At the beginning of the simulation, the positions were what you would expect. The United States and Israel and most of Europe wanted Iran to have virtually no nuclear capacity, so their preferred outcomes were close to zero. In contrast, the Iranian hard-liners were aggressive. This is not only Build a bomb, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita said, characterizing their position. Its probably: We should test a bomb.
But as the computer model ran forward in time, through 2009 and into 2010, positions shifted. American and Israeli national-security players grudgingly accepted that they could tolerate Iran having some civilian nuclear-energy capacity. Ahmadinejad, Khamenei and the religious radicals wavered; then, as the model reached our present day, their power another variable in Bueno de Mesquitas model sagged significantly.
Amid the thousands of rows on the spreadsheet, theres one called Forecast. It consists of a single number that represents the most likely consensus of all the players. It begins at 160 bomb-making territory but by next year settles at 118, where it doesnt move much. Thats the outcome, Bueno de Mesquita said confidently, tapping the screen.
What does 118 mean? It means that Iran wont make a nuclear bomb. By early 2010, according to the forecast, Iran will be at the brink of developing one, but then it will stop and go no further. If this computer model is right, all the dire portents weve seen in recent months the brutal crackdown on protesters, the dubious confessions, Khameneis accusations of American subterfuge are masking a tectonic shift. The moderates are winning, even if we cannot see that yet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magazine/16Bruce-t.html?pagewanted=all
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has been called everything from a modern Nostradamus to a real life Hari Seldon for the accuracy of his predictions, using games theory mathematics. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has now published a book, The Predictioneer's Game.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has used the games theory first formulated by John Nash, whose life was dramatized by the film A Beautiful Mind, to predict the future actions of nations and corporations. The Predictioneers Game describes the evolution of this technique and how Bruce Bueno de Mesquita has used it to predict future events with a startling 90 percent accuracy.
Among Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's successful predictions have been:
- "Forecasted the second Intifada and the death of the Mideast peace process, two years before it happened.
- "Defied Russia specialists by predicting who would succeed Brezhnev. "The model identified Andropov, who nobody at the time even considered a possibility," he says.
- "Predicted that Daniel Ortega and the Sandanistas would be voted out of office in Nicaragua, two years before it happened.
- "Four months before Tiananmen Square, said China's hardliners would crack down harshly on dissidents.
- "Predicted France's hair's-breadth passage of the European Union's Maastricht Treaty.
- "Predicted the exact implementation of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between Britain and the IRA.
- "Predicted China's reclaiming of Hong Kong and the exact manner the handover would take place, 12 years before it happened."
Some of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita future predictions include a recommendation that the United States keep a garrison of fifty thousand troops in Iraq after the self imposed August, 2010 deadline for withdraw. The idea is that the troops would prevent an alliance between Shiite elements in Iraq and the Iranians and would also accelerate what Bruce Bueno de Mesquita sees as a decline of the theocracy in Iran and the rise of a more moderate regime. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita also predicts persistent terrorist influence in Pakistan and that global warming will be immune to government prescribed solutions, but that technology will arise to deal with the matter.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita does admit to some failures. He predicted that Hillary Clinton's health care scheme would pass in the early 1990s. That illustrates, perhaps, a flaw in the games theory approach of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita as described in The Predictioneer's Game. Accuracy of predictions depends on the evaluation of human motives which tend to be subjective. The games theory approach assumes that everyone will act in their self interest. But what an outside observer perceives is a player's self interest may not be what the player perceives his self interest to be.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita claims in The Predictioneer's Game that his games theory approach is not only useful in the grand strategy arena of geopolitics, but in business, for instance how to choose a CEO of a company. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita even suggests that games theory will help one to buy a car.
http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2228447/the_predictioneers_game_by_bruce_bueno.html?cat=9
From a NY Times article on how he developed his analysis
Spoiler :
Bueno de Mesquita began studying political science in the 1960s. While working on his dissertation at the University of Michigan on parliamentary politics in India, a professor assigned him William H. Rikers book The Theory of Political Coalitions, one of the first works to apply game theory to politics. Game theory is a branch of mathematics that studies the way people will behave in strategic situations that is to say, when theyre making decisions based on how they think other people will make decisions. Generally, game theory assumes that people are always rational and selfish; theyre always angling to get whats best for them, which means their behavior can often be predicted. One famous application of rational-choice theory that particularly intrigued Bueno de Mesquita was Duncan Blacks analysis of committee voting, which argues that if two rival candidates are trying to get elected on a single issue say, taxes theyll inevitably shift their positions toward the median voter.
Bueno de Mesquita was enthralled by the idea of rendering the messy business of politics and history into precise, logical equations. He began his signature academic work on the selectorate, or the group of actors who run a country. In Bueno de Mesquitas worldview, there is no such thing as a national interest (or state). There are just leaders trying desperately to stay in power by building coalitions within their selectorate buying off cronies in the case of a dictatorship, for example, or producing enough good works to keep hoi polloi happy in a democracy.
