Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017
p.228
Amos Tversky and Don Redelmeier
“Discrepancy between Medical Decision for Individual Patients and for Groups”, April 1990
p.228
“Physicians deal with patients one at a time, whereas health policy makers deal with aggregrate.”
But there was a conflict between the two roles.
(Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017, )
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This grouping of TEXT has been put together into three different groups or sub-groups if it sounds more clear that way.
The first group is labelled [‘]expert, The expert[’];
the second group is labelled [‘]NSA, FBI, wiretapped[’];
‘NSA, FBI, wiretapped’ is nested inside ‘expert, The expert’,
kind of like the 101 Arabian nights stories, which have 101 stories inside the one story, also like peeling onions;
The third group is labelled [‘]Primrose, Tonkin, error correction[’];
this last group is added to the end of ‘expert, The expert’ as a bonus TEXT, kind of like getting a mini-comic story at the end of the main comic story in Japanese manga (Japanese culture of comic books).
Executive summary of ‘expert, The expert’
• experts are not perfect; they make mistake, because there is always a degree of uncertainty, no matter how close to zero that uncertainty might be; however, most experts and public figures, do not want or like to admit that uncertainty do exist, because to admit to uncertainty is to admit to the possibility of being wrong, in another word ‘error’; and error, usually, have consequences;
• many times, the experts do not follow the decision-making process (the set of rules or factors that they use to come to a decision or conclusion) that they would tell you that they use in practice; in other words, they say one thing, but in practice, they do some thing else - a bit different (the words do not match up with actions);
• just like the rest of us, experts do make mistake, and they tend to make the same mistake, over and over again; specifically, experts make the kind of mistakes that is in the design and structure of the system; not only that, these mistakes are usually hidden or invisible; and just like the rest of us, experts do not like to admit that they made the mistake; they might attribute the mistake or error to randomness, which is another way of saying, they don't really know why the mistake or error happened;
Executive summary of ‘NSA, FBI, wiretapped’
• the FBI - using the usual methods and by way of the NSA - should know most of things there is know about you that matter to their case and interest; once you get on their RADAR;
Executive summary of ‘Primrose, Tonkin, error correction’
• the Johnson administration was already on war footing (war posture) when the Gulf of Tokin incident pulled the United States into an undeclared war in Vietnam;
• integrity and fidelity of the data base and data transmission;
• error detection and error correction of the database and transmission;
• use ‘Redundancy’ to help compensate for noise in communication;
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Robert Trivers, The folly of fools, 2011
p.2
<skip first sentence of the paragraph> At the heart of our mental lives, there seemed to be a striking contradiction--we seek out information and then act to destroy it. On the one hand, our sense organs have evolved to give us a marvelously detailed and accurate view of the outside world--we see the world in color and 3-D, in motion, texture, nonrandomness, embedded patterns, and a great variety of other features. Likewise for hearing and smell. Together our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of ourselves--and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act repeatedly to boost positive self-opinion, and show a suite of ego-defense mechanisms. Why?
(Trivers, Robert., The folly of fools : the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life / Robert Trivers., 1. self-deception., 2. deception--psychological aspects., 3. deception--social aspects., 2011, 153.4, )
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Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013
pp.186-187
The idea is that a single word of a language can designate both a narrower and a broader category, where the narrower one is wholly contained inside the broader one, as was illustrated above by the word “coffee”.
p.187
Although marking can occasionally hinder communication and lead to confusion, it is mostly a useful tool, imbuing language with greater fluidity by allowing several categories to be labeled simultaneously by a single term and by taking advantage of our mind's natural sensitivity to context.
p.187
Next we will scrutinize a process at the core of human thought, and which we already introduced in Chapter 1: the development of concepts through category extension. As we saw in that chapter, when categories are born, they are tiny ── often they have just one member ── and then cores and halos begin to form.
p.187
Categories grow by welcoming new members, which sometimes are central and other times lie way out at the fringes, at the city limits. The act of welcoming such unexpected members into the fold requires either “pushing the envelope” or else the creation of new categories. In any case, analogy is the motor that drives all such extensions.
p.187
We will analyze the process at the root of this human ability to understand situations in terms of pre-existing concepts, and at the same time to modify those concepts under the influence of new situations.
p.187
What makes an expert?
This question is important because the concept of ‘expertise’ applies not only to a specialist's knowledge of some narrow domain but also to an average person's ability, developed over a lifetime, to deal with their daily environment.
p.187
More specifically, we shall see that being an expert doesn't mean just that one has acquired more categories than other people have, but also that one has organized them in such a way as to facilitate useful categorizations at different levels of abstraction, and in such a way as to allow one to glide smoothly, when under contextual pressure, from one category to another.
p.187
This indeed is one of the wellsprings of creativity ── namely, the ability to make certain crucial leaps that at first seem surprising but that come to make eminent sense after the fact.
(Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, 2013, )
Gary Klein, Sources of power : how people make decision, 1998
p.54
Andrzej (pronounced Andrei) Bloch,
p.55
To put things in perspective for me, he noted that food shortages were the traditional source of unrest in Poland and Russia; people were more likely to protest food shortages than a lack of political freedom. If they could not afford to buy bread, that might cause the government to collapse.
pp.55-56
Andrzej created wonderful simulations. Without prompting, he boiled it down to three variables: the rate of inflation, the rate of unemployment, and the rate of foreign exchange. I asked Andrzej to imagine how the Polish economy would do on these three variables by quarter for the year 1990. According to Andrzej, since the government was not going to fight inflation artificially, the inflation rate was going to zoom up from its (then) current rate of 80 percent a year to an annual rate of about 1,000 percent for a few months. (This meant prices would increase around 80 percent a month instead of 80 percent a year.) Goods were going to become quite expensive. Prices would rise faster than wages. Quickly, people would not be able to afford to buy very much, so demand would fall, and the prices would stabilize. He estimated that this would take about three months. To put things in perspective for me, he noted that food shortages were the traditional source of unrest in Poland and Russia; people were more likely to protest food shortages than a lack of political freedom. If they could not afford to buy bread, that might cause the government to collapse. Nevertheless, he felt that the euphoria over the Solidarity movement was high enough and that the period of sharp inflation would be short enough so there would not be problems on this score. When I reviewed his predictions with him a year later, we found that his was accurate. He had accurately called the sharp increase to up 1,000 percent for January and February, as well as the downturn to around 20 to 25 percent by April and thereafter.
