A family of black swans
So to find out its real value he began to compile a sample of 28,000 predictions by 284 experts over 18 years to see which of them came true. The results were disappointing. Expert predictions barely outperformed simple statistical prediction schemes such as those which assumed no change or that the latest rate of change would continue. In other words experts could not predict the future with any clarity but we consulted them anyway because of the need to appear in control of even future events. Indeed in Tetlock’s early 2007 video illustrates the weaknesses of expert prediction perfectly; with its references to “regional experts” who were very confident that the Surge would fail. Maybe it will, if we wait long enough. But one type of expert was clearly worse than others; the kind he termed the “hedgehog”. They made the least accurate predictions of all. “Hedgehog” in this context denotes someone who bets on extreme outcomes based on a theoretical construct, such an ideological position. The term is taken from a poem by the ancient Greek Archilocus who wrote “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. Hedgehogs are those who “just know” what is going to happen with the certainty of a true believer. They are guided by the “big thing”.
It was better Tetlock found, for predictors to be consciously aware of the unkown; to be informed not only by knowledge but anti-knowledge – what we don’t know. The experts who did that, who were open to the idea that the world was messy, full random and complex influences — he called the “foxes”. Normally they were more boring than the hedgehogs. Hedgehogs tended to categorically tell people what was going to happen or not happen, while foxes were often only willing to offer probabilities and forecast over short horizons. Tetlock argued that while the foxes predicted things better, the public was much more willing to listen to the hedgehogs, especially when they could tell a good story.
Even more entertaining than Tetlock is the video lecture by Nasim Nicholas Taleb, the author of the Black Swan. Taleb’s attitude toward life was changed by his discovery of how little he could predict and set about discovering the bounds of knowledge and anti-knowledge. Taleb in his lecture describes his now famous view that events in the world can be categorized into the categories of mediocristan and extremistan. Mediocristan is populated by events in which individual outcomes do not change the aggregate result by much. In this category phenomena can be easily mathematized and classic statistical predictions rule. Some domains of physics are like this.
But the other place — which by far encompasses most of the things that affect us — is dominated by a class of events that is not so easily mathematized. He calls this Extremistan. Here the rare, high impact event rules and individual events can have disproportionate effects on final outcomes. His example is the Black Swan. For most of human history all swans were believed to be white because all were observed to be white. But when Captain Cook arrived in Australia the first Black Swan they encountered was enough to invalidate a multitude of prior observations. We went from a world in which all swans were white to one in which they might be of a different color by a single observation.
It is not surprising that Taleb and Tetlock are friends. In common their work has highlighted the importance of what we don’t know. Taleb’s Black Swan idea partially explains why Tetlock’s “foxes” do better than is “hedgehogs”. “Foxes” understand that they don’t know the answers and are open to the existence of Black Swans and consequently they incorporate information which a “hedgehog” might throw away. Since hedgehogs already understand the future they are less likely to see what doesn’t fit and are consequently much more likely to be caught off guard by unexpected developments.
It is tempting to characterize Obama’s approach to international relations as one resembling that of Tetlock’s “hedgehog”. Although he is going to Afghanistan and the Middle East ostensibly to examine the conditions on the ground, it is not for the purpose of reworking his policies. He already knows what those are. They are given. Rather, he is there to discover what obstacles might obstruct their implementation. Obama already knows what he is going to do. It is this clarity of vision that makes him so attractive to his supporters. But it is also the source of the greatest danger to his policies. What happens if Obama says, “Yes we can” and reality says, “No you can’t”? What happens if the hedgehog meets the Black Swan?
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1. Lifeofthemind:The Hedgehog and the Fox. The book is worth reading.
Jul 19, 2008 - 8:16 pm 2. Eggplant:Wretchard said:
“… in his famous book the Fate of the Earth predicted Ronald Reagan’s would probably precipitate a nuclear war. At the time most analysts in the CIA were predicting that the Soviet Union would last forever.”
If I had been asked in 1986, I would have predicted the Soviet Union would last for centuries and Reagan’s pursuit of third generation nuclear weapons would precipitate nuclear Armageddon. Obviously I was wrong on both counts but still believe my basic logic was correct.
Something I repeatedly observed while traveling in Eastern Europe was that Communism destroyed a culture’s basic integrity. People trapped in the Soviet block simply knuckled under and refused to buck the system. The whole society had become so corrupt that it was simply impossible to construct a viable opposition. What I failed to realize was the Soviet Empire would fail from the top-down. Gorbachev tried to repair a system that was so rotten that attempting to fix one thing only succeeded in breaking two other things. The chain reaction ultimately wrecked the whole system (we need to worry about this happening to us).
I also thought that orbiting nuclear pumped X-ray lasers (a third generation nuclear weapon) would ultimately lead to nuclear war. The Soviets didn’t have the technical ability to develope such weapons (in truth, neither did we). Had the United States begun deploying third generation nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would have had no choice but to respond preemptively with submarine launched nuclear weapons and attempt nuclear decapitation. Fortunately the whole concept of nuclear pumped X-ray lasers was bogus and disaster averted.
It’s very important that people realize our survival of the Cold War was mainly through blind luck and/or the Grace of God. We must never again rely on Mutual Assured Destruction as a means of defense.
