Tetlock and Gardner after discussing the Wehrmacht training and tactics to illustrate distributed decision making:
“There is no divinely mandated link between morality and competence.”
This is awesome. It dovetails nicely with having to realize that ones enemies will attack you where you are weakest, not where you are strongest and where you’ve invested the most in defense.
“Forecasters who see illusory correlations and assume that moral and cognitive weakness run together will fail when we need them most. We don’t want intelligence analysts to assume jihadist groups must be inept or that vicious regimes can’t be creatively vicious.” —Tetlock/Gardner.
It worries me how many see their enemies as subhuman intelligence
“interstate wars have been declining since the 1950s and civil wars have been declining since the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. This is reflected in the number of battle deaths per year, which, with a few blips, declined throughout the period.” —Tetlock/Gardner.
What absolute balderdash. Pure high-grade fertilizer 💩. Tetlock really should know better than incoming this pernicious Pinker thesis but alas, even a researcher on analytical thinking has to fail sometimes.
There’s been a few places in this book where I feel the authors forgot their own message. Did JFK’s team really improve between the Bay of Pigs catastrophe and its win during Cuban Missile Cdisis? Wouldn’t you need to test their performance over several geopolitical scares to establish that?
Did this forecaster really let his values misguide his prediction? Wouldn’t you need to run a specific experiment to verify it wasn’t any number of different things?
Well maybe we can forgive some lapses😒
Oh about the stupid idea how war-related deaths have been decreasing for a handful of decades. I’m really thinking about publishing an alternative analysis every year: an event costing how many lives would have to occur this year to totally invert those silly linear regressions. I bet it wouldn’t be that big.
That is, I’d guess if 25k deaths happened in an official war in 2018, none of those reports would be able to say “war has declined since 1950s!” without serious data cherry picking 🍒.
And those war “statistics” may ignore things like the Rwandan and Guatemalan civil wars (where hundreds of thousands of lives were lost). That might be why Tetlock cites civil wars separately from “regular” wars, the former having only started “declining” (presumably in a linear regression sense?) since the 1990s. The nineties! Thirty years of declining civil wars! They’re well on their way to extinction! 😖😫🙄