Next, he considered unemployment. If the government had the courage to drop unproductive industries, many people would lose their jobs. This would start in about six months as the government sorted things out. The unemployment would be small by U.S. standards, rising from less than 1 percent to maybe 10 percent. For Poland, this increase would be shocking. Politically, it might be more than the government could tolerate and might force it to end the experiment with capitalism. When we reviewed his estimates, we found that unemployment had not risen as quickly as he expected, probably, Andrzej believed, because the government was not as ruthless as it said it would be in closing unproductive plants. Even worse, if a plant was productive in areas A, B, and C and was terrible in D and E, and then as long as they made a profit, they continued their operations without shutting down areas D and E. So the system faced a built-in resistance to increased unemployment.
Finally, he looked at foreign exchange, which he saw as a balancing force. As the exchange rate got worse, increasing from 700 zlotys per dollar to 1,500 zlotys per dollar, people would find foreign goods too expensive so they would buy more Polist items. Similarly, outsiders would find that Polish-made items were a bargain, so exports would boom, increasing employment and improving economic health. He thought this might take a few years to accomplish, if at all. He expected that during 1990, the exchange rate would continue to increase, eventually to 1,400 zlotys per dollar. He expected that the government would intervene at that point. During the year I noted that the zlotys went up to around 900 per dollar and stayed there. Andrzej had been too pessimistic. In 1991, I discussed this with him, and he felt that the problem again was that the government was softening the blows. Had the full market economy shift been made as advertised, the rate would have increased much faster, and the shift would have been finished much quicker.
This mental simulation depended on three factors and on a few transitions (rapid inflation, reduced level of inflation, gradual rise in unemployment and loss in exchange rate, improved employment, and finally, stabilized exchange rate).
Andrzej was not finished. He estimated the likelihood of success for this market economy experiment at 60 percent. A virtuoso at simulating Polish futures, he generated pessimistic mental simulations and showed how the experiment could fail. He switched to political simulations.
p.57
The implications of this minor sideline in an exploratory study are clear: without a sufficient amount of expertise and background knowledge, it may be difficult or impossible to build a mental simulation. The expert, despite his desire to see the market economy experiment work, could imagine different ways for it to fail and to anticipate early warning signs. He told me about several (e.g., if the rate of inflation does not come down below an annual rate of 50 percent by April, start worrying).
p.57
The example of the Polish economy shows how difficult it is to construct a useful mental simulation. But once it is constructed, it is impressive. We do this all the time in areas about which we are knowledgeable.
p.58
In assembling the action sequence, figure 5.3 reminds us that mental simulations generally move through six transitions, driven by around three causal factors. Once the person tries to assemble the action sequence, he or she evaluates it for coherence (Does it make sense?), applicability (Will it get what I need?), and completeness (Does it include too much or too little?). If everything checks out, the action sequence is run and applied to form an explanation, model, or projection. If the internal evaluation turns up difficulties, the person may reexamine the need and/ or the parameters and try again.
The cases Beth and I reviewed fit into two major categories: the person was trying to explain what had happened in the past, or trying to imagine what was going to happen in the future.
p.279
By way of analogy, when radar was introduced into commercial shipping, it was for the intent of improving safety so that ships could avoid collisions when visibility was poor. The actual impact was that ships increased their speed, and accident rates stayed constant. On the decision front, we expect to find the same thing. Planning cycles will be expedited, and the plans will be made with the same level of uncertainty as there was before.
(Klein, Gary, Sources of power : how people make decision / Gary Klein., 1. decision-making., 1998, 2001, 685.403, MIT Press, )
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/* */
/* NSA, FBI, wiretapped */
/* */
Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, 2013
p.196
Marking is actually a well-adapted and useful way of exploiting ambiguity in order to maintain flexibility, allowing people to use a word in a variety of contexts. Indeed, although precision is crucial in communication, it's equally important that precision should not entail a stifling rigidity, preventing one from understanding familiar words in unanticipated situations. Marking allows precision (the designation of a very specific category) to coexist with flexibility (the looseness of interpretation that comes from the freedom of finding the appropriate level of abstraction).
As we will see (note that this “we” is broader than we1, which consists of just your two authors, since it includes our readers as well, hence this “we” means we2) in the next few paragraphs, if we (note that this “we” is even broader since it includes all of humanity, hence it means we3) couldn't categorize things simultaneously at different levels of abstraction, it would lead to some unfortunate consequences:
Gyro Gearloose is extremely proud of his latest invention: a car that obeys spoken commands. No longer does he need to pilot his vehicle; all he needs to do is tell it what he wants it to do.
As they are approaching an intersection, Gyro says to his car, “Go straight at the crossing, but first make sure that no car is coming on either side; if there is one, then slow down and let it pass first.”
At the intersection, Gyro's car doesn't slow down in the least, and thus it gets sideswiped... by a truck.
p.197
Thus: are pickups trucks? Are SUV trucks, or are they station wagons, or are they vans? Are SUV cars? Are motorbikes and motorscooter motorcycles? Are roller blades roller skates? All these categories are marked categories, and thus they can take on wider or narrower senses depending on the context, which in certain situations leads to an affirmative answer, and in others to a negative answer.
p.197
The fact that single lexical item denotes categories at different levels of abstraction allows one to select the appropriate level as a function of the situation, and thus to deal with things in an appropriate manner.
(Surfaces and essences: analogy as the fuel and fire of thinking, Douglas Hofstadter & Emmanuel Sander, 2013, )
Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008
p.141
everything desirable that SIGINT might provide (desirable)
what could be done with present technology (possible)
what was legal (legal)
pp.148-149
“At key points, key points in my remarks, I pointedly and consciously downshifted the language I was using”, Hayden said.
I switched from the word ‘communications’ to the much more specific and unarguably accurate ‘conversations’.
There was no drift net for content.
web links, ip address, “to” “from” “subject” lines of emails, telephone numbers we dialed, the parties, times and durations of calls
TSP
transactional data, telephone logs, e-mail headers (p.145)
pp.145-146
vehicles, cell phones locations, cash machines, credit cards, bank transfers, changes of address, air hotel rental car reservation
phone records, bank records
NSA, CIA, FBI, elements of the Defense department additional surveillance (p.145)
p.145
From a legal point of view, the washout rate mattered. [why?]
p.287
Patrick Philbin
had been handling the classified paperwork. (US Justice department)
Philbin had to study the intersection of three complex systems: telecommunications, spy technology, and the statutory regimes that governed surveillance.
But this was not a routine matter, and the facts kept changing.
p.293
By the end of the month, Goldsmith and Philbin reached their conclusion: parts of the surveillance operation had no support in law. They walked Comey through the program, in far greater depth than Hayden had. Comey was so disturbed that he drove to Langley one evening to compare notes with Scott Muller, the general counsel at the CIA. Muller “got it immediately”, agreeing with the Goldsmith-Philbin analysis.
“At the end of the day I concluded something I didn't ever think I could conclude, and that is Pat Philbin and Jack Goldsmith understood this activity much better than Michael Hayden did”, Comey said. “They drilled down, understood things in a way that more senior people didn't”.
