= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
taw comments on Open Thread: April 2010 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (524)
Is there any evidence that Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is anything else than a total fraud?
Am I missing something here?
Well, his TED talk does make a number of specific testable predictions. They were registered in wrongtomorrow.com, but that's down.
Here they are. These are 5 predictions all basically saying "Iran will not make a nuclear test by 2011" as far as their predictive content is concerned, which is not much unlike predicting that "we will not use flying cars by 2011".
I don't think they're that vague and obvious.
He predicts "Ahmedinijad will lose influence and the mullahs will become slightly more influential", not loss of office - which is not testable.
All Iranian officials have claimed endlessly that their program is "civilian only" etc. - it would be a huge surprise if they made a sudden reversal.
If someone expected Iran to have had nukes, they have a serious prediction problems. The only people "expecting" that were the same who were expecting Saddam to have nukes.
That review is a very worthwhile read - thanks for linking to it!
I've heard claims that his "general model of international conflict" has been independently tested by the CIA and some other organization to 90% accuracy, but haven't seen any details of any of these tests.
Oh he gives plenty of such claims, not a single one of them are independently verifiable. You cannot access such report. This increases my estimation he's a fraud relative to not giving such claims in the first place.
At the Amazon link you provide, BBdM gives the full citation for the CIA report, among others:
Stanley Feder, "Factions and Policon: New Ways to Analyze Politics," in H. Bradford Westerfield, ed. Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal journal, 1955-1992 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995)
It does not mention BBdM by name, but is about Policon, which I believe is the original name of his company.
I have not read the report and don't know if it supports him, but I think it's pretty common for people's lack of interest in such reports to create the illusion that they have been fabricated so difficulty finding them on the web isn't much evidence.
ETA: the other articles he mentions: a follow-up by Feder (gated) and an academic review (ungated).
ETA: I have still not read the report, but I should say that first page says exactly what he says it says: 90% accuracy, standard CIA methods also 90% accuracy, but his predictions are more precise.
You'd think that if he had some method that at least happened to get lucky once in a while, he'd find a way to say "Hey, look at this success I can show!" or something.
Allow me to make a prediction: There will be conflict in the Middle East. ;)
(And I'm not exactly going out on a limb here. I don't even have to say when; there's been conflict there for roughly the past four thousand years, and I don't think anything's going to change that for as long as people still live there.)