Jul 19, 2008 - 8:50 pm 3. wretchard:Tetlock describe how pundits who find their seemingly impeccable failing can invoke the “I was almost right” defense, as in “if the coup aimed at Gorbachev had succeeded the Soviet Union would have survived”. I am sure there are any number of experts who are now arguing that “if Bush hadn’t been lucky enough to have Petraeus in command we would have been right about Iraq being a quagmire. And since nobody should count on being so lucky on average it was better to predict that Iraq would fail.” But this is counterfactual. It appears that the Surge has succeeded just as it appears the Soviet Union fell however differently we reasoned things out.
Jul 19, 2008 - 8:58 pm 4. Steve Skubinna:It was Reagan who broke MAD beyond recovery. By announcing “Star Wars” he upped the ante for the Soviets, by suddenly making their painstakingly created, at tremendous sacrifice, arsenal potentially obsolete. The USSR had nearly bankrupted itself trying to obtain conventional and strategic dominance (although we had no idea at the time how badly they were hurting), and now the US, in addition to possessing a standard of living far beyond the comprehension of most Soviet citizens, was proposing to wipe the slate clean and start over, this time without the “Mutuallly Assured” part.
Whether SDI was workable (only now are we really seeing the promise it displayed), the USSR believed it was, and that we could do it. Hence Gorbachev’s attempts to “restructure” the USSR, to streamline the Communist system so it could compete. In retrospect it was a doomed endeavor, since inevitably any loosening of the tight control the State held anywhere was going to send shock waves throughout the entire society and eventually break it apart. Jonah Goldberg once quipped that Gorbachev was like a man who removes a few bricks from the bottom of a dam, and doesn’t expect anything to happen until he was ready for it.
Well, the former USSR is still pretty much broken, depite the pathetic bluster of Putin and his clique. He threatens to start a new arms race? He can’t even match the defense spending of NATO, let along the US. Too bad they never figured out how a free society works, or even if they wanted to live in one, but perhaps they will eventually.
Jul 19, 2008 - 9:04 pm 5. Eggplant:Wretchard said:
“Tetlock describe how pundits who find their seemingly impeccable failing can invoke the “I was almost right” defense..”
I see history as a complicated array of streamlines that often go through branch points. The branch points are singularities where history could go down one fork or another due to an infinitesimal perturbation applied at exactly the right time and place. Historical actors are people who happen to be at a branch point at the right time and place. If Julius Caesar had been born a century sooner, he might never have impacted history. However Caesar had the good fortune as a young man of surviving Lucius Cornelius Sulla (who knew the youthful Caesar was a dangerous man). Caesar was later at the right place at the right time and changed the course of history. B. Hussein might be a historical actor who will push us down the wrong fork of history. Then again, Hussein might be a someone like Clement Vallandigham (google him), a very dangerous man who never amounted to anything.
Jul 19, 2008 - 9:22 pm 6. Dave:Well, Eggplant, Old Buddy, that is why God gave you washcloths. So you could scrub the egg off your face.
By 1984, I was telling folks that the USSR would not see the end of the century. I was of course hooted at. Then when it did not make the end of the decade, I was saying that the danger was not yet over, that the die-hards would attempt a coup. I was ignored.
By 1991, that latter prediction came true as well.
Does this make me a genius? No way. Notice how far off my timeing was in the first prediction. Also note that I could in no way predict when or how the bad guys would attempt to seize power.
What I did have going for me was the realization that SDI meant the end of MAD. That in turn let me grasp that Ronald Reagan
had an agenda. To wit: “We win. They lose.”
Having read Pournelle?Possony “Strategy of Technology” helped.
In the second case, my Austrian economic principles let me know that some people were simply incapable of accepting the end of their fantasy world and were compelled to try and overcome it with the only means available to them.
I just hope and pray that my current and future errors are no worse than these.
The question of the hour is why do the “hedgehogs” have so much more credibility that the “foxes”? Well, there used to be a saying among carnival mentalists/psychics: “You will never go broke predicting gloom and doom”. So notice that con artists take that to heart. BUT, and this is an important BUT: Pie in the Sky is the flip side of that coin. So the Gore-hogs, Buchanan-hogs, Paul-hogs set the stage for the cheerful-appearing Obama-hog to cash in on the opportunity to be that flip side.
And before I even try to prognosticate about the next four years, I will wait and see who wins and how before I try to analyze capabilites and go from there.
I just make it a point to Trust in God and keep the 1911 at full cock.
Jul 19, 2008 - 9:52 pm 7. Benj:But, ah, Obama is very foxy. What defines the sensibility on display in his books and his speeches is his variousness. His readiness to put himself in the shoes of that Sister wearing blue contact lens or the boys dreaming they’ll be Little Wayne or that Midwestern boy - Shamus was it? - off to be Marine or…O’s variousness is the very thing that makes Wretch think he’s a hustler.
A word on Berlin - He fancied himself a fox But I bet he’d recognize he was a piker comarted to O. Berlin tended to write good essays about Heine, Tolstoy and figures from the past. He wasn’t all that penetrating about the writers/thinkers of our own time. A little removed…- He certainly wasn’t as alive to the range of feeling in a room as Obama is…O’s eyes/ears travel. BErlin was a much more studied, bookish sort. What’s the point of such comparisons between a dead liberal don and live liberal pol?…Well O is out to embody and revive the values that Berlin tried to write up to. My guess is that he’s likely to be a more significant figure than Berlin in the history of the liberal imagination.
RE the Black Swan - again - I’d say there’s a case that O is the Black Swan. Could anyone have imagined at the moment of, say, “Mission Acomplished” that a few years on GEorge Bush would be a heavy drag on the chance that John McCain might could stop a candidate who opposed that Mission from becoming the first African American president?
