Game theory and how it fits in geopolitical forecasting

Good read through NYTimes

"Could this possibly be what will happen? Certainly Bueno de Mesquita has his critics, who argue that the proprietary software he uses can’t be trusted and may cast doubt on the larger enterprise of making predictions. But he has published a large number of startlingly precise predictions that turned out to be accurate, many of them in peer-reviewed academic journals. For example, five years before Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989, Bueno de Mesquita predicted in the journal PS that Khomeini would be succeeded by Ali Khamenei (which he was), who himself would be succeeded by a then-less-well-known cleric named Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (which he may well be). Last year, he forecast when President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan would be forced out of office and was accurate to within a month. In “The Predictioneer’s Game,” a book coming out next month that was written for a popular audience, Bueno de Mesquita offers dozens more stories of his forecasts. And as for Iran’s bomb?"


 

Strategic Observations on the Syrian crisis

Been reading up on a lot of op-eds recently. Lots of reasons behind it... general insatiable urge to lap up on why things are happening so crazily at the international front, why India did the policy decisions they have [or the lack of policies for that matter] till date and such. Another major reason is also the super forecasting that is required for the good judgment project that I am part of. [GJP is the link in case you want to know more on the same]

Was searching around for stuff and got a wealth of information.

a. Got good daily mailers from FP site.
b. Good material from Stratfor - unfortunately, its paid and its costly but one gets free tidbits every week or so and the ones that I get are as good as anyone can get.

All in all, a good way to start knowing more about stuff and once it gets more intriguing, it should be a good option to do some serious education in... mmh, now for more defence related studies.

Update: haha, I am over myself. I realise late that there is no relation between the title and content.

To make it more relevant, a few Syria based links [brilliant ones, IMO]

a. thro stratfor
b. real reason for syria pipe-control

I saw a lot more of articles reg the fact that Syria is in the hot seat in the ME.
Reason: Qatar [bordering Iran] has a lot of Nat Gas and wants to send it to the EU. The EU has a healthy paranoia on being dependent on Gazprom.  However, Gazprom wants to control the EU market and get a stranglehold, which quite naturally the US wants to break up. The US is sitting on a lot of shale reserves itself and wants to link up its own to Qatar's pipe and such.

A few more:
a. Syrian intervention - through guardian
b. aljazeera - syria pipelineistan
More information: IPI and TAPI proposed pipelines are perhaps a factor too. Its the energy factor too.

Psychology of overconfidence

Been checking on various methods of estimation, seemingly, to make myself better at it.

Friend sends this gem today. Thanks Jigs.

I do a bit of forecasting for fun at good judgment project [and finished on the leader board too this year] and this seems to have even more ramifications than just plain software engineering.

As an aside: the good judgment project has got a lot of publicity - check the search engines for the same.

Snippet from the same:

"
In Thinking Fast and Slow, Kahneman explains a great deal of psychology as the interplay between two “systems” which govern our thoughts: System I and System II. My far-too-brief summary would be “System II does careful, rational, analytical thinking, and System I does quick, heuristic, pattern matching thinking”.

And, crucially, it’s as if evolution designed the whole thing with a key goal of keeping System II from having to do too much. Which makes plenty of sense from an evolutionary perspective — System II is slow as molasses, and incredibly costly, it should only be deployed in very, very rare situations. But you see the problem, no doubt: without thinking, how does your mind know when to invoke System II? From this perspective, many of the various “cognitive biases” of psychology make sense as elegant engineering solutions to a brutal real-world problem: how to apportion attention in real time.

"