Filter

• This is an excellent video!

  I hadn't realized that vampire energy accounted for a full 1% of U.S. CO2 emissions. Is the diffusion of flat-screen TVs pushing this amount still higher?
  go to post

  • Date: Apr 22 2008
  • Posted by RFCapalino

• Do homework first.

  For all of you who are questioning Bueno de Mesquita's methods, predictions, etc., I suggest you do your homework first. It's not all that difficult to find his publications. A quick internet search will yield his curriculum vita which lists most of them. While many of you may not have access to them online, you can certainly go to any local university library and gain access to at least part of them. I would refer you first to his work entitled The War Trap (1981) which is a standard on most international relations reading lists (at least in graduate school). Then I would direct you to a follow-up piece, "The War Trap Revisited," in the American Political Science Review. Then maybe you could check out some critiques of his work such as one that appeared in the June 1984 edition of The Journal of Conflict Resolution. That piece is followed by another piece by BdM defending his work. You can also check out works such as War and Reason (1992) co-authored with David Lalman or Forecasting Policy Futures and The Logic of Political Survival (2003) co-authored with Alastair Smith, Randolph Siverson, and James Morrow (quickly becoming a stable of graduate education in political science as well). His predictions are not something conjured up as if out of a book of spells and incantations. His methods have been rigorously tested and critiqued over time by some of the top scholars in the field. His methods, as with those of any other scholar of rational choice and game theory, are based on basic assumptions about values and preferences of individuals and societies as well as their attitudes toward risk. Is he perfect in his predictions? No, of course he's not. Does he do a good job? Yes. Calculating and predicting human action, even that which many people are not sure is understandable (like that of many dictators), is something BdM seems to have been able to do well thus far. For those who are critics: Before you criticize him, I would suggest you try to find a more accurate means of prediction. Otherwise, you will not be heard, nor will your critiques.
  go to post

  • Date: Apr 17 2008
  • Posted by jboolo

• cyborg alert!

  cybernetic organism phobics beware!
  go to post

  • Date: Apr 08 2008
  • Posted by jtg2001

• Virtual worlds

  As one of the group of volunteers who created the John Edwards site mentioned above, I wonder how the author would have reacted to the many YouTube videos and Facebook sites created by volunteers for political purposes which lack professional polish? Or how about the websites of McDonalds and the New York Times back in 1996 when the web was the newest way to experience the Internet? Here's what this article might have looked like. Your experiences in Second Life were cursory, shallow, and solitary. God forbid a travel writer should go to New York with the same parameters and misunderstandings you constrained yourself with.
  go to post

  • Date: Apr 06 2008
  • Posted by gxeremio

• I Love Muxtapes...

  Muxtapes were all the rage last week, eh!? Good eye for featuring them. Here is mine: http://www.kimlaama.muxtape.com/ and here is a collection of them on tumblr: http://muxtape.tumblr.com/
  go to post

  • Date: Mar 31 2008
  • Posted by kimlaama

• Has Mesquita no students?

  I know nothing of political science but I do know a little about the scientific method. To science, it is not important that a man, such as Mesquita, can achieve good results; what is important is that other people can achieve the same results using the same method. This is conspicuously absent from the article. Has this man no students that have also made successful predictions? What the article shows is that there is a man that predicts things well enough to command fairly high commissions for doing so. Presumably, the people paying him have some sense of a decent success rate for them to continue paying. Some people also pay Water Douser's to locate their well-drilling equipment. This does not make it science, nor does a positive success rate. Science is based on repeatability by others. That Mesquita can adjust inputs to his mathematical models, metaphorically twiddling the dials until what he believes is the right answer pops out, only proves that he is somehow a political genius. It says nothing about his mathematical model, which could very well be nothing more than a fancy dousing-rod. Besides, even if the mathematical models worked for everyone, it would only give political actors another tool to manipulate the results. They would start gaming the game theory, so to speak. David...
  go to post

  • Date: Jan 12 2008
  • Posted by fixerdave

• Should've stopped after the first sentence...

  You begin your criticism of BdM (as he's known in the discipline) as stating you do not know much about political science. You should have stopped there. Instead you continue and ask the question: "has this man no students"? This indicates that you probably did not read the article closely. 1) The article said that grad students in the discipline (of which I am one) are taking courses in these types of formal models. 2) He is a professor at a prestigious university. 3) His articles have appeared in the top peer reviewed journals of the discipline. What this implies is that his methods are being tested and replicated. 1)Game theoretical methods are taught to graduate students in poli sci departments across the country. 2) As a professor he has graduate students who are replicating his models. 3) Since he has published a large number of articles in peer reviewed journals his methodology has been double checked by other political scientists. We are a weird bunch, I have friends who run data for fun. What you fail to keep in mind during your criticism is the medium of the article. This is a e-magazine with popular appeal...not specifically targeted to academics or professionals in an individual field. Therefore the problems you are finding are not necessarily with the individual...but the scope of the source.
  go to post

  • Date: Mar 26 2008
  • Posted by T_Mason

• A few false assumptions...

  1) Whether it is chemistry or political science; the researcher has to always ensure that the basic input is accurate. "Garbage in, Garbage out" applies to ALL scientific endeavors. 2) Appeals to authority are only fallacious under certain circumstances. In this case the CIA has used his services and compared them to their own analysts. The results have a direct relation to the topic of the article...ergo it is not an "empty" or fallacious appeal to authority. 3) The article refers to PS, the PEER REVIEWED journal of the American Political Science Association and the premeir journal of the discipline in the US (an equivalent to the New England Journal of Medicine or any other peer reviewed academic journal). So to answer your questions: these methods have been and continuously are tested within the discipline. Finally, remember this is a e-magazine article with popular appeal...not an academic journal. It is not going to give you all the technical specifics. If you want that you need to dig deeper than a journalistic article that only scratches the surface of the topic at hand.
  go to post

  • Date: Mar 26 2008
  • Posted by T_Mason

• Softball

  Not a useful article for purposes of science or judgement, but only for entertainment. Did you catch the swiftly given caveat "provided the basic input is accurate"? Did you notice that the references to CIA and DOD are empty appeals to authority? Do you notice that there is no proof of his predictive powers given here in a meaningful sense? What are the failures? How were all of the models different? Has this process been tested by other scientists in any formalize scientific review process? The predictive power is measurable. What is his success and error rate overall? What is the measure taking into account the magnitude of errors? The comparison to CIA analysts is meaningless. First, the success rates of the praised man are given, but not those of the CIA analysts. Second, rather than compare on the measurable benchmark of accuracy as used already, the CIA analysts apparently fall short in terms of precision. But this is not measured. This piece is an uncritical puff-piece.
  go to post

  • Date: Oct 31 2007
  • Posted by Gooder

• racist?

  My initial reaction is that presumption of nefarious activity is racist, given the lack of context. But then I realized that a white man at a car window with cash would be equally suspicious.
  go to post

  • Date: Mar 25 2008
  • Posted by jtg2001