Jew Corrupter: Bruce Bueno de Mesquita

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

(CIA) Jew NeoCon Corrupter and Israeli-Jew Propagandist

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Then the math begins, some of which is surprisingly simple. If you merely sort the players according to how badly they want a bomb and how much support they have among others, you will end up with a reasonably good prediction. But the other variables enable the computer model to perform much more complicated assessments. In essence, it looks for possible groupings of players who would be willing to shift their positions toward one another if they thought that doing so would be to their advantage. The model begins by working out the average position of all the players — the "middle ground" that exerts a gravitational force on the whole negotiation. Then it compares each player with every other player, estimating whether one will be able to persuade or coerce the others to move toward its position, based on the power, resolve and positioning of everyone else. (Power isn't everything. If the most powerful player is on the fringe of an issue, and a cluster of less-powerful players are closer to the middle, they might exert greater influence.) After estimating how much or how little each player might budge, the software recalculates the middle ground, which shifts as the players move. A "round" is over; the software repeats the process, round after round. The game ends when players no longer move very much from round to round — this indicates they have compromised as much as they ever will. At that point, assuming no player with veto power had refused to compromise, the final average middle-ground position of all the players is the result — the official prediction of how the issue will resolve itself. (Bueno de Mesquita does not express his forecasts in probabilistic terms; he says an event will transpire or it won't.)

One of Bueno de Mesquita's most prominent public consultations occurred in 1999, when Richard Lapthorne, then the vice chairman of British Aerospace, asked him to help engineer a $10 billion acquisition. The British government wanted British Aerospace to form a pan-European firm by merging with the German firm DASA and the French giant Aérospatiale; British Aerospace, however, was more interested in trying to buy the British electronics giant Marconi Electronic Systems. To persuade the British government to approve the Marconi deal, Lapthorne asked Bueno de Mesquita to predict the viability of mergers between the German and French firms. The model forecast that the three firms would never be able to agree on terms, and that the Marconi deal was the better option; when Bueno de Mesquita showed his analysis to the government heads, they agreed to permit the Marconi acquisition. "There's nothing shimmy shammy or flip-flop about it," Lapthorne says of the logical nature of Bueno de Mesquita's prediction. "It's very clear where the information came from. It has intellectual rigor." Lapthorne is now chairman of the U.K. telecommunications company Cable and Wireless; he has used Bueno de Mesquita for seven predictions since, though he would not disclose the subjects.

It is difficult to verify how accurately Bueno de Mesquita's model performs in corporate settings because most firms are loath to discuss his work for them. For most of the cases we discussed, Bueno de Mesquita would disclose details of the negotiation but wouldn't name the firms in question. In other cases, clients would talk to me and praise Bueno de Mesquita's work for them, but they would not disclose verifiable details of specific negotiations. There were a few exceptions: Robert F. Kelley, a retired former partner of Arthur Andersen, described using Bueno de Mesquita for "60 or 70" cases, ranging from internal firing decisions to figuring out how to persuade the U.S. to support China's entry into the World Trade Organization. (Bueno de Mesquita also offered to use his software to predict which of Arthur Andersen's clients — including, at the time, Enron — were likely to engage in financial fraud. But the firm's lawyers, Bueno de Mesquita says, didn't want to use the tool for fear it would put them in awkward legal positions. "Had I been able to convince the firm" to use the model, Kelley says, "I think that Andersen would be alive today.")

Bueno de Mesquita's most regular client by far has been the C.I.A. He says he has performed more than 1,200 predictions for the agency, tackling questions like "How fully will France participate in the Strategic Defense Initiative?" and "What policy will Beijing adopt toward Taiwan's role in the Asian Development Bank?" In 1987, Stanley Feder, a research political scientist for the C.I.A., published a report analyzing forecasts that Bueno de Mesquita's firm did of political events in 27 countries; he found that the success rate of its predictions was the same as that of the C.I.A.'s own analysts, only more precise. (He "got the bull's-eye twice as often," Feder wrote in his report, which was declassified in 1993. No other reports have been declassified since.) Feder noted, for example, that Bueno de Mesquita's model predicted in a forecast done of Italy's budget one year a specific figure that turned out to be off by only 1 percent; the C.I.A. method would predict just a deficit.

Those who have watched Bueno de Mesquita in action call him an extremely astute observer of people. He needs to be: when conducting his fact-gathering interviews, he must detect when the experts know what they're talking about and when they don't. The computer's advantage over humans is its ability to spy unseen coalitions, but this works only when the relative positions of each player are described accurately in the first place. "Garbage in, garbage out," Bueno de Mesquita notes. Bueno de Mesquita begins each interview by sitting quietly — "in a slightly closed-up manner," as Lapthorne told me — but as soon as an interviewee expresses doubt or contradicts himself, Bueno de Mesquita instantly asks for clarification.

"His ability to pick up on body language, to pick up on vocal intonation, to remember what people said and challenge them in nonthreatening ways — he's a master at it," says Rose McDermott, a political-science professor at Brown who has watched Bueno de Mesquita conduct interviews. She says she thinks his emotional intelligence, along with his ability to listen, is his true gift, not his mathematical smarts. "The thing is, he doesn't think that's his gift," McDermott says. "He thinks it's the model. I think the model is, I'm sure, brilliant. But lots of other people are good at math. His gift is in interviewing. I've said that flat out to him, and he's said, 'Well, anyone can do interviews.' But they can't."

