Timothy Birdnow

Here's something a little lighter for a Sunday morning. Last night I was surfing channels and Story Television (the minor league ball club for the History Channel) was running an apocalypse day. I watched one episode, and it was discussing Nostradamus, but also a guy named Bruce Bueno de Mesquita. Now, I know a fair amount about Nostradamus and have read his entire treatise "Centuries" and know that while some of his predictions were disturbinglly accurate others were either unintelligible or just plain wrong. For starters, he warned that the AntiChrist would appear in Asia, not Europe, and would do so shortly after the year 2000. In my best Maxwell Smart voice "missed it by THAT much!"

But what interested me was this good mosquito guy. The documentary waxed poetic on his prophetic skills. He was not a seer or prophet though; supposedly he has a computer algorithm that looks at multiple connections and uses math to sort them all out.

Ri-ight.

The first thing I thought of was Isaac Asimov's "psychohistory". Some 20,000 years from now a scientist would invent a form of mathematical sociology that can predict the future given enough people. Modeled on gas theory, you had to have the trillion plus population of the Galactic Empire to make accurate predictions in the Foundation stories. In the stories (they started as short stories in Astounding Science Fiction, but later Asimov wrote several full-length novels where he worked in his other great stories, such as robots and alternate universes).

The point is Asimov, a very smart guy, more or less argued the extreme difficulty of such a science.

Which brings us to this fellow. My first impression of him was a medicine show man, a sort of Professor Waldo Wigglesworth from the old Jay Ward Hoppity Hooper cartoon. He wasn't openly smarmy but he seemed sort of smug. He is a political scientist, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Not sure how a political scientist can devise a mathematical model that predicts the future, but he claims it is so.

He also refuses to divulge his methods. That is a YUUUGGe red flag.

Science is about repeatability. If you perform an experiment you have to hand over the details so others may repeat it. And if you have a method that could revolutionize our foreign policy and other policies and it works better than what we are currently doing, don't you owe it to humanity to hand that over?

Supposedly this guy has been a consultant with the government - state department, CIA, etc.

If so, one wonders why we have made so many dreadful mistakes, and why our situation is in far worse shape now than it was in times past. Maybe they ARE taking his advice? That may well be the problem.

Look; we use computer models to predict the weather and those are frequently wrong, and after more than a few days they are usually profoundly wrong. Why? Because the weather is a chaotic system. In fact, Chaos Theory was invented precisely because of a weather prediction program. The inventer of Chaos Theory was a guy named Edward Lorenz from MIT. He got the idea from a weather prediction program that had stopped and restarted the next day. It was found to be WAY off. It was run again with the exact same conditions and gave a wildly different result. It occurred to Lorenz that the weather was a chaotic system, and micro-influences had a drastic effect on the outcome of any such program.

Now, we know many of the variables involved in weather and can take them into account in forecasting. They are mathematically hard numbers; temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, air speed, etc. The problem is they are not absolutes, and it may be a degree cooler just a little ways away from the spot you measure, or it could be raining in one place and not in another. The end result is IN THEORY weather should be Newtonian, easily predicable, a clockwork system. In practice not so much.

But what Bueno de Mosquita is proposing is far, far more complicated as it goes to fundamental human psycghology and sociology that cannot be mathematically modeled. How do you quantify some things, like the public reaction to events? And how do you include extenuating factors? Speaking of weather, the weather will actually influence the outcome of events in some cases. That is a well known phenomenon in elections; bad weather usually means lower turnout and thus the government winds up looking different than it would have had the weather been nice. But there are an infinite number of variables that would have to be quantified and fed into the computer.

Good Mosqquito argues the computer is better at handling large numbers of permutations than are humans and he's right, but they can ONLY handle what is fed into them. They have no judgement. They are at best logical but not reasonable (another point Asimov made in his robot stories; robots often came to terrible conclusions because they weren't reasonable, just machines that crunched numbers).

A model is a simplification of reality by necessity. If you have a model as complex as the thing you are modeling it is useless; you can get the information you want from the thing iself. So we create models that are simpler than that thing and hope we can extrapolate from that. That's where human thinking and intuition comes into play. And of course a model is only as good as the data it is fed, and the assumptions of the programmer often have a huge impact on what the models tell us.

