Saturday, May 7, 2011

Future Babble by Dan Gardner ? review

This book should be required reading for America's intelligence agencies

President Obama recently criticised American spy agencies for failing to predict the spreading unrest in the Middle East. Soon after, US researchers began recruiting volunteers for a multi-year, web-based study of people's ability to predict world events. Sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), the Forecasting World Events project aims to discover whether some kinds of personality are better than others at making accurate predictions.

The spooks would do well to read Dan Gardner's fascinating new book. In Future Babble, the Canadian journalist examines a wide range of expert forecasts and finds them wanting. His starting point is a famous study by the American psychologist Philip Tetlock. Tetlock asked 284 people who made their living "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends" to estimate the probability of future events in both their areas of specialisation and in areas about which they claimed no expertise. Over the course of 20 years, the experts made a total of 82,361 forecasts. Would there be a non-violent end to apartheid in South Africa? Would Gorbachev be ousted in a coup? Would the United States go to war in the Persian Gulf? And so on.

Tetlock put most of the forecasting questions into a "three possible futures" form, in which three alternative outcomes were presented: the persistence of the status quo, more of something (political freedom, economic growth), or less of something (repression, recession). The results were embarrassing. The experts performed worse than they would have if they had simply assigned an equal probability to all three outcomes. Dart-throwing monkeys would have done better.

This may not come as a big surprise in the aftermath of a financial crisis that so many experts failed to foresee. What is perhaps more interesting is that not all experts are equally bad. Some, in fact, are surprisingly good, and their uncanny accuracy suggests that there may be a special kind of intelligence for thinking about risk and uncertainty which, given the right conditions, can be improved. Most areas of life require, to a greater or lesser degree, some degree of risk intelligence, but many of those in the positions where this is most important ? doctors, for instance ? prove themselves highly unqualified, not because they aren't bright or well-trained, but precisely because their intelligence and long training have led them to be overconfident and to suppress doubt.

Gardner also poses an important question: if expert predictions have such a poor track record, why do we keep seeking them out and believing them? He cites Scott Armstrong's "seer-sucker" theory: "No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers." Gardner puts this down to a widespread aversion to uncertainty. I think what he has in mind is something psychologists call the "need for closure", though Gardner doesn't refer to this concept explicitly. The need for closure reflects the desire for an answer to a question. When it becomes overwhelming, any answer, even a wrong one, is preferable to remaining in a state of confusion and ambiguity. It's the opposite of what Keats called "negative capability" ? "when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It's not "reaching after fact and reason" in itself that Keats objects to, but doing so irritably. It's the overhasty conclusion that he condemns ? the preference for immediate half-truths rather than waiting for the details.

Nowhere is the need for closure more evident, and more dangerous, than in politics. It was politicians who, to use Andrew Gilligan's memorable phrase, "sexed up" the intelligence reports about the threats posed by Saddam Hussein. The intelligence agencies were concerned, for example, that there was not enough evidence to support the claim that Iraqi forces could deploy weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes of Saddam giving an order to use them, but politicians allegedly told the spooks to remove the caveats. As a result, the September dossier was far more categorical in its assessment of the threat posed by Iraq than the more cautious spooks would have liked.

The same process was at work in the United States. US Secretary of State Colin Powell relied heavily on the evidence of a single source in his speech to the United Nations on 5 February 2003, which paved the way for the invasion of Iraq two months later. The source's credibility was already in doubt well before then, but there is no trace of these doubts in Powell's speech. Later, his chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkinson, would wonder why the director of the CIA, George Tenet, and his deputy John McLaughlin, believed the source so readily, and why they conveyed his claims to Powell "with a degree of conviction bordering on passionate, soul-felt certainty".

In blaming the CIA for failing to foresee the current unrest in the Middle East, therefore, President Obama is passing the buck. The spooks themselves are often well aware of the uncertainties; it is their political paymasters who elide them. It is our leaders, and not the intelligence analysts, who really need to read Gardner's book.

Dylan Evans's Risk Intelligence: How to Live with Uncertainty will be published by Atlantic Books/Free Press next year.


guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds


Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/07/future-babble-dan-gardner-review

Lady Gaga Jay Z Movie News Celebrity Gossip

No comments:

Post a Comment