Abu Muqawama: Post
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Reporting Iran
Again, I am not the best source of news on Iran, a country about which I know very little. But as a non-expert spectator, I have been riveted by the news coming out of Tehran. I have been especially impressed by the good old fashioned wire services as well as the blogs which have collected all the reporting done by both the wires and newspaper and television journalists -- to say nothing of the YouTube videos sent in by Iranians. Cable news, no suprise, has dropped the ball, and people are mad as hell at CNN in particular. The one thing that could always be said for CNN is that, unlike Fox, it would make sure it had correspondents actually on the ground reporting. The old line was that if there was a tsumani, CNN would have a reporter on the scene while on Fox they would have had four people in a studio talking about how tsunamis are bad. Is that true anymore? Has CNN, in its efforts to be more like Fox, ceased to be the go-to place for breaking news? Look, I'm not trying to defend either station -- you all know I think cable news worthless. But it's interesting the way in which U.S. cable news has uniformly dropped the ball on this story -- even the network supposedly more sober-minded than Fox and MSNBC.
By the way, Happy Birthday, U.S. Army. Mama Muqawama gave me a U.S. flag for my birthday, which falls two days before both Flag Day and the U.S. Army's birthday. If only I could have stayed in the oven for just two more days I would have been the most patriotic baby ever. (Babies born on 4 July excluded.)
"Again, I am not the best
"Again, I am not the best source of news on Iran, a country about which I know very little. But as a non-expert spectator, I have been riveted by the news coming out of Tehran."
You don't have to be an "expert" on Iran to make a comment about it. Perhaps this is your way of trying to get around analyzing what's going on in Iran and then being proven wrong, just like you were on Lebanon. A few days after the Lebanese elections, you were quoted by various news agencies as an "expert on Lebanon." Anyone who claims to know what's going on and then gets proven wrong should lose all credibility.
Pretending to know very little about Iran, you can also hedge your bets when others realize you are incorrect in your analyses. Bloggers posing as "experts" are failing us all. For the sake of everyone, I can't wait until the day when bloggers are no longer taken as authoritative voices on these topics.
I work with some Iranian
I work with some Iranian ex-pats and we occasionally talk about Iran. My general sense is that the clerics do not hold power quite so tightly as one might think. The sympathies of the military are also unclear to me. Anyone know anything more definite?
Steve
Foreign Policy Passport has
Foreign Policy Passport has some interesting stuff: http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/
Bottom line -- it might be worse than we originally thought and we might be in for more turmoil.
AM, If you had only listened
AM, If you had only listened to me and used the correct formula n(n-1)^2, rather than the incorrect n factorial ~= sqrt(2*pi)*n^(n+1/2)*exp(-n), you would have been able to correctly predict that Ahmadinejad would steal the Iranian elections and ignite widespread street protests in Tehran and other cities, as well as predict an M8 minority in Lebanon.
Humorously, here is Bruce Bueno de Mesquita using the incorrect n! formula in the service of his 2009 TED Lecture prediction that,
"Mr. Ahmadinejad [is] getting weaker … he is not a major player in Iran, he's on the way down."
@ vimothy I just saw your
@ vimothy
I just saw your response here now. Mesquita still gets it wrong because he ignores the very important cases "A thinks that B thinks that A thinks", or, using your notation,
A:B:A:B-C
The total number of all such cases is about n*(n-1)^(m-1) for length m strings, not n factorial. n factorial counts the number of arrangements of n letters with no repeats. For n = 5, this is only the cases "A thinks that B thinks that C thinks etc.", which looks like
A:B:C:D-E
as you wrote.
All of this technical discussion ignores the utility or (un)reasonableness of even attempting to "compute" policy outcomes using hypotheses about what "A thinks that B thinks that A thinks that B thinks …" repeated five or ten times out. Mesquita's TED lecture implies that he actually makes predictions with constructs modeling human behavior that look like
A:B:A:B:A:B:A:B:A-C
Without knowing more, this basic approach strikes me as absurd.
abu sharmouta, I do not
abu sharmouta, I do not recall AM ever claiming to be an expert on Lebanon.
أبو مقاومة How
أبو مقاومة
How dare you claim a game theorist got something wrong. After all, he can speak math.
ADTS
"Anyone who claims to know
"Anyone who claims to know what's going on and then gets proven wrong should lose all credibility."
Abu Sharmouta, if we followed this maxim of yours, we wouldn't be able to listen to anyone about anything. Sure, there are a lot of phony experts out there, but even the most informed and wise experts in every field get things wrong. AM was far from the only person to call the Lebanon election going the other way, and I don't think he even said he was sure. When engaged in analysis, there is always a risk that mistakes will be made by the best, the worst, and those in between.
The Huffington Post feed has
The Huffington Post feed has been very good for up-to-date info.
Interestingly, CNN stepped up its Iran coverage after the initial criticism, and they do have people 'on the ground' in Iran, including Christian Amanpour.