Not the first person to say this but Nouri started giving O the Out WEEKS ago as I noted here. I wish my man would acknowledge the Surge worked - and that we now may have “good” options in Iraq. But - he’s a pol not a lamb - Gioven the fear of the flip-flop critique and the difficulty of incarnating liberal-mindedness in a world of blowhards…Can’t say I’m shocked O is locked down on Iraq right now…
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Jul 19, 2008 - 10:03 pm 8. dla:Bunk. The Soviets wouldn’t have launched a nuke attack over us doing 3rd gen weapons. Why? Pretty simple really - there wasn’t a threat.
The US never had imperialist intentions for the Soviet Union. Frankly, we could’ve cared less by Reagan’s era. What did we need another rust belt for? Ugh!
We weren’t after the Soviets and their leadership knew it. By Reagan’s presidency, the old hard-line “we must wipe capitalism from the earth” communists were only found in the rice paddies of Asia. The Kremlin didn’t worry about the US invading, they worried about the the entire world rushing past them economically - and they couldn’t solve that with nukes and tanks.
Jul 19, 2008 - 10:27 pm 9. NahnCee:Something I repeatedly observed while traveling in Eastern Europe was that Communism destroyed a culture’s basic integrity. People trapped in the Soviet block simply knuckled under and refused to buck the system. The whole society had become so corrupt that it was simply impossible to construct a viable opposition. What I failed to realize was the Soviet Empire would fail from the top-down. Gorbachev tried to repair a system that was so rotten that attempting to fix one thing only succeeded in breaking two other things. The chain reaction ultimately wrecked the whole system (we need to worry about this happening to us).
Isn’t this description (and its result) more applicable to the MIddle East than to America?
I’ve always thought we went into Iraq with a bottom-line goal of destabilizing the Middle East. It didn’t really make a whole lot of difference who won or lost there, just so the domino’s starting tipping over. I can’t tell, yet, if they are tipping but there do seem to be a whole lot more mightily unhappy people flailing around in their streets than there used to be.
(Can we pass a Constitutional amendment that every time a moonbat quotes “Mission Accomplished”, that that is sufficient reason to shoot him dead immediately on the spot and call it a crime passionale because it’s been overused, abused and misquoted with such sadistic glee for so long?)
Jul 19, 2008 - 10:28 pm 10. Eggplant:Dla said:
“Bunk. The Soviets wouldn’t have launched a nuke attack over us doing 3rd gen weapons. Why? Pretty simple really - there wasn’t a threat.”
The nuclear pumped X-ray lasers were baloney so this is all hypothetical. The problem with that particular weapon system was we had to launch on warning from submarines (they couldn’t shoot over the horizon). The lasers would have been out of the atmosphere on suborbital trajectories and then burned up in the atmosphere if they weren’t used. This means the Soviets could have saturated that defense strategy if they attacked in waves, i.e. the initial attack causes us to pop up our lasers, then the nuclear effects ionize the upper atmosphere and our Ballistic Missile Early Warning System (BMEWS) would be blind thus allowing the Soviets a clean shot with the second wave (the old Safeguard nuclear ABM concept had similar problems). If we initiated the first strike with our ICBMs, then the Soviets would have had to shoot their whole wad on warning otherwise their ground assets would have been destroyed in their silos. However we would have had X-ray lasers out of the atmosphere waiting for them with our first strike. The lasers would have destroyed all of the Soviets counter strike and left them open to annihilation. Again this is all science fiction baloney and total nonsense but there were scenarios that were extremely destabilizing (there was a huge advantage for the guy who struck first). Soviet military planners had to consider all scenarios. We’re lucky that they got so freaked out that Gorbachev tried to fix their rotten system. If Stalin, Beria or someone worse had been running things, he might have opted to nuke us preemptively rather than allow us to get our new ABM technology up and running.
Jul 19, 2008 - 11:25 pm 11. wretchard:Well, there used to be a saying among carnival mentalists/psychics: “You will never go broke predicting gloom and doom”. So notice that con artists take that to heart. … BUT: Pie in the Sky is the flip side of that coin. So the Gore-hogs, Buchanan-hogs, Paul-hogs set the stage for the cheerful-appearing Obama-hog to cash in on the opportunity to be that flip side.
I think Tetlock called it the attraction of “boom and gloom”. They are the guys who called out probabilities of one or zero. ‘It is going to happen’ or ‘no way’. At a speech before autoworkers, McCain told them times would be rough and that he didn’t know whether he could make them better. He might be right, but few will want to hear this. On the other hand Obama can get up and say he’ll repeal NAFTA while sending someone to the Canadians to tell them he won’t. But I’ll make the claim that sometimes even when people know they’re being lied to they’ll believe the lie that gives them hope as a opposed to the truth which leaves them in uncertainty.
The truth will make you free, but what people really want it assurance.
Jul 19, 2008 - 11:43 pm 12. dla:Sorry Eggplant, but that is exactly the material I said “bunk” to. There are all sort of military planners and all sorts of plans. But they all have to have a sequence that creates the trigger. And the trigger scenario couldn’t/wouldn’t have happened. And no matter how nutty we may think the old commies were, they never had the justification - ever.
The cold war was real and potentially deadly. But like all wars it was winding down before Reagan took office. And during Reagan’s tenure, the US and the rest of the G7 ran past the Soviets economically. Unlike the 12th Imman Shiites in Iran, the Soviet leadership had no desire to destroy the world. They didn’t want to usher in stone knives and bearskins.
