, according to Tetlock, are pragmatic, circumspect and not ideological. They see the world as complex and uncertain are willing to change their mind if facts are different. They are more accurate in their prediction but much less confident. Clearly they are not media favourites. In other words, they are not fekus. They are not too eager to impress others.

It is not that people are not aware of the inadequacy of the experts and others claiming to have predictive powers. But they still believe in them. In his seer-sucker theory, J Scott Armstrong, professor at University of Pennsylvannia, says, “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”

Why is that? Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled by Randomness, has an explanation. “Humans can’t accept that reality is chaotic, and are looking, at least subconsciously, for ways to rationalize and explain it…We are wrongly attributing a cause-and-effect chain of circumstances to events, when, in fact, so much of what happens is fundamentally random and impossible to neatly parcel into cause and effect…In a bigger sense we love to see patterns, and infer mechanisms that lie behind them…”.

That’s the reason, we will always go back to soothsayers, clairvoyants and crystal-ball gazers, and believe them if they convey us a pattern emphatically. For the same reason we will keep listening to the same experts ever after they have been proved wrong many times over. That’s why we will trust politicians who offer grand but simplistic solution to our problems.

Fekus, in fact, are creatures of our own making. If they were not there, we would invent them.

This article borrows liberally from three books: Future Babble by Dan Gardner; Indianomix - Making Sense of Modern India by Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya and Philip E Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment: How good is it? How can we know?