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Most impressive. You were able to stay awake in the same room as Mickey Kaus, the most sleep-inducing rightwinger since God invented Paul Harvey.
Surely he claimed that the destruction of welfare was connected, somehow, to better movie quality. It is Kaus' favorite topic.
Posted at February 4, 2006 5:53 PM in response to Movie Demographics
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The idea that the president of Iraq is "unpopular" defies credibility. On the contrary, his popularity is the problem. The "mullahs," who viewed him during the election as their tool, are now opposing him in parliament and the supreme spiritual advisor, Khamenei, was quoted as saying that Ahmadinejad was elected to solve social issues, not to make war on Israel. Since the whole conservative position, during the 90s, was that Khamenei was the evil power that pulled all the strings, it is remarkable that suddenly he drops out of the equation.
A much smarter way of dealing with Iran is outlined by Iran's Nobel Peace prize winning dissident, Shirin Ebadi, and an Iranian Physicist living in L.A., Muhammed Sahimi, on this Huffington Post report: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/iran-nobel-winner-sa ys-un_b_14038.html. I have only one disagreement with their post. One is that the Russian offer can be a good temporary compromise until Iraq agrees to keep protocols in place, or at least for a cooling off period.
Posted at January 21, 2006 10:26 AM in response to What to do about Iran?
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Mr. Bergen, surely Coll's book gives us a more sophisticated notion of the CIA's relation to the mujahideen than that. In particular, there were two major pointers to CIA/American irresponsibility.
One was the intentionally blind trust in the ISI, and the refusal to model the composition or intentions of the ISI. Coll's book includes numerous instances of intelligence officers who were punished or pulled from the field for questioning the ISI middleman role in selecting the beneficiaries of U.S. aid (and Saudi -- the aid network was a synthesis of different aid packages).
The second was the striking down of a taboo that was directly attributable to the CIA. As Coll records, it was Bill Casey himself who directed the CIA to encourage attacks within the borders of the Soviet Union. I am surprised that you don't find it startling that the CIA encouraged erasing this taboo, or consider the unexpected result of encouraging this kind of attack. What the CIA wanted the Afghan guerrillas and their supporters to do became a pretty precise model for what Al qaeda has done to the U.S.
Posted at January 21, 2006 10:13 AM in response to Was bin Laden a Frankenstein-creation of the CIA
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Actually, I think Gigerenzer has a good way of thinking more intuitively about probability problems as natural frequency problems. So that, for instance, one thinks of the the array of possible situations in which the Soviet Union and the U.S. have international relations, in one of which the U.S. abrogates diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. Then one thinks of the array of situations in which the Soviet Union has peaceful or hostile relationships with the world, in one of which the Soviet Union invades Poland. And then one combines those arrays, which of course means that the number of situations is amplified.
The same is true for Linda.
For a good critique of Ferguson's careless way with counterfactuals from 1998, see this essay by Tetlock's sometimes collaborator, Richard Lebow, in World Politics, here:
<span>http://0-muse.jhu.edu.library.uor.edu/journals/world_politics/v05 2/52.4lebow.pdf</span>
Posted at January 17, 2006 8:34 AM in response to The Pity of War
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The conjuncts are independent. You can't logically derive "the soviet union invades Poland" from "the U.S. takes back diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union," nor vice versa. It is possible for one to cause the other -- but of course, that is what the calculation of probabilities is set up to quantify.
Posted at January 17, 2006 6:53 AM in response to The Pity of War
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I like Ferguson as a historian, even if I almost always disagree with his angle -- such as the angle on the benificence of the British Empire. But as an alternative historian, a genre he seems to love, he sucks.
There's a simple problem with alternative histories: the scenarios they create become more and more improbable as they add more and more events. That improbability is actually written into the calculus of probability -- see the work of Kahneman and Tversky. There was a famous quiz given to policymakers about scenarios in which the policymakers were supposed to grade scenarios according to their probability. Most of the policymakers failed, miserably, since they simply ignored probability theory.
There's a long quote from L. Menand's review of Philip Tetlock's book on this subject. It looks we are going to go through this all over again from the hawks:
"And, like most of us, experts violate a fundamental rule of probabilities by tending to find scenarios with more variables more likely. If a prediction needs two independent things to happen in order for it to be true, its probability is the product of the probability of each of the things it depends on. If there is a one-in-three chance of <span class="italic">x</span> and a one-in-four chance of <span class="italic">y</span>, the probability of both <span class="italic">x</span> and <span class="italic">y</span> occurring is one in twelve. But we often feel instinctively that if the two events “fit together” in some scenario the chance of both is greater, not less. The classic “Linda problem” is an analogous case. In this experiment, subjects are told, “Linda is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in antinuclear demonstrations.” They are then asked to rank the probability of several possible descriptions of Linda today. Two of them are “bank teller” and “bank teller and active in the feminist movement.” People rank the second description higher than the first, even though, logically, its likelihood is smaller, because it requires two things to be true—that Linda is a bank teller and that Linda is an active feminist—rather than one.
Plausible detail makes us believers. When subjects were given a choice between an insurance policy that covered hospitalization for any reason and a policy that covered hospitalization for all accidents and diseases, they were willing to pay a higher premium for the second policy, because the added detail gave them a more vivid picture of the circumstances in which it might be needed. In 1982, an experiment was done with professional forecasters and planners. One group was asked to assess the probability of “a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983,” and another group was asked to assess the probability of “a Russian invasion of Poland, and a complete suspension of diplomatic relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, sometime in 1983.” The experts judged the second scenario more likely than the first, even though it required two separate events to occur. They were seduced by the detail."
Posted at January 16, 2006 4:48 PM in response to The Pity of War
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Not Iglesias, as in Julio, but Yglesias, as in Matt
Posted at January 16, 2006 9:09 AM in response to Democrat Foreign Policy Take 2: Neo-Colonalists versus Sensible Realists???
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Den, I think you answered your last question in your second paragraph. America is smoking crack. Or at least D.C. is.
The country should switch, as soon as possible, to Canadian weed. There's nothing like a cranked nuclear power to make one feel bad about the future. In the next presidential race, the media should definitely press the question of the drug use choices of the candidates, and the candidate that isn't smoking marijuana should lose. We (pseudo)-elected mr. Coke in 2000 and look what it got us.
Posted at January 15, 2006 4:32 PM in response to Iran Links
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Why should there be anything happening on the Republican side? They won. They've built Republican paradise. A perpetual war with no real goal, mixed up with a war that has richly benefited traditional GOP sectors, like energy and defense. An economy that has been righted from the deviation of the Clinton years, so that those with the talent -- the top ten percentile of income -- accrue multiples on the fruits of their labor, while laborers become more ever more efficient and competitive, having less money and facing the prospect of working even harder now that the pensions are put out to pasture and social security is threatened. The ownership society, or society for the owners, is here.
If ever there was a time to revel, this is it. It is highly improbable the GOP majority will really be dented in the next election -- the media cowtows so much that it believes it is avant garde when it harries the President's press secretary for a day -- and the particular constituency that the GOP represents is fat and happy.
Ideas are for losers.
Posted at January 11, 2006 8:18 AM in response to Party of Ideas Watch
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Does Freedom House have a report out yet about Texas? Living in a city -- Austin -- that was gerrymandered out of its political existence, I have a few complaints I'd like to register with them.
Posted at January 3, 2006 7:34 AM in response to Foreign Policy Fantasies about Venezuela