Sometime the problem with reading books, whether the “what if’s” you refered to or total fantasy movies like “Inconvenient Truth” is that they collide with common-sense.
Jul 19, 2008 - 11:43 pm 13. Kirk Parker:Dave,
“Having read Pournelle, Possony [and Kane's] _Strategy of Technology_ helped.”
Indeed, there’s a new footnote in Pournelle’s online version about their estimate of Soviet military spending as a percentage of the economy. At the time, their estimate was far higher than the conventional wisdom held, so they scaled back their number for actual publication. After the fall of the USSR, when actual figures were available, it turned out that their original estimate, the one they were afraid to go with, was actually still an underestimate.
Jul 20, 2008 - 1:13 am 14. Charles:Here’s a detailed account of that fight on afghan/paki border last week.
Jul 20, 2008 - 1:35 am 15. Charles:There’s an interesting book out Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley
The interesting thing is that effort got going in the 1960’s but wasn’t able to keep up with the west. Why not? well in the soviet system they would have needed a steady stream of high powered defector/spies to keep fertilizing their dead system. it looks like that pretty much stopped after the mcCarthy era.
the other question to ask is…are the chinese succeeding in getting this steady stream of defector/spies in way that the soviets were unable to do.
Jul 20, 2008 - 1:46 am 16. Manny C:People cool with me throwing a Knight into the mix? Who wins? The Hedgehog, the fox or the knight?
Jul 20, 2008 - 5:15 am 17. ADE:Extremistan
Here’s mine: We’re at the end of history. Islam’s pathetic offering to the modern world is even less than the soviet’s.
We’re in the ‘embarassment reduction’ phase with the vile pest that is islam, just ‘cos we’re polite. The Chinese would Tibet them off the planet. “Suffer the Children”, or some such phrase, being Christian. We don’t need missile shields, just let the Arabs die from embarassment - have you seen MEMRI?
But what to do with the hedgehog? I know some of them. Not funny brown people with silly habits, so they think they count. Actually, I think there is no hope for them; they count for no future. Dhimmis, destined to cover the legs of pianos, greenies, warmenists, freedom hating, future-hating, fun hating.
Like Lady MacBeth, “I feel now the future in the instant”. The surge has worked, we’ve won. Ode to Joy.
ADE
Jul 20, 2008 - 6:07 am 18. Hangtown Bob:So…. IMHO, the biggest Hedgehog of the century must be Al Gore who speaks with a certainty that no one should possess, a certainty that garnered him a Nobel Prize.
Jul 20, 2008 - 6:33 am 19. Roy Lofquist:Twenty thousand seers say their sooths. The dozen who came closest serenade us with all forty seven verses of “I Told You So, You Silly Twit”.
Jul 20, 2008 - 7:19 am 20. Bob Hawkins:About 15 years ago, there was an article in Science about a study of expert witnesses in parole hearings. It found that psychiatrists did no better than chance at predicting whether a prisoner would be back, which did not surprise the author. What did surprise the author was that judges were perfectly aware of it, but followed the psychiatrists’s recommendations anyway.
The explanation was that the judges were also aware that they would do no better than chance. But by relying on the experts’s coin flip rather than their own, they shifted the blame to the experts.
There are uses for experts that do not require them to be expert.
Jul 20, 2008 - 7:22 am 21. dkite:The surge was going to be as successful as the politicians in Washington would let it.
The ground work was there. The strategy worked where applied. The experience and training, one of the core strengths of the US military, where experienced fighters teach the new recruits, was bearing fruit. The generalship that entered the war had been triaged, the ones who could fight still there, the ones who couldn’t kept off the streets by the media.
All that was required was the will to do it.
There is a refusal to see the basic fact of today’s military situation. The US military can do whatever it wants to do. The raw power, the command structures, the invention and adaptation which is remarkable in such a large organisation, the depth of possible offensive and defensive strategies.
So any predictions about the surge were strictly whether political will existed to implement it. The prognosticators were by prognosticating helping or harming the project.
Derek
Jul 20, 2008 - 8:34 am 22. wretchard:A reader sends this link to this New Republic article by Jonathan Chait, entitled <a href=”http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-a8a0-945d1deb420b”>The Dead Left which illustrates the extreme hedgehog. Chait reviews a new book by Naomi Klein who began with the thesis that Capitalism was evil. After 9/11 she came to the conclusion that Capitalism was even more evil. Chait writes:
It’s an article of faith among some conservatives that every liberal once mugged or beset by the consequences of bad judgements experiences a kind of conversion. But not necessarily with a hedgehog, because misfortune only brings confirmation that the Man is out to Get Them. Some people’s belief system cannot be falsified by experience. This implies that a certain hard core of fanatics exist within any movement, whether on the left or the right. That’s a pretty worrisome thought.
Jul 20, 2008 - 8:35 am 23. ForNow:“Anti-knowledge”? We already have a word for that - “ignorance.” Anyway, “anti-knowledge” would not be the unknowing or unknown but instead the knowing-to-be-false or known-to-be-false. “Anti-”, “contra-”, “counter-”, and “dis-” have that sense of a diametrical opposite rather than of simple negation. Like the difference between counterfactual and nonfactual. Or between disbelief and unbelief. (Sometimes in English “un-” works like “dis-” or “anti-,” e.g. “unhappy” which means a negative feeling, not merely “non-happy.”)
Jul 20, 2008 - 8:38 am 24. RWE:I deal with statistical analysis quite a lot. One of the problems with using it is that people so frequently insist that the lessons of the past no longer apply.