On Thursday, March 4, Comey brought the finding to Ashcroft, conferring for an hour one-on-one. The two men “agreed on a course of action”, Comey later testified.
p.243
Like other senior officials, Edelman received daily transcripts from the NSA that touched on subjects of his responsibility, delivered in a manila envelope with his name on a white cover page.
Eric Edelman
(Angler: the Cheney vice presidency, Barton Gellman, 2008, )
/* */
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systems analysis
selected readings
Edited by Standford L. Optner
penguin books, first published 1973
1 Charles Hitch
An Appreciation of System Analysis
C. Hitch, ‘An appreciation of systems analysis’, The RAND Corporation, 1955, pp.699, 8-18, 55, 1-25.1
1. This paper is a condensation of lectures prepared for Air Force audiences; it was presented to the Operations Research Society of America at the Los Angeles meeting, 15 Auguest 1955.
◇p.36
Systems analysis should be looked upon not as the antithesis of judgement but as a framework which permits the judgement of experts in numerous sub-fields to be combined - to yield results which transcend any individual judgement. This is its aim and opportunity.
But we still have the question: where is the ‘expert’ in the field as a whole with the judgement required to design a systems analysis and interpret its result? We know there are not any real experts. But we think we can demonstrate that the degree of expertness required to design a systems analysis is less than the degree of expertness to intuit a good answer without a system analysis.
Let me put it in another way. We tend to be worse, in an absolute sense, in applying analysis or scientific method to broad context problems; but unaided intuition in such problems is also much worse in an absolute sense. Let's not deprive ourselves of any useful tools, however short of perfection they may fall.
(systems analysis, selected readings, Edited by Standford L. Optner, penguin books, first published 1973, ◇p.36)
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Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017
pp.165-176
Chapter 6
The Mind's Rules
p.165
In 1960 Paul Hoffman, a professor of psychology ...
...leafy Eugene neighborhood that had most recently housed a Unitarian church, and renamed it the Oregon Research Institute.
A private institute devoted exclusively to the study of human behavior, there was nothing in the world like it, and it soon attracted both curious assignments and unusual people.
p.168
Many of the psychologists who joined the place [Oregon Research Institute] shared Paul Hoffman's interest in human judgement. They also shared an uncommon interest in Paul Meehl's book, Clinical versus Statistical Prediction, about the inability of psychologists to outperform algorithms when trying to diagnose, or predict the behavior of, their patients. It was the same book Danny Kahneman had read in the mid-1950s before he replaced the human judges of new Israeli soldiers with a crude algorithm [implemented female soldiers who were instructed how to do the interview].
p.168
1986, essay called “Causes and Effects of My Disturbing Little Book”, Paul Meehl
pp.168-169
If human judgment was somehow inferior to simple models, humanity had a big problem: ...
pp.169-170
To that end, in 1960, Hoffman had published a paper in which he set out to analyze how experts drew their conclusions. Of course you might simply ask the experts how they did it--but that was a highly subjective approach. People often said they were doing one thing when they were actually doing another. A better way to get at expert thinking, Hoffman argued, was to take the various inputs the experts used to make their decisions (“cues”, he called these inputs) and infer from those decisions the weights they had placed on the various inputs.
p.170
Lew Goldberg
p.170
sought to understand clinical psychologists, how they make decision
p.171
Lew Goldberg, 1968
He began by pointing out the small mountain of research that suggested that expert judgement was less reliable than algorithms. “I can summarize this ever-growing body of literature,” wrote Goldberg, “by pointing out that over a rather large array of clinical judgment tasks (including by now some which were specifically selected to show the clinician at his best and the actuary at his worst), rather simple actuarial formulae typically can be constructed to perform at a level of validity no lower than that of the clinical expert.”
p.172
Goldberg pointed out that, indeed, experts tended to describe their thoughts processes as subtle and complicated and difficult to model.
p.173
The doctors might want to believe that their thought processes were subtle and complicated, but a simple model captured these perfectly well.
p.174
Still, Goldberg was slow to blame the doctors.
p.174
How could their simple model be better at, say, diagnosing cancer than a doctor? The model had been created, in effect, by the doctors. The doctors had given the researcher all the information in it.
p.174
The Oregon researchers went and tested hypothesis anyway. It turned out to be true. If you wanted to know whether you had [stomach ulcer] cancer or not, you were better off using the algorithm that the researchers had created than you were asking the radiologist to study the X-ray. The simple algorithm had outperformed not merely the group of doctors; it had outperformed even the single best doctor.
p.174
Lew Goldberg, “Man versus Model of Man”
p.175
It was as if the doctors had a theory of how much weight to assign to any given trait of any given ulcer. The model captured their theory of how to best diagnose an ulcer. But in practice they did not abide by their own ideas of how to best diagnose an ulcer. As a result, they were beaten by their own model.
p.175
But in practice they did not abide by their own ideas of how to best diagnose an ulcer. As a result, they were beaten by their own model.
p.175
Why would the judgement of an expert--a medical doctor, no less--be inferior to a model crafted from that very expert's own knowledge?
(Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017, )
Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017
p.218
representativeness, availability, anchoring
p.219
people made mistakes!
the mistakes were predictable and systematic
They seemed ingrained in human nature.
p.221
To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.
p.228
Amos Tversky and Don Redelmeier
“Discrepancy between Medical Decision for Individual Patients and for Groups”, April 1990
p.228
“Physicians deal with patients one at a time, whereas health policy makers deal with aggregrate.”
But there was a conflict between the two roles.
p.228
A doctor who did his job properly really could not just consider the interest of the individual patient; he needed to consider the aggregate of patients with that illness.
(Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017, )
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Can Game Theory Predict When Iran Will Get the Bomb?
By CLIVE THOMPSON
AUG. 12, 2009
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html
... ... ...
In June, I visited Bueno de Mesquita at his San Francisco home to see the results. A tall man with a slab of gray hair, Bueno de Mesquita, who is 62, welcomed me with painstakingly prepared cups of espresso. Then he pulled out his beat-up I.B.M. laptop — so old that the lettering on the A, S, D and E keys was worn off — and showed me a spreadsheet that summarized Iran’s future.
The spreadsheet included almost 90 players. Some were people, like the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; others were groups, like the U.N. Security Council and Iran’s “religious radicals.” Next to each player, a number represented one variable in Bueno de Mesquita’s model: the extent to which a player wanted Iran to have the ability to make nuclear weapons. The scale went from 0 to 200, with 0 being “no nuclear capacity at all” and 200 representing a test of a nuclear missile.
... ... ...
