Thursday, November 01, 2007

The New Nostradamus

I give you, without commentary....BDM.

If you listen to Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and a lot of people don’t, he’ll claim that mathematics can tell you the future. In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. “Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is,” says one colleague. “Others think he’s a quack.”

3 comments:

Dirty Davey said...

"His first foray into forecasting controversy took place in 1984, when he published an article in PS, the flagship journal of the American Political Science Association..."

"Flagship journal"--I do not think that term means what you think it means.

Angus said...

lol, it's inconceivable that PS is not APSA's flagship journal!!

you killed my father, prepare to die!

Dirty Davey said...

Other choice bits:

Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions--more than 2,000,...

Of course, the real measure is not the total count of correct predictions but the rather the proportion of predictions made that are correct. If he made 2,050 total predictions, 2,000 is impressive. If he made 10,000 predictions, then not so much.

As one of the foremost scholars of game theory—or “rational choice,” as its political-science practitioners prefer to call it...

Umm... game theory is kind of a subset of rational choice, not by any means the whole thing, right?

...a new editor of the APSR who vowed to make the flagship journal more hospitable to mathematics-free articles...

So it seems the APSA's fleet of journals has multiple flagships, which would imply multiple flag officers! Wonder how you model that?