For example, engineers will assert that a specific class of failure modes no longer apply because “we fixed that and it will never happen again.” Therefore, they argue, the probability of failure must be less than the historical record indicates.
Unfortunately, there are other things they have not fixed that will surely rear their ugly heads. And there is no evidence that any type of problem is ever truly fixed. Memories fade and other urgencies arise to displace older priorities.
In May 1986 a Delta booster broke up after launch from Cape Canaveral. The cause was a chafed wire and the entire space launch industry underwent something of an epiphany in regards to that type of problem. So it was fixed, right?
In August 1998 a Titan IV booster broke up after launch from the Cape. The problem was once again a chafed wire. And just a few years later the Titan engineers argued they had fixed their vehicle and that past failures should not be “counted against them.”
Jul 20, 2008 - 8:41 am 25. james wilson:There is only one man in all of history who was prophetic, and he never saw himself in that light. Among many other things, Tocqueville foresaw a battle for the world between America and Russia. And, he warned that were Europe to return, from it’s then current madness and dysfunction, to the system of the despotism of one man, all the restraints that formerly weighed upon such a man would have been removed, and Europe would see abominations it had never wittnessed before.
Jul 20, 2008 - 9:14 am 26. Eggplant:But for the rest of us, take ourselves to 1900, and then predict what would happen in the Twentieth Century. How foolish, and how impossible. That is the lesson, and it is an important one.
If security exists at all, it derives from one’s own ability to perform, not predict.
Dla said:
“The cold war was real and potentially deadly. But like all wars it was winding down before Reagan took office. And during Reagan’s tenure, the US and the rest of the G7 ran past the Soviets economically. Unlike the 12th Imman Shiites in Iran, the Soviet leadership had no desire to destroy the world.”
In the late 1970s, early 1980s, the Soviets were running out of money and options. I traveled extensively through Eastern Europe during that period and saw it with my own eyes, i.e. the whole infrastructure was literally falling apart.
Unfortunately, the Soviets hadn’t been idle. They had spent hundreds of millions of dollars infecting us with surrender robots, i.e. the moonbats. I vividly remember the moonbats shrieking that nuclear Armageddon was unavoidable and our only hope for survival was by surrendering to the communists. The 1972 McGovern campaign could be interpreted as a failed attempt at surrender. The modern day moonbats are a bizarre form of ronan samurai trying to find new overlords to accept their surrender. I can imagine the islamic fascists scratching their heads in puzzlement and asking themselves: “Why are these people trying to surrender to us?”.
RWE said:
“In May 1986 a Delta booster broke up after launch from Cape Canaveral. The cause was a chafed wire and the entire space launch industry underwent something of an epiphany in regards to that type of problem. So it was fixed, right? In August 1998 a Titan IV booster broke up after launch from the Cape. The problem was once again a chafed wire.”
Space Shuttle Columbia (OV-102) almost failed due to chafed wiring (technicians had been walking on the wiring in the cargo bay). After that near failure, the orbit vehicle was completely rewired and had a modern glass cockpit installed. Unfortunately Columbia later burned up during reentry because a leading edge thermal protection tile was broken during launch.
Columbia’s chafed wiring was not the only close call. There was another case before Columbia’s failure where a leading edge tile had been broken and plasma was blowing inside the thermal protection system. The orbit vehicle survived through the blind luck. Also, the carbon phenolic throats in the solid rocket boosters had a nasty tendency to spall. In one case, a throat was within millimeters of reaching burn-through. Again, survival was due to blind luck. Launch vehicles are incredibly complicated. It’s amazing that any of them actually work.
Roy Lofquist said:
“Twenty thousand seers say their sooths. The dozen who came closest serenade us with all forty seven verses of “I Told You So, You Silly Twit”.”
Obviously it’s a bell curve. If you have a thousand guys making predicitions then a dozen might get it right by accident. My predictions were all wrong so I was near the peak of the bell curve. Dave was one of the lucky few who got it right. If you ask Dave to make some more predicitions, he’ll probably be as wrong as I was in 1986.
Dkite correctly said:
“The surge was going to be as successful as the politicians in Washington would let it… There is a refusal to see the basic fact of today’s military situation. The US military can do whatever it wants to do. The raw power, the command structures, the invention and adaptation which is remarkable in such a large organisation, the depth of possible offensive and defensive strategies.”
If you’ll pardon the cliche:
“Fortune favors the bold”
(Virgil: “Audentes Fortunas Juvat”)
Seize the iniative and do NOT trust in luck. Keep at it, learn from your mistakes and don’t rest until victory has been achieved.
Jul 20, 2008 - 10:39 am 27. 3Case:“That’s a pretty worrisome thought.”
More worrisome, substantially more worrisome in my mind, is that the police apparatus of the Federal and State governments are so far up the butts of the right wing crazies that they (police) know what they (RW crazies)are thinking before they think it while the Left Wing crazies are pretty much untended.
How do I know? Once upon a time, I was an AUSA. I’d listen to briefings on wacky groups and their activities and was forever amazed that it was always the RW nuts that were pursued.
As to Ms. Klein, what’s that old saying: “There is none so blind as those that will not see.”? From the NR piece:
‘Klein wrote that she could envision a future “ fascist state where we all salute the logo and have little opportunity for criticism because our newspapers, television stations, Internet servers, streets and retail spaces are all controlled by multinational corporate interests.”‘ Query: Is Ms. Klein bright enough to recognize the corporate interests of Messrs. Soros and Buffett and the NGOs and 501C3s as corporate?