There were a few exceptions: Robert F. Kelley, a retired former partner of Arthur Andersen, described using Bueno de Mesquita for “60 or 70” cases, ranging from internal firing decisions to figuring out how to persuade the U.S. to support China’s entry into the World Trade Organization. (Bueno de Mesquita also offered to use his software to predict which of Arthur Andersen’s clients — including, at the time, Enron — were likely to engage in financial fraud. But the firm’s lawyers, Bueno de Mesquita says, didn’t want to use the tool for fear it would put them in awkward legal positions. “Had I been able to convince the firm” to use the model, Kelley says, “I think that Andersen would be alive today.”)
... ... ...
Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they’re talking about and when they don’t. The computer’s advantage over humans is its ability to spy unseen coalitions, but this works only when the relative positions of each player are described accurately in the first place. “Garbage in, garbage out,” Bueno de Mesquita notes. Bueno de Mesquita begins each interview by sitting quietly — “in a slightly closed-up manner,” as Lapthorne told me — but as soon as an interviewee expresses doubt or contradicts himself, Bueno de Mesquita instantly asks for clarification.
“His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he’s a master at it,” says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. “The thing is, he doesn’t think that’s his gift,” McDermott says. “He thinks it’s the model. I think the model is, I’m sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I’ve said that flat out to him, and he’s said, ‘Well, anyone can do interviews.’ But they can’t.”
... ... ...
Stephen Walt, a Harvard professor of international affairs
It’s the predictions that Walt doesn’t trust, because Bueno de Mesquita does not publish the actual computer code of his model. (Bueno de Mesquita cannot do so because his former firm owns the actual code, but he counters that he has outlined the math behind his model in enough academic papers and books for anyone to replicate something close to his work.) While Bueno de Mesquita has published many predictions in academic journals, the vast majority of his forecasts have been done in secret for corporate or government clients, where no independent academics can verify them.
... ... ...
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The New Nostradamus
by Michael A.M. Lerner | Ethan Hill
October 4, 2007
https://www.good.is/articles/the-new-nostradamus
"Game theory is math for how people behave strategically," Bueno de Mesquita says.
How does Bueno de Mesquita do this? With mathematics.
"You start with a set of assumptions, as you do with anything, but you do it in a formal, mathematical way," he says. "You break them down as equations and work from there to see what follows logically from those assumptions." The assumptions he's talking about concern each actor's motives. You configure those motives into equations that are, essentially, statements of logic based on a predictive theory of how people with those motives will behave. From there, you start building your mathematical model. You determine whether the predictive theory holds true by plugging in data, which are numbers derived from scales of preferences that you ascribe to each actor based on the various choices they face.
The Prisoner's Dilemma, a basic in game theory, explains it well: Two burglars are apprehended near the scene of a crime and are interrogated separately by the police. The police know these two goons did it, but they don't know how, so they offer each one a deal. If they both confess and cooperate, they'll both get a minor sentence of five years. If neither man confesses, they'll both only get one year (for having been caught with some of the stolen loot on them). But, and here's where it gets interesting, if one confesses and the other doesn't, the one who confesses walks out scot-free while the other will do 10 years. What will they do? Will they trust each other and do what's obviously in their best interest, which is not confess? Based on game theory's assumptions about human nature, the math derived from this dilemma tells you squarely that the two goons will turn each other in.
Quote:
In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag.
Which illustrates the next incontrovertible fact about game theory: In the foreboding world view of rational choice, everyone is a raging dirtbag.
Bueno de Mesquita points to dictatorships to prove his point: "If you liberate people from the constraint of having to satisfy other people in order to advance themselves, people don't do good things."
When analyzing a problem in international relations, Bueno de Mesquita doesn't give a whit about the local culture, history, economy, or any of the other considerations that more traditional political scientists weigh.
His only concern is with what the political actors want, what they say they want (often two very different things), and how each of their various options will affect their career advancement. He feeds this data into his computer model and out pop the answers. Though controversial in the academic world, Bueno de Mesquita and his model have proven quite popular in the private sector.
... ... ...
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1:42:42
The Predictioneer's Game
42:47 (start)
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
https://youtu.be/XfE0ih-6fi8?t=2567
44:00 (stop)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfE0ih-6fi8
NYUAD Institute
Published on Sep 15, 2015
The Predictioneer's Game
December 9, 2009
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita will discuss how applied game theory can be used to anticipate policy choices whether in business or in government.
The Predictioneer's Game
https://slideplayer.com/slide/4437069/
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Steve Casner, Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds, 2017
p.35
Absolutely no one is immune from screwing up.
p.35
We will learn how training, skills, and experience tend to change the kinds of errors we make but it doesn't eliminate them.
p.35
Slips Happen Even When We're Good at Something
p.36
Have you ever tripped and fallen down while walking along a perfectly paved sidewalk? Errors like these are what psychologists call slips.
p.36
After we learn to do something and practice it many times, we experience what is called automaticity. A skill becomes automatic when it no longer requires much conscious thought or our constant attention to perform. When it becomes a no-brainer. Automaticity is what allows us to get good at something and do it efficiently and effortlessly. Automaticity is what makes us look like a pro. While beginners fumble through the pages of the instruction manual, an expert fires up a chain saw with one rip of the cord. The crowd applauds and feels sorry for the poor sap who's still trying to figure it out. But it turns out that smooth expert performance, when our minds are sort of engaged and sort of not, is fertile ground for making errors.
p.36
There seems to be no limit on the creative ways in which we humans can sometimes slip while doing even the most routine things. Psychologists Don Norman and James Reason have collected hundreds of examples of slips and have even categorized them. Like the student who came home from jogging, took off his sweaty shirt, and tossed it in the toilet.
36. Don Norman and James Reason: Don Norman's classic paper about slips is Norman, D. A. (1981). Categorization of action slips. Psychological Review 88(1), 1-5. Two books about human errors, including many entertaining examples, are Norman's The Design of Everyday Things (2013; New York: Basic Books) and Reason's classic Human Error (1990; New York: Cambridge University Press).
( Casner, Steve, author. )
( Careful : a user's guide to our injury-prone minds / Steve Casner.
Accidents──prevention. | safety education. | public safety | industrial safety. )
( LCCN HV675.C35 2017 )
( DDC 613.6--dc23 )
( https//lccn.loc.gov/2016049067 )
Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017
p.218
representativeness, availability, anchoring
p.219
people made mistakes!
the mistakes were predictable and systematic
They seemed ingrained in human nature.
p.220
both mainly saw only what they had been trained to see.
p.221
To acknowledge uncertainty was to admit the possibility of error.
p.228
Amos Tversky and Don Redelmeier
“Discrepancy between Medical Decision for Individual Patients and for Groups”, April 1990
p.228
“Physicians deal with patients one at a time, whereas health policy makers deal with aggregrate.”
