Predicting the future

Very interesting links... more from Tetlock and the study behind his expert prediction and insights into how forecasting can be made better and such.


No wonder the GJP is picking up at a decent clip!


how to predict the future


there is no substitute for good judgment

So, you are smarter than the CIA?

Recently, the GJP super forecasting team has been getting a fair bit of popularity. So, one co-superforecaster and the idea behind the project (Phil Tetlock) chime in on this link.

Dailymall speaks about it here.
NPR
Washingtontimes

The lady they are talking to, Elaine Rich, is part of a different team, amongst the 8 super forecasting teams, and we all compete together and a bit against each together.

Pretty embarrassing, really. Next year being season 4 will finish things off. Where to from there?
Time will tell. 

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.

India Pakistan Relations: Perspectives

Brilliant read on the Indo-Pak relations.

Brookings essay by William Dalrymple

More stuff on what transpired in 2002 and why we recalled the Indian Ambassador can be read here

Aah... the advantages of doing read ups, thanks to being part of the Good Judgment Project... Strenuous... but lovely to do all this.

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.

"