Jul 20, 2008 - 12:56 pm 28. whiskey:The USSR failed not because of Star Wars but because the huge patronage/military system could not be maintained when oil prices declined after the 1970s-early 1980’s recession and matched increased production by the Saudis and gulf oil states.
The Soviets could not pay their army, nor send money to their client states. That caused the end of all but a few (Castro). Simple as that. Economics matters, and most hedgehogs paid little attention to how much wealth and money the USSR could create and how much it spent to maintain it’s empire.
The Soviet Empire WAS massive, but typically Russian. I.E. perpetually broke, poor quality of men and equipment, often stupid and brutal inside it’s own organizations, few visionary leaders, stupid use of limited resources, a Czar and a bunch of serfs, no independent thinking, and very slow to adapt. This characterizes Russia since the days of Ivan the Terrible (and likely before). It took an effort of will not to see the obvious, people mesmerized by the effort in WWII and projecting that into the current situation and future. Which would be like viewing Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow as indicative of the French today.
Obama’s bound to be set up for disappointment. Not the least of which is presiding over a massive Chosin Resevoir defeat in Afghanistan, matched perhaps by the nuking of an American city by Pakistani or Iranian nukes. Jimmy Carter knew one thing: abasement of America to atone for our “sins” and ended up a disaster that created 12 years of Republican rule on the Presidential level.
Obama’s likely to be even worse, and ironically for his supporters a disaster for all his policies. He’s too rigid and unbending and believes his own messiah hype.
Jul 20, 2008 - 1:06 pm 29. Al_Batross:james wilson said:
If security exists at all, it derives from one’s own ability to perform, not predict.
I think that sums it up very well.
Jul 20, 2008 - 2:05 pm 30. ForNow:Examples from history abound, but one in particular comes to mind:
In the years leading up to WW2, there was great anxiety in Britain that tbe next war would involve large-scale air raids in which poison gas would be dropped (an idea “popularised” by the 1936 Alexander Korda film “Things to Come”). This led to gas masks being issued to all civilians, including special versions for babies. The air raids came, but with explosives and incindiaries, not gas, and the masks were largly consigned to cupboards and forgotten.
In contrast, the use of the London Underground system as shelter from bombing was not planned for. In fact, it was planned to prevent people taking refuge underground, for reasons of morale rather than the danger that heavier-than-air gases would be used. The use of the system as a public shelter was initially a large-scale act of civil disobedience, in which the performers showed better judgement than the predictors, but one which enabled the city to continue functioning throughout the war. (The last V2 stuck London on 27 March 1945).
The decline in oil prices contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, but so did Star Wars, including a faked successful test. They didn’t think that they could keep up and their oil price problems were part of the reason. Many were the sources of Soviet demoralization and resignation.
Jul 20, 2008 - 2:42 pm 31. Eggplant:ForNow said:
“The decline in oil prices contributed to the fall of the Soviet Union, but so did Star Wars, including a faked successful test.”
It’s my understanding that the “faked successful test” was actually an honest scientific mistake and not deliberate deception. Has anyone heard anything different?
Jul 20, 2008 - 7:42 pm 32. Charles:The Poetry of D.H. Rumsfeld
Happenings
You’re going to be told lots of things.
You get told things every day that don’t happen.
It doesn’t seem to bother people, they don’t—
It’s printed in the press.
The world thinks all these things happen.
They never happened.
Everyone’s so eager to get the story
Before in fact the story’s there
That the world is constantly being fed
Things that haven’t happened.
All I can tell you is,
It hasn’t happened.
It’s going to happen.
—Feb. 28, 2003, Department of Defense briefing
Jul 20, 2008 - 8:47 pm 33. NahnCee:Charles, I bet you’re a real hit with the rest of the Kos Kids, aren’t you? Come to try your act out with the adults now, and it appears to be falling flat. Silly little boy creature.
Jul 20, 2008 - 9:53 pm 34. Ravalli County News » Blog Archive » Our Messy World:[...] Fernandez has an interesting article on research which suggests that experts who see the world as messy, full random and complex [...]
Jul 20, 2008 - 10:29 pm 35. Stones Cry Out - If they keep silent… » Things Heard: e28v1:[...] Obama and the Middle East trip, in the context of hedgehogs and swans. [...]
Jul 21, 2008 - 5:33 am 36. Pseudo-Polymath » Blog Archive » Monday Highlights:[...] Obama and the Middle East trip, in the context of hedgehogs and swans. [...]
Jul 21, 2008 - 5:33 am 37. Peterike:Benj wrote:
He certainly wasn’t as alive to the range of feeling in a room as Obama is…O’s eyes/ears travel.
Benj is correct. O is very alive to the feeling in a room. So are lots of other people. So many, in fact, that we have a name for them. They are called “actors.”
Jul 21, 2008 - 7:14 am 38. Charles:NahnCee:
Doesn’t sound like you like Rumsfeld.
Myself, I thought his poetry was the best part of the guy.
Jul 21, 2008 - 8:16 am 39. Whitehall:Dear Mr. Eggplant,
You wrote:
“Fortunately the whole concept of nuclear pumped X-ray lasers was bogus”
That’s what they WANT you to think…..
Jul 21, 2008 - 9:50 am 40. Whitehall:Let me add that the best definition of “intelligence” is the ability to predict the future.
If pundits speak for the conventional wisdom, isn’t that a a case of regression to the mean?