But there was a conflict between the two roles.
p.228
A doctor who did his job properly really could not just consider the interest of the individual patient; he needed to consider the aggregate of patients with that illness.
p.223
“In math you always check your work. In medicine, no. And if we are fallible in algebra, where the answers are clear, how much more fallible must we be in a world where the answers are much less clear?” Don Redelmeier
(Michael Lewis, The undoing project, 2017, )
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Robert Trivers, The folly of fools, 2011
p.187
Likewise, many more accidents occur when the pilot and copilot are flying for the first time together (45 percent of all accidents, while safe flights have this degree of unfamiliarity only 5 percent of the time).
pp.187-188
The notion is that the copilot is even less likely to challenge mistakes of the pilot than vice versa, and especially if the two are unfamiliar with each other.
p.188
Consider now an interesting case from a different culture. Fatal accident rates for Korea Airlines between 1988 and 1998 were about 17 times higher than for a typical US carrier, so high that Delta and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korea Air, the US Army forbade its troops from flying with the airline, and Canada considered denying it landing rights.
p.188
An outside group of consultants was brought in to evaluate the problem and concluded, among other factors, that Korea, a society relatively high in hierarchy and power dominance, was not preparing its copilots to act assertively enough.
p.188
In any case, since intervention, Korea Air has had a spotless safety record. The key point is that hierarchy may impede information flow--two are in the cockpit, but with sufficient dominance, it is actually only one.
(Trivers, Robert., The folly of fools : the logic of deceit and self-deception in human life / Robert Trivers., 1. self-deception., 2. deception--psychological aspects., 3. deception--social aspects., 2011, 153.4, )
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/* */
/* Primrose, Tonkin, error correction */
/* */
James Gleick., The information : a history, a theory, a flood, 2011
p.158
Primose, Western union telegraph.
Supreme court
June 16, 1887
p.158
Those who used the telegraph codes slowly discovered an unanticipated side effect of their efficiency and brevity. They were perilously vulnerable to the smallest errors. Because they lacked the natural redundancy of English prose ── even the foreshortened prose of telegraphese ── these cleverly encoded messages could be disrupted by a mistake in a single character. By a single dot, for that matter.
p.158
For example, on June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had brought ── abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY ── 500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.
p.158
The legal battle dragged on for six (6) years, until finally the Supreme Court upheld the fine print on the back of the telegraph blank, which spelled out a procedure for protecting against errors:
To guard against mistakes or delays, the sender of a message should order it REPEATED; that is telegraphed back to the originating office for comparison .... Said company shall not be liable for mistakes in ... any UNREPEATED message ... nor in any case for errors in cipher or obscure messages.
p.158
The telegraph company had to tolerate ciphers but did not have to like them. The court found in favor of Primrose in the amount of $1.15, the price of sending the telegram.
(The information : a history, a theory, a flood / James Gleick., 1. information science--history., 2. information society., Z665.G547 2011, 020.9--dc22, 2011, )
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J. C. R. Licklider, Robert Taylor, The Computer as a Communication Device [ ]
The Computer as a Communication Device
J. C. R. Licklider, Robert Taylor
Originally published in Science and Technology, April 1968. Published on KurzweilAI.net November 9, 2001.
2 years - It will take 2 years, at least, to
bring the first interactive computer
network up to a significant level
of experimental activity
6 years - operational systems might reach
critical size
pp.36-37
Fortunately, we do not have to, for the system we envision cannot be bought at this moment. The time scale provides a basis for genuine optimism about the cost picture. It will take two years, at least, to bring the first interactive computer networks up to a significant level of experimental activity. Operational systems might reach critical size in as little as six years if everyone got onto the bandwagon, but there is little point in making cost estimates for a nearer date. So let us take six years as the target.
p.37
In the computer field, the cost of a unit of processing and the cost of a unit of storage have been dropping for two decades [20 years] at the rate of 50% or more every two years.
p.37
Such advances in capability, accompanied by reduction in cost, lead us to expect that computer facilitation will be affordable before many people are ready to take advantage of it. The only areas the cause us concern are consoles and transmission.
p.37
In the field of transmission, the difficulty may be lack of competition. At any rate, the cost of transmission is not falling nearly as fast as the cost of processing and storage. Nor is it falling nearly as fast as we think it should fall. Even the advent of satellites has affected the cost picture by less than a factor of two. That fact does not cause immediate distress because (unless the distance is very great) transmission cost is not now the dominant cost. But, at the rate things are going, in six years it will be the dominant cost. That prospect concerns us greatly and is the strongest damper to our hopes for near-term realization of operationally significant interactive networks and significant on-line communities.
(Acknowledgments - Evan Herbert edited the article and acted as intermediary during its writing between Licklider in Boston and Taylor in Washington. )
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M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine, 2001
p.265
Charlie Herzfeld
And on more than one occasion, he even tried to tell Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that the U.S. government didn't know what it was doing in Vietnam--not that his warning had much impact.*
* No one could call Herzfeld a dove on Vietnam. After escaping from Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938 and then witnessing the Soviet takeover of Eastern Europe only a few years later, he had no love of nazism, communism, or any other brand of totalitarianism. Moreover, he was convinced that at some deep level, decision makers from Lyndon Johnson on down really believed they were trying to help the South Vietnamese people resist aggression, a goal he himself could support.
Nonetheless, Herzfeld had a clearer picture than most that the Vietnam involvement was headed toward disaster. One of his initiative as ARPA director was greatly to expand Project AGILE, a research program on counterinsurgency that had been bubbling along at a low level since the early days of the Kennedy administration. Hertzfeld was determined to mount a comprehensive, system-wide effort to understand the counterinsurgency problem as a whole, an effort that was to include an honest attempt to understand the Vietnamese people on all sides. “We studied the Vietnamese culture”, he says. “Even the character traits that result from being brought up in a very strict family structure. And we studied the different mind-set that comes from the enormous importance placed on the ancestors, the racial group, and the family. That was much more important than ideology. Among other things, it meant that when you tried to move villagers out of Vietcong-controlled areas, that went over very badly; they wanted to stay near their ancestors.”
In addition, says Herzfeld, every time he went over to Southeast Asia himself--ARPA now had field offices in Saigon and Bangkok--he found lower-ranking officials eager to feed him the kind of information that never seemed to make it back to headquarters. “I developed a theory that I was high enough in the pecking order that people wanted to show me stuff”, he says, “but not high enough for them to want to lie. That's how I learned about the Vietcong's network of tunnels north of Saigon, which nobody in Washington would believe [existed].”
p.275
October 1967, at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles in Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
(Waldrop, M. Mitchell.; The dream machine : J. C. R. Licklider and the revolution that made computing personal / M. Mitchell Waldrop., 1. Licklider, J. C. R., 2. microcomputers--history, 2001, )
Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013
p.154
sin of commission and the sin of omission.
p.154
But even with a change of mind-set, it will not be easy to win the war on cancer.
p.159
The real war in Southeast Asia was sending body bags home every day; the actual horror of guns and grenades was being replayed each evening on the television news. Vietnam, in 1971, was an open sore on the national psyche. But rather than shy away from battlefield imagery, many in Congress embraced it, even drawing direct comparison between the dread disease and the conflict in Vietnam.
p.159
Jack Kemp
“Let me remind you that cancer killed eight times as many Americans last year alone than have been killed in Vietnam during the past six years.” (??)
