The University of Georgia has apparently created a statistical model for predicting chances of success in wars. I tell you, we are getting closer and closer to a Hari Seldon-like reality.
For those of you unfamiliar with Seldon, he is a major protagonist in Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy. Although the works are fiction, they helped shape my adult outlook. I know this is going to sound kind of way out there to some people, but I see this war-model as a prelude to practical Psychohistory, or the prediction of future events based on statistical predictions.
We’re seeing fictional precedents from SF novels and media fulfilled over and over again. Like technology from Star Trek, it seems as if scientists, once given a fictional portrayal of a useful device, inexorably work toward that as a goal even if they don’t mean to. Witness our “Communicator-like” cell phones. Yeah, it’s just one small example, but the Motorola Razr is eerily similar to Jim Kirk’s hand held communicator.
I don’t think anything in the world happens by “accident“. If one understood all the variables surrounding a supposed “accident”, it could have been perfectly predicted ahead of time. While there is some very slight randomness at the level of electrons, reactions of substances larger than subatomic levels are universally predictable. It’s the grounding foundation of science that, if you control the variables, you can make reliable predictions regarding the outcome of an event.
The problem in making such predictions is that, when people are made aware of predictions about their behavior, the predictions then become a variable in the equation, messing it up. For instance, this prediction of a 23% chance of “success” in Iraq has, itself, affected the likelihood of a favorable outcome. IMHO, such a low probability will drive anti-war efforts with the backing of “science” — more like, “carefully chosen statistics favorable to your non-scientific goals” — for political purposes. This is the same effect for which we use placebos in double-blind tests, because often the simple awareness that one is taking a medication is enough to cause a substantial percentage of those being tested to show effects.
A politician, as various famous people have said before, uses statistics like a drunk uses a lamp-post… more for support than for illumination. The unfortunate fact is that as our ability to model human behavior becomes more and more refined from the rough, tentative steps we take today, money will continue to be needed to fund such projects. That money will probably come from universities, who rely on grant money — public money — for support, which means more publicity, regular appeals for more cash, and easily-twisted statistics wielded by politicians and policy-makers for their own self-serving ends.
What seems to be needed is an enormously wealthy, self-sustaining think-tank which keeps mum about most of its predictions, only using the outcomes of various conflicts to further improve statistical models. I don’t know if it would be possible — or even desirable — to keep such an effort under wraps, particularly when knowledge of the outcome of a conflict could be used to avert the conflict in the first place.