Jul 21, 2008 - 10:03 am 41. sirius_sir:Wasn’t it Rumsfeld who championed Iraqi democracy before most people, including Paul Bremer, thought it prudent?
He also said the U.S. couldn’t and wouldn’t lose in Iraq.
“We have no choice but to take the offensive,” Rumsfeld told a packed auditorium of soldiers and families of those already deployed, arguing that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq is not a viable option. “People who want to toss in the towel were wrong yesterday, they’re wrong today, and they’ll be wrong tomorrow.”
Rumsfeld was absolutely right on the most important points. No wonder some people can’t forgive him.
Jul 21, 2008 - 10:27 am 42. Charles:Rumsfeld imho was a sight better than McNamera. Is there’s a DoD historian on the board. My understanding is that apart from their wars both sec defs had/will have long lasting impacts on the DoD.
Jul 21, 2008 - 10:51 am 43. Captain Ramen:I suggest reading The Wisdom of Crowds. One of the author’s theories is that experts, in isolation, do worse than average, e.g., most fund managers do worse than the market. A better way to predict the future is through futures markets, such as the Iowa Election Market or the Prediction Market on Strategy Page.
In fact, I suspect the strangling of the Policy Analysis Market had more to do with Senators being afraid of losing control than any ethical concerns.
Jul 21, 2008 - 11:11 am 44. Eggplant:Whitehall said:
“That’s what they WANT you to think…..”
Engineers like to gossip amongst themselves. We’re not supposed to and they tell us not to but we do it anyway.
Jul 21, 2008 - 11:56 am 45. Peter Grynch:Question for Eggplant: You say that all your predictions about Reagan were wrong and then assert, “Had the United States begun deploying third generation nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union would have had no choice but to respond preemptively with submarine launched nuclear weapons and attempt nuclear decapitation.”
All my predictions about the effect of Reagan’s actions were correct, and I disagree with your assertion.
Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, was the Wrong Way Corrigan of foreign policy. He handed a peaceful, stable US ally (Iran) over to terrorists, allowed Castro to empty his prisons into the streets of Miami, forced Clinton to sign the treaty that allowed North Korea to develop nuke weapons, supports Hamas against Israel, and kept Hugo Chavez in power by saying a rigged election was fair.
I’m guessing that you are a Carter supporter?
Jul 21, 2008 - 3:17 pm 46. Whitehall::^)
I did work of a fission fragment laser in college in the 70’s. We got maybe 4 coherent photons out of it.
I remember reading a paper on the x-ray laser back in the 80s and thinking it was pretty bogus although the effects on-target would be cool.
Jul 21, 2008 - 4:12 pm 47. Tarnsman:Re: The Collapse of the Soviet Union
Jul 21, 2008 - 4:46 pm 48. Eggplant:1.) In 1978 I took a Political Affairs class at a local junior college with a professor (the name escapes me) who had led a very traveled life and had friends/contacts living in the old Soviet Union. Toward the end of the course this professor spent a day making predictions of what he saw as trends in the world. One of those was that the Soviet Union would not last the century. Of course, we (the students) stated our disbelief and asked how. “Jeans” was his one word answer. He then went on to explain that in the Soviet Union one of the most coveted possessions was a pair of jeans, American blue jeans. That smugglers were selling them at five-ten times their value. Of course there was Soviet-made copies available, but the citizens wanted the real McCoy, the American-made. In fact, they wanted anything made in America. Despite all the state propaganda, the people of the Soviet Union knew that America was the land of wealth and prosperity. They would see some piece about some disaster in America and notice all the cars in the streets, how well fed the Americans looked, the clothes they were wearing, etc. They knew that the ‘truth’ about America was a lie. And they wanted to live that ‘lie’. “How can a system survive when its citizens wish for the life like the citizens of the sworn enemy?” The professor went on the expand on how the Soviet economy worked and how everything was in short supply, that one could bypass the lines and rationing with bribes, that the system was ranked with corruption and waste, that eventually the house of cards would collapse. Time has proven him wise. He made several other predictions: Brazil becoming the powerhouse in South America, the EU forming but eventually breaking apart due to the reluctance of the wealthy nations willing to foot the bill for the poor ones in Europe, and the breakup of Canada (my favorite). He thought that Quebec would declare its independence thereby causing the Western Provinces to secede and ask for admittance into the Union, the United States of America Union that is. So far that prediction hasn’t come true.
2.) My grandfather(then his late eighties) traveled twice to the Soviet Union during the mid-1980s. After his first trip he came back and personally saw that the Soviet people stood in line for everything, including toilet paper. “What are we so afraid of? They can’t even get enough toilet paper to their own people.” A man that had lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression didn’t think the Soviet Union would last long either.
Peter Grynch asked:
“I’m guessing that you are a Carter supporter?”
I’m a second generation Californian and a Reagan hater. I did vote for Carter but now regret it. If I could do it over again I would have abstained. I still believe that Carter is a good man (he’d make a great Bapitst preacher) but freely admit that he was a terrible President. Perhaps one of the reasons why I’m so deeply distrustful of B. Hussein is because I once supported Jimmy Carter (been there, done that). I did vote for G.W. Bush and would do so again. I believe my earlier error of supporting Carter has been cancelled out by my supporting G.W. Bush. I will vote for McCain and have already sent in my campaign contribution.
Whitehall said:
“I did work on a fission fragment laser in college in the 70’s. We got maybe 4 coherent photons out of it.”