(Clifton Leaf, The truth in small doses : why we're losing the war on cancer ── and how to win it, 2013, )
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Marc Ambinder (and) D. B. Grady, Deep State, 2013
pp.91-93
p.91
On August 2, 1964, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats engaged the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. The Maddox had been collecting signals intelligence.
p.91
The incident ended with three crippled North Vietnamese vessels and no Americans harmed.
p.91
(The South Vietnamese government wanted total retaliation, but SIGINT suggested that the attack was a one-off by an overly aggressive North Vietnamese commander.)
p.91
Two nights later, a Marine signals intelligence team transmitted a warning that North Vietnamese PT boats were maneuvering in a way eerily similar to those of August 2.
pp.91-92
Meanwhile, the Maddox and the USS Turner Joy (sent to provide support) picked up a series of incomplete radar returns suggesting a North Vietnamese air and sea presence closing in fast, and received a priority alert from an NSA listening post warning of an imminent attack.
p.92
When sonar operators detected signals suggesting hostile vessels closing fast, the two destroyers unleashed weapons on the radar blip for three and a half hours. They reported two North Vietnamese boats destroyed.
p.92
Hours later, acting on the advice of the secretary of defense, President Johnson authorized airstrikes against North Vietnam.
p.92
Meanwhile, the on-site commanders grew alarmed that no evidence of an attack subsequently presented itself. Neither the Turner Joy nor the Maddox took damage. There was never a visual confirmation of North Vietnamese vessels; the attack was precipitated and directed by radar and sonar, and bad weather may have confused instruments and crew.
p.92
Signals intelligence that was initially certain now seemed ambiguous at best.
p.92
And one key word was mistranslated: the North Vietnamese had said that two “comrades” were lost, not two “ships”. An error like this is common in the din of battle, but with the U.S. military leadership already shifting to a war posture, ...
p.92
In 1964, the NSA covered up its role in mistakenly reporting that two U.S. ships had been attacked. Through 2001, the NSA insisted that a second attack did in fact occur two days later, and for years this story didn't change. But it was a lie perpetuated by secrecy.
p.93
One agency historian suggests that it was embarrassed by its mistakes; that its leaders wanted to believe that a pattern of aggressive action by the North Vietnamese was emerging; and that the system set up to analyze the signals intelligence was confusing, compartmentalized, and unreliable.
(Deep State : inside the government secrecy industry, Marc Ambinder (and) D. B. Grady, 2013, )
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George P. Richardson, Feedback thought in social science and systems theory [ ]
hidden character
[p.336]
... We have seen various emphases on “message” (Deutsch), “test and operations” (Millers, Galanter, and Pribram), “stimuli and responses” (Easton and others), each of which can be classified under one or the other of the generic terms “event” and “decision.” In contrast, the unit of behavioral description emphasized by social scientists in servo-mechanisms thread is the “pattern of behavior.” Thus the system dynamicist works with “behavior modes,” which are expressed in graphs of quantities varying over time.
In this regard, Forrester's distinction between “policy” and “decision” is significant (Forrester 1961, p. 97; see section 3.3). A decision is a discrete event. A policy is a persistent framework, a set of decision rules, within which arises an ongoing stream of decisions. Forrester described this distinction in terms of the conceptual “distance” of the viewer. Observed from a sufficient distance, a decision stream is seen not as a sequence of discrete decisions but as pattern of behavior that reflect a policy structure. Thus the units in which systems are described in the servo-mechanisms thread are policies, not decisions, and patterns of behavior, not events, and those patterns are usually expressed in terms of graphs over time. These more aggregate units or atoms of system description are consistent with the usually more distant perspective of the servo-mechanisms thread.
I believe that the distinction between events, patterns of behavior, decisions, and policy structure are among the most important observations in this investigation of the evolution of feedback thinking. The units of system description employed in the different feedback threads can be seen to be the foundation underlying many of their other characteristics.
“”
(Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., p.336)
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James Gleick., The information : a history, a theory, a flood, 2011
p.22
John F. Carrington, an English missionary, born in 1914 in Northamptonshire
left for Africa at the age of 23 and Africa became his lifetime home. The drums caught his attention early, as he traveled from the Baptist Missionary Society station in Yakusu, on the Upper Congo River, through the villages of the Bambole forest.
p.22
One day he made an impromptu trip to the small town of Yaongama and was surprised to find a teacher, medical assistant, and church members already assembled for his arrival. They had heard th drums, they explained.
p.22
Eventually, he realized that the drums conveyed not just announcements and warnings but prayers, poetry, and even jokes. The drummers were not signaling but talking: they spoke a special, adapted language.
p.22
Eventually Carrington himself learned to drum. He drummed mainly in Kele, a language of the Bantu family in what is now eastern Zaire.
p.22
“He is not really a European, despite the color of his skin”, a Lokele villager said of Carrington. “He used to be from our village, one of us. After he died, the spirits made a mistake and sent him off far away to a village of whites to enter into the body of a little baby who was born of a white woman instead of one of ours. But because he belongs to us, he could not forget where he came from and so he came back.” The villager added generously, “If he is a bit awkward on the drum, this is because of the poor education that the whites gave him.”
p.22 John F. Carrington
The Talking Drums of Africa, 1949
p.23
Carrington found the key in a central fact about the relevant African languages.
They are tonal languages, meaning is determined by rising or falling pitch contours as by distinctions between consonants or vowels.
p.23
But for other languages, including, most famously, Mandarin and Cantonese, tone has primary significance in distinguishing words. So it does in most African languages.
([ requirement to learn to sing in your native tongue and other languages ])
p.23
Even when Europeans learned to communicate in these languages, they generally failed to grasp the importance of tonality, because they had no experience with it.
the importance of tonality, because they had no experience with it.
When they transliterated the words they heard into Latin alphabet, they disregarded pitch altogether. In effect, they were color-blind.
p.24
the drum language went a difficult step further.