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The son of Jewish immigrants who arrived from Brussels during World War II, Bueno de Mesquita grew up in Manhattan, where his father ran a small publishing company and his mother managed a women's clothing shop. He went to Queens College when he was 16 — "way too young," he says — and read history and literature voraciously. (Bueno de Mesquita spent years researching and writing a short novel that defends Ebenezer Scrooge as a kindhearted man.) "He is one the most remarkably intelligent human beings I've met in my life, and Bruce does not hesitate to tell you that," Kevin Gaynor, an environmental lawyer who has twice hired Bueno de Mesquita to advise his corporate clients on "extremely sensitive" government negotiations, told me half-jokingly. "He's not self-effacing. But he's not self-effacing in a charming way." Bueno de Mesquita's voluminous academic work — he has published 16 books and more than 100 papers — is credited with helping to move game theory and mathematical modeling into the mainstream of political science; according to one count, by 1999 fully 40 percent of papers in the American Political Science Review used modeling. (The figure was so high it prompted deep consternation among non-game-theory political scientists.) While few perform the consulting work he does, other game theorists have produced models very similar to Bueno de Mesquita's, and he actively promotes his technique, including training N.Y.U. undergraduates to do similar predictions.) He spends half the year at N.Y.U., where he recently finished a four-year stint as the chairman of the political-science department, and half the year at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Under the terms of his academic contracts, he is permitted to spend one day per week during the academic year doing outside consulting.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/magaz ... wanted=all





Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's game theory and the Israel-Palestine conflict July 17, 2008
Posted by fleshisgrass in Israel, Palestine, conflict.
Tags: "Bruce Bueno de Mesquita", game theory
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Professor Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist – specifically a mathematician specialising in game theory and rational theory. He produced a computer-based model that predicts the outcome of any international conflict, providing the initial input is accurate.  Unsurprisingly – because he works as if most things can be expressed in numbers – he's a controversial figure, but he has a track record of accurate and – riskily for him – very specific predictions. He believes in being specific because, among other work, he advises the Pentagon.

Here is an excerpt on the Israel-Palestine conflict from a wider ranging and dramatically-titled piece The New Nostradamus in GOOD Magazine (I got to this via Marginal Revolution which was a click from the front page of Pickled Politics at the time).

"Recently, he's applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "In my view, it is a mistake to look for strategies that build mutual trust because it ain't going to happen. Neither side has any reason to trust the other, for good reason," he says. "Land for peace is an inherently flawed concept because it has a fundamental commitment problem. If I give you land on your promise of peace in the future, after you have the land, as the Israelis well know, it is very costly to take it back if you renege. You have an incentive to say, 'You made a good step, it's a gesture in the right direction, but I thought you were giving me more than this. I can't give you peace just for this, it's not enough.' Conversely, if we have peace for land—you disarm, put down your weapons, and get rid of the threats to me and I will then give you the land—the reverse is true: I have no commitment to follow through. Once you've laid down your weapons, you have no threat."

Bueno de Mesquita's answer to this dilemma, which he discussed with the former Israeli prime minister and recently elected Labor leader Ehud Barak, is a formula that guarantees mutual incentives to cooperate. "In a peaceful world, what do the Palestinians anticipate will be their main source of economic viability? Tourism. This is what their own documents say. And, of course, the Israelis make a lot of money from tourism, and that revenue is very easy to track. As a starting point requiring no trust, no mutual cooperation, I would suggest that all tourist revenue be [divided by] a fixed formula based on the current population of the region, which is roughly 40 percent Palestinian, 60 percent Israeli. The money would go automatically to each side. Now, when there is violence, tourists don't come. So the tourist revenue is automatically responsive to the level of violence on either side for both sides. You have an accounting firm that both sides agree to, you let the U.N. do it, whatever. It's completely self-enforcing, it requires no cooperation except the initial agreement by the Israelis that they are going to turn this part of the revenue over, on a fixed formula based on population, to some international agency, and that's that."

Just makes me think again about how I wish I was good at maths, I wish I understood game theory better and I wish more of this kind of conflict resolution was going on.

http://fleshisgrass.wordpress.com/2008/ ... -conflict/


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Video:

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on predictions (a TED presentation)
9 April 2009 by Sean Power ~ Permalink

There's a new video on TED's website by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

http://community.akoha.com/blog/2009/04 ... sentation/

I think one of the interesting lessons to take away from this presentation is that the science of prediction relies on understanding the position of many contributing influencers - not just thought leaders themselves.  Bruce makes the point that leaders can't possibly keep up with flow of information.  Leaders may be ambiently aware of issues (and sometimes not even that), but are not directly plugged in.  This is because consuming information and making informed decisions is nearly impossible when the information surrounding those issues begin to multiply.  It's information overload.  So leaders rely on (hopefully) smart people to help them make decisions for them.  And so, the real key is to understand the strata below the key influencer.

And if the strata below the key influencer is so critical, then one good way to have an issue heard or a belief practiced is to hopefully "bring on board" a critical mass.  At the very least, understanding the motivations of those strata will help you better understand where things are going in your environment.