On Fri, Aug 24, 2001 at 04:17:08PM -0500, Dan Minette wrote:
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Garcia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 8:03
> PM Subject: Re: Landmines RE: US Foreign Policy Re: *DO* we share a
> civilization?
>
>
> > The point I was trying to make (and rather badly I must admit)
> > was that there *were* people in the government who were warning
> > top advisors that Iraq had designs on Kuwait. Furthermore, on Aug
> > 1, 1990, the National Intelligence Officer for Warning issued an
> > official warning that (in his judgement of course) that there would
> > be an invasion of Kuwait by the end of the day.
>
> Interesting. This parallels a discussion that Gautam and I have
> been having off and on concerning the fall of the Berlin wall. I
> know an former CIA officer who stated that people he knew who were
> responsible for this area thought that there was a strong probability
> of the Berlin wall falling, but that they couldn't get their opinion
> up through the bureaucracy to the president. Gautam knows someone
> researching this area for his Phd who thinks the agency just missed
> it.
The problem with hindsight in cases such as these is simple probability
and statistics.
If you have a lot of people, each predicting that several things will
happen, then for any given thing that occurs, there will often be
someone who predicted it.
I'd rather look at the data for a given person or predictor, and see
what their batting average was, rather than looking at a given event and
seeing if anyone predicted it.
--
"Erik Reuter" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.erikreuter.com/
