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Notes -
Eh ... there are a lot of 'grand theories' that aren't grand in retrospect. Like - wow, everything is on a computer today! Proposing that in 1900 would've certainly been "grand", yet it happened. And narrow theories can also be very wrong too!
It ends up declaring - "ambitious theories are wrong". Which is often true, but ambitious theories are also useful if correct, so you shouldn't give up trying them
For forecasting - well, isn't "forecasting is a useful methodology in general" a grand theory? I think what Tetlock's seeing is -
I guess there's also a bit of "if you aren't being serious, it's incredibly easy to make a fake grand theory by just claiming things at random" - but unserious narrow theories aren't better than unserious grand theories. That might be what's causing the thing - historians do narrow work on the travel time of mail carriers in Derbyshire in 1750, some blogger declares all the world's problems are because of rent control. but the blogger isn't going to be more correct if he declares something about mail carriers in derbyshire.
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