Since it’s not perfect, it’s fiction. Good thinking! Not.

Accurate prediction scares people for many reasons, most of which are alleviated if they’re the ones getting the predictions.

The psycho-history issue that needs more exploration is the potential effect of publicizing the model’s projections. What is the feedback effect? Does the future become opaque as Asimov suggested? Or does the information solidify the predictions? Or does it vary, depending on the issue and what’s at stake?

Anyway, don’t put down sci-fi. As is frequently the case with dismissive rejections, the idea that it is mere escapism is 180° wrong; it is actually the only literature which takes long-term issues seriously.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.”

Since it’s not perfect, it’s fiction. Good thinking! Not.

Accurate prediction scares people for many reasons, most of which are alleviated if they’re the ones getting the predictions.

The psycho-history issue that needs more exploration is the potential effect of publicizing the model’s projections. What is the feedback effect? Does the future become opaque as Asimov suggested? Or does the information solidify the predictions? Or does it vary, depending on the issue and what’s at stake?

Anyway, don’t put down sci-fi. As is frequently the case with dismissive rejections, the idea that it is mere escapism is 180° wrong; it is actually the only literature which takes long-term issues seriously.

To verify the accuracy of his model, the CIA set up a kind of forecasting face-off that pit predictions from his model against those of Langley’s more traditional in-house intelligence analysts and area specialists. “We tested Bueno de Mesquita’s model on scores of issues that were conducted in real time—that is, the forecasts were made before the events actually happened,” says Stanley Feder, a former high-level CIA analyst. “We found the model to be accurate 90 percent of the time,” he wrote. Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.”