Race is still the No. 1 determinant in every election.

Actually, one of the better indicators historically of how well the stock market will do is just a Gallup poll, when you ask Americans if you think it's a good time to invest in stocks, except it goes the opposite direction of what you would expect. When the markets going up, it in fact makes it more prone toward decline.

Well the way we perceive accuracy and what accuracy is statistically are really two different things.

Basically, books were a luxury item before the printing press.

One of the pervasive risks that we face in the information age, as I wrote in the introduction, is that even if the amount of knowledge in the world is increasing, the gap between what we know and what we think we know may be widening.

The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times. And so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.

The thing that people associate with expertise, authoritativeness, kind of with a capital 'A,' don't correlate very well with who's actually good at making predictions.