That’s only if one believes the justifications. Think of the system as rewarding useful propaganda, and it works pretty well.

Or finding a brick of $100,000 in someone’s freezer, or a bunch of lobbyists in the Cabinet or someone attempting to sell a Senate seat or, for that matter, someone driving off a bridge with his mistress and leaving her to drown.

1. Provide three guiding principles that inform your judgments.

2. Describe a time when you learned something that caused you to change your mind.

3. Describe a time when you were right while other pundits were wrong.

4. Describe a time when you were wrong while other pundits were right.

And so on. The point would be less to point out hypocrisy than it would to inform people about the ability of pundits to think critically about issues, rather than simply reacting with knee-jerk partisanship. If Bill Kristol honestly thinks that he has never been wrong, it would be nice to have him state that officially.

Who knows what it is. Applying basic reasoning to her actions yield little understanding. I wouldn’t be surprised if her resignation stemmed from a childing stubbornness — the same kind that made her a bit of a maverick in her own campaign last year.

But who can tell with That Woman?

It is the somewhat gratifying lesson of Philip Tetlock’s new book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” (Princeton; $35), that people who make prediction their business—people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry roundtables—are no better than the rest of us. When they’re wrong, they’re rarely held accountable, and they rarely admit it, either. They insist that they were just off on timing, or blindsided by an improbable event, or almost right, or wrong for the right reasons. They have the same repertoire of self-justifications that everyone has, and are no more inclined than anyone else to revise their beliefs about the way the world works, or ought to work, just because they made a mistake. No one is paying you for your gratuitous opinions about other people, but the experts are being paid, and Tetlock claims that the better known and more frequently quoted they are, the less reliable their guesses about the future are likely to be. The accuracy of an expert’s predictions actually has an inverse relationship to his or her self-confidence, renown, and, beyond a certain point, depth of knowledge. People who follow current events by reading the papers and newsmagazines regularly can guess what is likely to happen about as accurately as the specialists whom the papers quote. Our system of expertise is completely inside out: it rewards bad judgments over good ones.