When Bueno de Mesquita spotted a logical error in one of Rikers books, he wrote the author a letter; Riker offered Bueno de Mesquita a job in 1972 at the University of Rochester, where a new generation of political scientists was starting to apply formal mathematical models to political analysis.
Thats where Bueno de Mesquita began programming his computer model. It is based loosely on Blacks voter theory, and it works like this: To predict how leaders will behave in a conflict, Bueno de Mesquita starts with a specific prediction he wants to make, then interviews four or five experts who know the situation well. He identifies the stakeholders who will exert pressure on the outcome (typically 20 or 30 players) and gets the experts to assign values to the stakeholders in four categories: What outcome do the players want? How hard will they work to get it? How much clout can they exert on others? How firm is their resolve? Each value is expressed as a number on its own arbitrary scale, like 0 to 200. (Sometimes Bueno de Mesquita skips the experts, simply reads newspaper and journal articles and generates his own list of players and numbers.) For example, in the case of Irans bomb, Bueno de Mesquita set Ahmadinejads preferred outcome at 180 and, on a scale of 0 to 100, his desire to get it at 90, his power at 5 and his resolve at 90.
Bueno de Mesquita was enthralled by the idea of rendering the messy business of politics and history into precise, logical equations. He began his signature academic work on the selectorate, or the group of actors who run a country. In Bueno de Mesquitas worldview, there is no such thing as a national interest (or state). There are just leaders trying desperately to stay in power by building coalitions within their selectorate buying off cronies in the case of a dictatorship, for example, or producing enough good works to keep hoi polloi happy in a democracy.
When Bueno de Mesquita spotted a logical error in one of Rikers books, he wrote the author a letter; Riker offered Bueno de Mesquita a job in 1972 at the University of Rochester, where a new generation of political scientists was starting to apply formal mathematical models to political analysis.
Thats where Bueno de Mesquita began programming his computer model. It is based loosely on Blacks voter theory, and it works like this: To predict how leaders will behave in a conflict, Bueno de Mesquita starts with a specific prediction he wants to make, then interviews four or five experts who know the situation well. He identifies the stakeholders who will exert pressure on the outcome (typically 20 or 30 players) and gets the experts to assign values to the stakeholders in four categories: What outcome do the players want? How hard will they work to get it? How much clout can they exert on others? How firm is their resolve? Each value is expressed as a number on its own arbitrary scale, like 0 to 200. (Sometimes Bueno de Mesquita skips the experts, simply reads newspaper and journal articles and generates his own list of players and numbers.) For example, in the case of Irans bomb, Bueno de Mesquita set Ahmadinejads preferred outcome at 180 and, on a scale of 0 to 100, his desire to get it at 90, his power at 5 and his resolve at 90.
Some say it's voodoo
Spoiler :
Bueno de Mesquita had arrived, and so, too, had rational-choice theory. Rational choicers began sprouting up in political-science departments around the country and, say their critics, strangling anyone and anything in their way. By 2000, according to one estimate, some 40 percent of all articles published in the prestigious American Political Science Review were rational-choice themed. Increasingly, graduate students in political science viewed a fluency in formal mathematic modeling as a prerequisite for career advancement. And the leaps in technology taking place only fueled rational choices advance: faster, more powerful computers allowed rational choicers to build bigger, ever more complex models that could be applied to ever more complex situations. And, naturally enough, an intellectual counteroffensive was launched.
It began in 1994 when two Yale political-science professors, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, published their book, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, which disputed much of the scientific underpinnings that rational choice claimed for itself. In essence, the authors said that when rational choice was actually put to the practical test, much of it simply didnt work. This was followed by a 1999 (lightning speed in academia) article by Stephen M. Walt in the journal International Security called Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Walt, a political-science professor at Harvards John F. Kennedy School of Government, conceded some value to formal modeling but ultimately likened rational choice to a cult of irrelevance that stifled creativity and had little practical value in actual policy formulation. Most vexing, Walt accused rational choicers of regarding nonrational choice theorists such as himself as methodological Luddites whose opposition rests largely on ignorance.
It began in 1994 when two Yale political-science professors, Donald Green and Ian Shapiro, published their book, Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory, which disputed much of the scientific underpinnings that rational choice claimed for itself. In essence, the authors said that when rational choice was actually put to the practical test, much of it simply didnt work. This was followed by a 1999 (lightning speed in academia) article by Stephen M. Walt in the journal International Security called Rigor or Rigor Mortis? Walt, a political-science professor at Harvards John F. Kennedy School of Government, conceded some value to formal modeling but ultimately likened rational choice to a cult of irrelevance that stifled creativity and had little practical value in actual policy formulation. Most vexing, Walt accused rational choicers of regarding nonrational choice theorists such as himself as methodological Luddites whose opposition rests largely on ignorance.
http://www.good.is/post/the-new-nostradamus/
Rational choice, game theory, modern day Nostradamus, thoughts, concerns, recommend the book?
I really don't get why you find that so funny. The prediction was over a decade in advance, and seems to have contained quite a few details. I'd say being off by a year is well within the margin of error. This isn't some psychic mumbo jumbo, this is an attempt at predictive science, and some error of this sort is to be accepted.