It employed tone and only tone.
a language composed entirely of pitch contours.
p.25
For the Yaunde, the elephant is always “the great awkward one”.
p.25
The resemblance to Homeric formulas ── not merely Zeus, but Zeus the cloud-gatherer; not just the sea, but the wine-dark sea ── is not accident. In an oral culture, inspiration has to serve clarity and memory first. The Muses are the daughters of Mnemosyne.
p.25
Redundancy ── inefficient by definition ── serves as the antidote to confusion.
([
p.296
DNA, nucleotide
First, preserves information
([ preserves the rules that are used to generate the information ])
([ rules generator(s) ])
p.84
In any case the computers, being human, made errors, so the same work was often farmed out twice for the sake of redundancy. (Unfortunately, being human, computers were sometimes caught saving themselves labor by copying from one other.)
Comparer of the Ephemeris and Corrector of the Proofs.
p.230
If a letter can be guessed from what comes before, it is redundant; to the extent that it is redundant, it provides no new information.
p.247 Shannon
in Shannon's terms, the less information is conveyed by subsequent letter. When the subject guesses the next letter with confidence, it is redundant, and the arrival of the letter contributes no new information. Information is surprise.
The more inherent order exists ── order in the form of statistical patterns ── the more predictability there is, ...
p.297
When the genetic code was solved, in the early 1960s, it turned out to be full of redundancy.
p.202
Biologists have been puzzled by the fact that the amount of information stored in the genes is much smaller than the amount of information needed to describe the structure of the adult individual. The puzzle is now solved by noticing that it is not necessary for the genes to carry all the information regarding the adult structure, but it suffices for the genes to carry a set of rules to generate the information (Magoroh Maruyama, p.308)
(Richardson, George P., Feedback thought in social science and systems theory, copyright © 1991 by the University of Pennsylvania Press)
(Feedback thought in social science and systems theory / George P. Richardson (1991), 1. social science--methodology., 2. feedback control systems., p.202)
Maruyama, Magoroth (1963). The Second Cybernetics: Deviation-Amplifying Mutual Causal Processes. American Scientist 51: 164-179. Reprinted in Buckley (1968), pp. 304-316.
-- (1974). Paradigms and Communication. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 6: 3-32.
])
p.26
if u cn rd ths
u cn gt a gd jb w hi pa!
p.26
For the African drummers, messages need to be about eight times as long as their spoken equivalents.
p.27
schoolboys who did not even learn their own drum names.
p.224
Now, instead of boosting the power, a sender can overcome noise by using extra symbols for error correction ── just as an African drummer makes himself understood across long distances, not by banging the drum harder, but by expanding the verbosity of his discourse.
(The information : a history, a theory, a flood / James Gleick., 1. information science--history., 2. information society., Z665.G547 2011, 020.9--dc22, 2011, )
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([ Redundancy ])
Bryan Barnard, The Genius of Islam, 2011
p.32
Books were stored in multiple copies in many libraries across the Muslim empire.
p.32
When the Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1238, multiple copies of the translations remained in Cairo, Damascus, and Cōrdoba. They would become the West's essential link to a Greek past, seen from then on through Muslim eyes.
p.33
Much ancient knowledge--the writing of Aristotle, for instance--exists only in Arabic translation or, in some cases, translations of translations. The Aristotelean we know is not the work of a single individual but a composite person whose works have been repeatedly transcribed, retranslated, and edited, handed down to us by centuries of Muslim scribes and commentators.
p.33
The Islamic translation project was selective and practical. Greek science, mathematics, and philosophy were usedful, therefore translated and preserved.
(Bryan Barnard, The Genius of Islam, 2011, how Muslims made the modern world
written and illustrated by Bryan Barnard, p.33 )
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“The effects of this decision not to call up the reserves were significant: the depth of American involvement was concealed from the public until about 1967; and in time the need for forces in Vietnam brought on a disintegration of US forces in Europe and the United States. ... ... ... Twenty-two years ago the last American involved in the war ignominiously left Vietnam from the roof of our embassy in Saigon. Shortly before, the CIA station chief sent a final message: "It has been a long and hard fight and we have lost. The severity of the defeat and the circumstances of it would seem to call for a reassessment of the policies which have characterized our participation here. Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat. Saigon signing off." McMaster has done his part to help us learn from history.” (Reviewed by Brigadier General Douglas Kinnard, USA Ret., Ph.D., Emeritus Professor of Political Science, University of Vermont, and author of The War Managers., Autumn 1997)
Book Reviews by three contributors of Dereliction of Duty by H. R. McMaster, 1997. From Parameters, Autumn 1997, pp. 162-81.
https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/97autumn/autrev.htm
John Gans., white house warriors : how the national security council transformed the American way of war, 2019
p.20
Eisenhower
French Indochina was home to one of these limited wars at the nationalist rebellion, led by Ho Chi Minh, sought to end France's colonial rule. Reluctantly, Eisenhower and the United States had provided financial aid but no military forces to France in the fight and then supported a 1954 agreement that split Vietnam into two territories. The United States installed Ngo Dinh Diem, a fierce anti-Communist, as prime minister in the South (he soon became president) and funded his government and military. But as both South Vietnamese institutions struggled to counter a growing insurgency supported by the North, Eisenhower resisted sending combat troops, in part due to the thinking about limited war in NSC 162/2.47
p.23
Kennedy
Despite the US-backed Diem regime's inability to establish popular support, effective governance, and control over the military, the Kennedy team embraced Diem tightly without demanding reforms in return. Instead, Kennedy and his team tried to better use American military advisors ── some of whom the new president dispatched to Vietnam ── to get the South Vietnamese armed forces prepared and dedicated to fight the growing insurgency.
p.26
Kennedy administration's strategy in Vietnam in 1961.
pp.26-27
The US “strategic hamlet” program sought to help pacify the South Vietnamese countryside and win popular support for the central government, and for a while and in data reports from the field, the plan, along with thousands of Americans on the ground advising South Vietnam's military, appeared to be making progress.
p.27
After Forrestal returned from one trip to South Vietnam in early 1963, he and a colleague reported the war “clearly going better than it was a year ago.”78
p.27
When Diem's special forces began cracking down on political opponents in May 1963 and support for the regime cratered, Forresetal looked for a way to change the South Vietnamese president's approach.
p.27
Disaffected Vietnamese military officers approached American representatives with a proposal for a coup against Diem. The generals wanted, according to one Pentagon report, an indication of the US position on the idea and tacit support for it.80
p.28
Though Kennedy did not renege on the tacit approval given to the plotters of the coup, the conspiracy appeared to fizzle, and the president's team, including Forrestal, renewed calls for reforms in South Vietnam. The on November 1, American representativces in Saigon were alerted that the plot was under way.88
88. Kahin, Intervention, 183.
p.28
According to notes, Forrestal said at the time, it was a “well-executed coup, much better than anyone would have thought possible”; but matters quickly got out of hand.89 Diem surrendered on the condition that his safety be guaranteed, only to be promptly killed in the back of an armored personnel carrier.
