Free A Sense of the Enemy: The High Stakes History of Reading Your Rival's Mind by Zachary Shore Page B

programs as well as human observations can easily go awry, and errors are most likely to occur when either the computer or the person is focused on the wrong data. If the software is designed to project a minor league pitcher’s future strike-outs but fails to include information on the weakness of the batters that pitcher faced, then the pitcher will be in for a rough ride when he reaches the major leagues. By the same token, scouts who assess a player’s promise by the athlete’s imposing physique might overlook some underlying flaws. Though he does not state it directly, Silver finds that scouts do better when they focus on pattern breaks. “I like to see a hitter, when he flails at a pitch, when he takes a big swing and to the fans it looks ridiculous,”one successful scout told Silver, “I like to look down and see a smile on his face. And then the next time—bam—four hundred feet!” There’s no substitute for resilience, and it can best be seen at those times when things don’t go as planned. 3
While prudent, thoughtful quantification can serve us well in many areas, it cannot be applied in every area. As a case in point, toward the close of his book, Silver turns to intelligence assessments, drawing specifically on the failure to predict the attacks on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. On the one hand he advocates that intelligence analysts must remain open to all possibilities, particularly by assigning probabilities to all imaginable scenarios, no matter how remote they might seem. On the other hand, he assumes that analyzing individuals is a less profitable endeavor. Silver writes: “At a microscopic level, then, at the level of individual terrorists or individual terror schemes, there are unlikely to be any magic bullet solutions to predicting attacks. Instead, intelligence requires sorting through the spaghetti strands of signals . . .” Of course it is true that we have no magic bullets. Statesmen do, however, possess ways of improving their odds. Rather than mining the trove of big data for patterns in their enemies’ behavior, or sorting through a sticky web of conflicting signals, statesmen can focus instead on the moments of pattern breaks. Again, it is obvious that this will not guarantee successful predictions, but it can help illuminate what the enemy truly seeks.
As a quant, Silver is understandably less comfortable analyzing how individuals behave. His forte is calculating how groups of individuals are likely to behave over the long run most of the time. Here then is a crucial difference between the type of predictions made by Silver and his fellow quants and those predictions made by statesmen at times of conflict. Quantitative assessments work best with iterative, not singular, events. The financial investor, for example, can come out ahead after years of profits and losses, as long as his overall portfolio of investments is profitable most of the time. Depending on the arena, a good strategy could even be one that makes money just 60 percent of the time, as is a common benchmark in personal finance. The same is true of the poker player, baseball batter, or chess master. When the game is iterative, played over and over, a winning strategy just has to be marginally, though consistently, better than that of a coin flip. But leaders, in painful contrast, have to get it right this one time, before lives arelost. In the dangerous realm of international conflict, statesmen must be 100 percent right when it matters most. They cannot afford to repeat again and again the Nazi invasion of Russia or the American escalation in Vietnam. Unlike in competitive poker, the stakes in this setting are simply too high.
The political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is arguably the king of quants when it comes to predicting foreign affairs. Frequently funded by the Defense Department, Bueno de Mesquita insists that foreign affairs can be predicted with 90 percent accuracy using his own secret formula. Of course, most