That's why climate models are so bad at predicting events; they have been programmed by the same people using the same assumptions and the same often faulty data. Most climate models, for instance, assume a low climate sensitivity. Most assume the atmosphere has no top (it was easier to just pick a zone in the stratosphere and not go beyond that). Most do not factor in negative feedbacks like cloud formation from evaporated water, etc. These models have failed miserably to predict current conditions, and have failed when fed historical data, yet climate scientists continue to cling to them because they cannot think of anything else to do and because they want that lucrative funding that climate doomsaying provides.

This, I think, is more of the same. This Bueno de Mosqita fellow may have a computer model that he believes is taking everything into account, but it is impossible to program such a model. May as well say you have a computer algorithm that will predict the name and appearance of your future spouse. (Another great example; computer dating has mixed results and always has despite the great advances in computer technology. Computer dating sites can only match up a number of self-identified characteristics and beliefs and find another person who is willing,but they hardly KNOW the people and so mismatch more than they match.)

The article I cited mentions investment aps. Well, if there were such things that actually worked wouldn't there people people exploiting it? You would have wizards of hedge funds who would guarantee huge profits and their clients would clean up. The sad fact is usually when you find such a thing it turns out to be a pyramid scheme or other con.

This guy claims to have a 90% accuracy rate. Pardon me if I sound a bit skeptical. He may be above 50%, which would mean a coin toss, but somehow I doubt he can make any predictions that high. I suspect he gets that number by making a bunch of easy calls that boost his percentage. Hell; I predicted the Russian invasion of Georgia back in '08 just by reading Pravda. Often these things aren't that hard, especially when the crisis is almost upon us. The Ukrainian invasion was fairly predictable too, and our State Department would have known it had they bothered to just read what the Russians were saying and to use basic common sense; Putin saw an opportunity and knew there wouldn't be repercussions. Some things can't be predicted though; I doubt anyone saw the terror attacks on Israel coming, although if this guy's idiot machine predicted some sort of terrorist attack at some point it wouldn't be much of an intellectual stretch.

This guy was talking about Iran in the program I watched and said "we need to de-escalate with Iran. If you push them it will insult their sense of national pride and they will become more aggressive" and yet it was when Mr. Biden de-escalated that Iran became more aggressive - not the other way around. Score one for the Human mind. Every time we've de-escalated with Iran we've seen them re-emerge as bad actors on the world stage.

Sadly a lot of people will probably believe in a guy like this. He has all the right features; he uses computers, writes fancy equations,keeps his supposedly highly successful algorithms secret, and prophecies the future. Humans want to know the future. One of the great stresses in our lives is the fact that we have minds capable of thinking ahead to the future and planning and yet cannot see it. I've heard it argued by some preachers that the fruit from the tree of the knowlede of good and evil was what stole humanity's peace of mind, and that because suddenly we were aware of the dangers of what is to come and had no way to see it coming. I don't know. Certainly one can argue that attempts like this are a kind of modern witchcraft, divination to foretell and to prophecy. There is a reason why the Bible condemns witchcraft (thou shalt not suffer a wtich to live, it says) and if nothing else it leads us to make really bad mistakes and to stop relying on both our own intellects and on God.

That's not to say attempts at predicting the future are necessarily evil. Certainly knowing if a tornado is coming is a good thing. But there is a human tendency to worship things like computers and science, and there is an increasing tendency in the young to believe not in God but in algorithms. That way will ultimately lead to ruin.

So my view is that this guy is a charlatan, like the oracles in the ancient world who had all sorts of gadgets to give the illusion to worshippers of miraculous events. Archaeologists have unearthed many such temples and found they were nothing but illusionist tricks. I think our worship of the machines is a sign of a modern form of sorcery, the kind mentioned in the Book of Revelation "neither would they repent of their sorceries" (Rev.9:21)

Add to that the renewed interest in UFO's (Satan's lying wonders 2 Thessalonians 2:9-12) and belief that men can become women by an act of will, or that men laying with men is "natural" or that "science has disproven God" or any other profoundly ignorant and self-serving ideas believed by our modern world, and one does have to wonder at why God still puts up with us. I would long ago have smote them hip and thigh were I the Almighty. They should count their blessings I am not He.

One final thought; there are no good nosquitoes. The only good mosquito is a dead mosquito. I think the first punishment God visited upon Adam and Eve were those evil little creatures!

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:32 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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