Kai Bird, The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy: brothers in arms: a biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998), 263.
p.28
A few weeks later, Forrestal traveled to South Vietnam to review the aftermath and meet with the recently recognized military junta. Before he departed, the NSC staffer visited with Kennedy, who had recently agreed to begin withdrawing troops from the country the next year.
p.29
On November 22, the president was shot in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was declared dead at 1:00 p.m. local time. At 2:38 p.m., Johnson took the oath of office aboard Air Force One.
p.29
Forrestal had returned from South Vietnam with a great deal of information. He was worried about the war and told Johnson directly that the “most urgent current problem” was the collapse of the counterinsurgency program, the perceived success of which had turned out to have been based on bogus progress reports by South Vietnam and some on the American team there.
p.30
whether time was “working with us or against us, and if against us, how fast?”
pp.30-31
Although Vietnam had only occasionally drawn the public's attention before Johnson's victory in November, Forrestal remained in close touch with Bundy and with his two replacement on the NSC, Chester Cooper, a CIA detailee, and James Thomson, a State employee. When Cooper, who was forty-seven and had a doctorate from American university, was given the Asia assignment, Bundy called it a “difficult, thankless task”.100 At least he would have help: the thirty-three-year-old Thomson, “gifted young man, but not perfectly suited to the bureaucracy”, was assigned to the Far East team.101
p.32
The North Vietnamese, Thomson explained, were only too aware “the we will have to go home, someday, quite soon.”105 Bundy simply replied: “Well, James, that's a good point. You may well be right. Thank you so much.”106
105. Kai Bird, The Color of Truth, 297
106. Ibid.
p.32
Yet the North Vietnamese, and their insurgents in the South, remained committed to simply outlasting the United States.108
p.32
Forrestal left the State department on March 1, 1965, never to return to government. An increasingly disenchanted Cooper decided to leave the staff later that year, though he continued his government service away from the NSC.109 Thomson soon returned to Harvard.
p.34
Morton Halperin,
p.39
The Pentagon Papers.
The multiyear study demonstrated to Halperin that the US government, and the Einsenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations, were well aware of the war's impossible dynamics but nevertheless chose to intervene and then deepen America's role in Vietnam.
(White house warriors : how the national security council transformed the American way of war / John Gans., subjects: LCSH: national security council (u.s.)──history. | national security──united states──decision making. | united states──military policy──decision making. | strategic culture──united states. | civil-military relations──united states. | united states──foreign relations──1945─, classification: LCC UA23.G356 2019 | DDC 355/.033573─dc23, https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054255, 2019, )
Sidney Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, 2002
p.54 (pdf page: 57/154)
By referring to procedures, physically available data or standards of good practice, investigators can micro-match controversial fragments of behavior with standards that seem applicable from their after-the-fact position. Referent worlds are constructed from the outside the accident sequence, based on data investigators now have access to, based on the facts they now know to be true. The problem is that these after-the-fact-worlds may have very little relevance to the circumstances of the accident sequence. They do not explain the observed behavior. The investigator has substituted his own world for the one that surrounded the people in question.
p.54 (pdf page: 57/154)
Referent worlds are constructed from the outside the accident sequence, based on data investigators now have access to, based on the facts they now know to be true.
p.54 (pdf page: 57/154)
The problem is that these after-the-fact-worlds may have very little relevance to the circumstances of the accident sequence. They do not explain the observed behavior. The investigator has substituted his own world for the one that surrounded the people in question.
p.56 (pdf page: 59/154)
PUT DATA IN CONTEXT
Taking data out of context, either by:
• micro-matching them with a world you now know to be true, or by
• lumping selected bits together under one condition identified in
hindsight
p.57 (pdf page: 60/154)
robs data of its original meaning. And these data out of context are simultaneously given a new meaning──imposed from the outside and from hindsight.
p.57 (pdf page: 60/154)
You impose this new meaning when you look at the data in a context you now know to be true. Or you impose meaning by tagging an outside label on a loose collection of seemingly similar fragments.
p.57 (pdf page: 60/154)
To understand the actual meaning that data had at the time and place it was produced, you need to step into the past yourself. When left or relocated in the context that produced and surrounded it, human behavior is inherently meaningful.
p.57 (pdf page: 60/154)
Historican Barbara Tuchman put it this way: “Every scripture is entitled to be read in the light of the circumstances that brought it forth. To understand the choices open to people in another time, one must limit oneself to what they knew; see the past in its own clothes, as it were, not in ours.”4
4 Tuchman, B. (1981). Practicing history: Selected essays. New York: Norton, page 75.
source: The field guide to human error investigations, by Sidney Dekker,
Cranfield university press
filename: DekkersFieldGuide.pdf
(Sidney Dekker, The field guide to human error investigations, 2002, )
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Robert Greene, The 48 laws of power (a Joost Elffers book), 1998
pp.241-242
Peloponnesian War
In 415 B.C., the ancient Athenians attacked Sicily, believing their expedition would bring them riches, power, and a glorious ending to the 16-year Peloponnesian War. They did not consider the dangers of an invasion so far from home; they did not foresee that the Sicilians would fight all the harder since the battles were in their own homeland, or that all of Athens's enemies would band together against them, or that war would break out on several fronts, stretching their forces way too thin. The Sicilian expedition was a complete disaster, leading to the destruction of one of the greatest civilizations of all time.
(The 48 laws of power, Robert Greene (a Joost Elffers book), 1998, )
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Dr. John Gofman
Nine Basic Rules for Believable
Bio-Medical Research
integrity and fidelity of the data
A Trustworthy Database: A Sacred Obligation of Humanity
A database from a major accident such as Chernobyl becomes a precious and irreplaceable health-resource for humanity. It seems reasonable to assert that humans have a sacred obligation to produce a database which meets the most rigorous standards for believability. By database, we mean the original raw data on radiation exposure-estimates and on the health status of participants in the database.
If the database itself is false -- either from careless work or from intentional bias -- it poisons every conclusion which emerges from it. A false database causes innocent analysts of such data to fill the medical journals and textbooks with un-knowledge. It renders all its users into agents of possibly deadly mis-information. . . .
Therefore, one of the most vital activities in the field of citizen action and preventive medicine -- today, tomorrow, and forever -- is the fiercest possible defense of objective, untainted databases. --Dr. John Gofman
The two scientists suggested that federal safety guidelines for low-level [radiation] exposures be reduced by 90 percent in 1969.
http://ratical.org/ratitorsCorner/12.21.97.html
http://ratical.org/ratitorsCorner/12.21.97.txt
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/NRBE/NRadBioEffects.txt
http://www.ratical.org/radiation/CNR/synapse.txt