There’s a book about the guys behind the X-ray laser titled:
“Star Warriors, A penetrating look into the lives of the young scientist behind our space Age Weaponry” by William J. Broad, ISBN: 0-671-54566-3.
I believe(?) the book was written before the follow-on tests showed the X-ray laser didn’t work. At one time, the book was fashionable to read at Lawrence Livermore National Lab where the work was actually done.
I vaguely remember the Livermore X-ray laser was a bundle of thin copper wires. I have no clue how one would get something like that to lase. I’m a bit surprised that no one has figured out how to make a gamma ray laser.
Jul 21, 2008 - 5:32 pm 49. Peter Grynch:Eggplant, in the interest of full disclosure, I also voted for Carter but his short presidency made me a conservative for life.
Ronald Reagan said that he never left the Democrat Party, it left him. Today the best Democrat politicians, men like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, are quitting the party or being thrown out. The Democrats may enjoy huge gains this November, but they are no longer a positive force in America.
Jul 21, 2008 - 7:56 pm 50. Eggplant:Whitehall,
I was surfing around the web and found this:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3823325.html
The filing date of the patent was 07/23/1973 (pre-Starwars). The patent assignee was the US Atomic Energy Commission. Here’s the fun bit:
“An x-ray laser utilizing flash-heating of a lasing medium to temperatures of the order of the K-shell binding energy of the medium comprising: means for producing a beam of laser radiation having a pulse of up to about 10-12 seconds, a longitudinally extending lasing medium of material having a diameter of up to about 1 micron and a Z in the range between 2 and 30 and an optical phasing network positioned intermediate said radiation producing means and said lasing medium, said lasing medium being axially aligned with said beam of radiation such that said beam produces flash-heating of said lasing medium producing a traveling heat pulse passing longitudinally along the lasing medium at the group velocity of x-radiation through the heated lasing medium causing a population inversion and lasing of the material.”
Jul 21, 2008 - 8:00 pm 51. Peter Grynch:With respect to gamma ray lasers:
Pumping has been one of the rocks on which previous efforts foundered. The first pumping schemes proposed would have put a great deal of energy into the lasing material very quickly (bomb-pumped lasers (Star Wars)) — in microseconds or even picoseconds — in the hope of getting some into short-lived lasing states. This threatened to melt the material. A suggested alternative was to use an energy state that lasts a long time, perhaps 270 years, so that energy could be built up slowly, and then trigger the stimulated emission. But in the long time period, there are effects that degrade the sharpness of the wavelength, one of the qualities necessary for a good laser.
“This straightforward, brute-force pumping won’t work,” Collins concludes. What will work, he says, is a double process in which energy is first stored in a long-lived “isomeric” state — a state that naturally lasts about a year before it radiates. In this way energy can be introduced slowly to avoid overheating. Then another injection of energy pumps the nucleus to a nearby state that lasts only a second, and from this state the actual lasing occurs. This “upconversion” process is done with X-rays.
Once the nucleus is pumped, will it emit gamma rays? To counter the enthusiasm of the gamma ray workers, the organizers of the meeting invited Harry J. Lipkin of Argonne (Ill.) National Laboratory and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, as devil’s advocates for nuclear physics. He reminded the group that the nucleus would most likely get rid of its energy by a process that emits an electron rather than a gamma ray. The laser people responded that they intend to embed the lasing nuclei in a crystal; then a property of the crystal known as Borrmann effect would alter the energy balance so as to make gamma ray emission more likely.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_v130/ai_4539152
Research continues.
Have you heard about the halfnium bomb?
Jul 21, 2008 - 8:05 pm 52. Eggplant:http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&contentId=A22099-2004Mar24
Peter Grynch said:
“… in the interest of full disclosure, I also voted for Carter but his short presidency made me a conservative for life…. Today the best Democrat politicians, men like Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman, are quitting the party or being thrown out. The Democrats may enjoy huge gains this November, but they are no longer a positive force in America.”
It frustrates me that an honorable and virtuous man like Jimmy Carter was such a terrible President. Also, Joe Lieberman is a very good man of the highest moral integrity. The Democratic Party’s treatment of Lieberman was an utter disgrace. I suspect if the Democrats had matched Lieberman against G.W. Bush then Lieberman would have won easily in the general election. I completely agree that the Democrats are no longer a positive force in America. The moonbats and our dysfunctional MSM are destroying the political process.
Jul 21, 2008 - 8:16 pm 53. Peterike:Eggplant said:
It frustrates me that an honorable and virtuous man like Jimmy Carter was such a terrible President.
Perhaps you would be less frustrated if you understood that Carter is neither honorable nor virtuous, but a vain, vicious cretin.
Jul 22, 2008 - 7:44 am 54. Eggplant:Peter Grynch asked:
“Have you heard about the hafnium bomb?”
I have heard of it but need to study it in greater depth. Hafnium is interesting stuff. The folks in the spacecraft thermal protection business were once all a twitter over hafnium diboride. Supposably it was going to revolutionize entry vehicle design. Then they discovered hafnium diboride shatters like glass when subjected to thermal shock (works fine if it’s warmed up slowly). People no longer talk about hafnium diboride (another “good idea” that didn’t work).
Jul 22, 2008 - 9:31 am 55. Things to Keep in Mind When Watching College Football Gameday « Thinking Bulldog:[...] is essential daily reading. The site also has many other posts on interesting topics, to wit: The Black Swan, which is ostensibly a discussion of Barack Obama’s foreign policy positions, but is more [...]
Aug 19, 2008 - 3:50 pm