"6:48 PM ET -- CNN responds to criticism. For the last few hours, CNN has been airing pretty consistent coverage of the Iran unrest, even referencing the Twitter-driven protests of their coverage.
Meanwhile, media critic Howie Kurtz, who hosts a show on CNN, defends the network's earlier coverage: "Maybe CNN should have taken CNNi feed last evening. But it was middle of the night in Iran, and even journalists have to rest sometimes."
As I did last night, I've compiled a count of the references to "Iran" on the various U.S. and international networks, using a TVEyes database search. And unlike last night, CNN comes out ahead:
MSNBC: at least 43 mentions
Headline News: at least 54 mentions
Sky News (UK): at least 93 mentions
Fox News: at least 93 mentions
CTV (Canada): at least 115 mentions
BBC News (UK): at least 146 mentions
CNN: at least 185 mentions"
Just saying...CNN deserves a fair hearing.
"Anyone who claims to know
"Anyone who claims to know what's going on and then gets proven wrong should lose all credibility."
Anyone who knows whats going on know that they will get proven wrong now and then, because reality aint linear. Doh.
Watch the BBC.
Watch the BBC.
I wonder if we even have a
I wonder if we even have a policy for WTF to do if there IS an Iranian revolution. Perhaps I'm giving them too much credit, but I think the Russians and Chinese won't be caught flat footed.
Did intel see this coming at all, or is this yet another Black Swan?
CIA audits of Bueno de
CIA audits of Bueno de Mesquita's predictions are included in the collection, "Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955-92", http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0300072643/ref=sib_rdr_dp
Could there be a reason that he's employed by the CIA and the DoD?
Bueno de Mesquita's
Bueno de Mesquita's predictions are audited by the CIA in the collection, "Inside CIA's Private World: Declassified Articles from the Agency's Internal Journal, 1955-92", http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0300072643/ref=sib_rdr_dp
Seems like a pretty decent record to me.
A.M. to the front ! Spiegel
A.M. to the front !
Spiegel reports that Voice of America reports that 5000 Hezbollah fighters took to the streets in Teheran, giving their sponsors a helping hand. Spiegel adds a personal account of protesters getting attacked by thugs shouting in Arabic:
"Mit hassverzerrten Gesichtern kommen sie Ketten schwingend auf uns zu, drohen, uns mit ihren Crossbikes zu rammen. Rechts und links werden Flüchtende niedergeknüppelt. "Macht, dass Ihr wegkommt", schreien die Männer auf Arabisch: Nach Berichten des Senders "Voice of America" sollen bis zu 5000 libanesische Kämpfer der Hisbollah-Miliz Teheran beim Showdown zur Hand gehen." http://www.spiegel.de/politik/ausland/0,1518,630463,00.html (couldn't find it on VoA, though ...)
Sorry A.M., but now you HAVE to get involved ... ;-)
LOL, Spiegel's hooked on
LOL, Spiegel's hooked on Hizballah
Expect a flurry of anti-Iran
Expect a flurry of anti-Iran propaganda from the pro-Israel folks to start up, in order to remove focus on Nethanyahu telling the president to go fck himself.
Off topic, this is quite interesting: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/06/15/neo_nazis_army/index.html It even features M. Totten.
A friend passed along an
A friend passed along an email from a professor of his -- one of the world's leading experts on Iran -- which I won't quote verbatim but rather summarize here:
I spent the Army's B-Day
I spent the Army's B-Day running the exact path of Pickett's charge to the "Angle" atop Cemetery Ridge,
What was the "high water mark" of the Confederacy also was the beginning of a strong, united and representative Army infantry. Where Armistead died, the U.S. Army as we know it today was born.
To the Irishmen of the 69th Pennsylvania and the Zouaves of the 72nd Pennsylvania, happy birthday to you, too. And thank you.
Seems like a pretty decent
Seems like a pretty decent record to me.
Except when it isn't, just following Amazon's link. From Bueno de Mesquita's Red Flag Over Hong Kong book description:
"It predicts a bleak economic and political future for Hong Kong after it is ceded by the United Kingdom to China in 1997."
Googling the book link you sent uncovers more controversy and questions about these claims of success, apparently none resolved.
I don't have a dog in this fight but to defend the honor ofthe beautiful Gamma function.
Just read the papers, look
Just read the papers, look at the data and consider the evidence. The are plenty of papers critical of The War Trap, of course (as well as response papers not listed on the Decision Making Under Uncertainty website).
Vimothy: You *have* read
Vimothy:
You *have* read Walt, "Rigor or Rigor Mortis," right, and his rebuttal chapter in "Rational Choice and Security Studies?" He claims the evidence for the impact of POLICON/FACTIONS at CIA is minimal, IIRC.
You might want to check out Stanley Feder on political forecasting - you can google him, and he has a piece in the Annual Review of Political Science. For what it's worth, he *is* a POLICON/FACTIONS person.
ADTS
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