View 280 October 20 - 26, 2003 (original) (raw)
Saturday, October 25, 2003
In another conference, someone made a point, another commented "nonsense" and I replied. I thought my reply might be of use here:
c.. 1990 Baker inadvertently gave him (Saddam) the Green Light to invade
Kuwait
has some truth to it. Our ambassador delivered a highly ambiguous message. April Glaspie was more interested in not stirring the burnt bottom of the soup than in conveying any real messages, and particularly not threats or an ultimatum. It wasn�t so much Bush who conveyed the wrong message as the imbecilic policies that led us to career FSO cookie pushers as ambassadors to important places. A real political appointed ambassador would have leveled with Saddam. The FSO people have no idea what either the President or the American people want: they have their own agenda, and they do not hesitate to apply it rather than Presidential intentions. Glaspie was one of the worst of a very bad lot. Saddling the US with career FSO types in top posts was stupid when we did it, and it is stupid now.
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Is this something to worry about? From the International Herald Tribune:
. . . Martin Van Creveld, a military sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes that "the morale of the [Israeli] army has never been so low."
The military command has no strategic vision, he said. "Nothing it has done to defeat the intifada has worked."
There is a grave lesson in this for the U.S. Army in Iraq, which now teeters on the wall separating liberation from repression.
The official claim is that it is fighting attacks from remnants of a defeated regime and other enemies of democratic reform. Yet the number of daily attacks on U.S. forces has been rising.
Israel has countered the intifada by escalating, with increasing air and artillery attacks on "targeted individuals", which has had the effect of greatly increasing "collateral damage" (deaths and injuries to Palestinian Arab civilians including children). I am not here arguing for or against the Israeli tactics: the question is, are there lessons for the US here? And are we learning them?
The Rumsfeld Memo seems to be asking much the same questions.
How long will the army endure this? The loss of 4 troopers and serious injury to a dozen more is now on page 16 of the Saturday LA Times. That may be the right place for it. A trooper a day is something above training levels of casualties, but it's not unendurable for those sufficiently hardened to it. Whether it's a sustainable rate given the politics of the situation is another matter.
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Paul Meehl, Prediction, and feeling safer
Excerted from:
50 Years of Successful Predictive Modeling Should be Enough: Lessons for Philosophy of Science
J.D. Trout & Michael Bishop http://hypatia.ss.uci.edu/lps/psa2k/fifty-years.pdf
In 1954, Paul Meehl wrote a classic book entitled, Clinical Versus Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and Review of the Literature. Meehl asked a simple question: Are the predictions of human experts more reliable than the predictions of actuarial models? To be a fair comparison, both the experts and the models had to make their predictions on the basis of the same evidence (i.e., the same cues). Meehl reported on 20 such experiments.
Since 1954, every non-ambiguous study that has compared the reliability of clinical and actuarial predictions (i.e., Statistical Prediction Rules, or SPRs) has supported Meehl's conclusion.
So robust is this finding that we might call it The Golden Rule of Predictive Modeling: When based on the same evidence, the predictions of SPRs are more reliable than the predictions of human experts.
Is there a lesson in here for TSA and Homeland Security? But of course another term for Statistical Prediction Rules is "profiling".
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Seventy Five Years Ago:
"A void is made in the heart of Islam which has to be filled up again and again by a mere repetition of the revolution that founded it. There are no sacraments; the only thing that can happen is a sort of apocalypse, as unique as the end of the world; so the apocalypse can only be repeated and the world end again and again. There are no priests; and this equality can only breed a multitude of lawless prophets almost as numerous as priests. The very dogma that there is only one Mohamet produces an endless procession of Mohamets."
G. K. Chesterton
About the same time, Hillaire Belloc predicted:
"... I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralyzed but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable."
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Do we want to help people or feel good?
If the money in the Head Start Program were instead put into indexed government bonds in the names of the individuals who go into the Head Start program and the proceeds paid out to them as additional retirement benefits when they reached the age of retirement, would they be better off?
It turns out they would be very much better off. The benefits of Head Start vanish after a few years. The bonds wouldn't.
But of course we will never do anything like that, which answers the question posed above.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/03/magazine/03LEVITT.html
The Probability That a Real-Estate Agent Is Cheating You (and Other Riddles of Modern Life) New York Times Magazine, 3.8.3 By STEPHEN J. DUBNER
The most brilliant young economist in America -- the one so deemed, at least, by a jury of his elders
In Levitt's view, economics is a science with excellent tools for gaining answers but a serious shortage of interesting questions. His particular gift is the ability to ask such questions. For instance: If drug dealers make so much money, why do they still live with their mothers? Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What really caused crime rates to plunge during the past decade? Do real-estate agents have their clients' best interests at heart? Why do black parents give their children names that may hurt their career prospects? Do schoolteachers cheat to meet high-stakes testing standards? Is sumo wrestling corrupt?
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