| 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.
=========================
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.
<snip>
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.
==================
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".
============================
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."
==================================
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.
====================================
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
<snip>
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?
<snip>
=========================
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