Posted on 04/02/2014 9:55:23 PM PDT by Theoria
The morning I met Elaine Rich, she was sitting at the kitchen table of her small town home in suburban Maryland trying to estimate refugee flows in Syria.
It wasn't the only question she was considering; there were others:
Will North Korea launch a new multistage missile before May 10, 2014?
Will Russian armed forces enter Kharkiv, Ukraine, by May 10? Rich's answers to these questions would eventually be evaluated by the intelligence community, but she didn't feel much pressure because this wasn't her full-time gig.
"I'm just a pharmacist," she said. "Nobody cares about me, nobody knows my name, I don't have a professional reputation at stake. And it's this anonymity which actually gives me freedom to make true forecasts."
Rich does make true forecasts; she is curiously good at predicting future world events.
Better Than The Pros
For the past three years, Rich and 3,000 other average people have been quietly making probability estimates about everything from Venezuelan gas subsidies to North Korean politics as part of the Good Judgment Project, an experiment put together by three well-known psychologists and some people inside the intelligence community.
According to one report, the predictions made by the Good Judgment Project are often better even than intelligence analysts with access to classified information, and many of the people involved in the project have been astonished by its success at making accurate predictions.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
It’s not group think if the individuals don’t interact. It’s the wisdom of crowds.
I didn’t say it was. Group think in the context of intelligence predictions of the past. And how the process of coming to the conclusion was based on a flawed system of analysis that was/is blurred.
This may interest you.
Group think has a specific definition, and this isn’t it.
I seem to remember some scientist doing something similar with memes or keywords on the Internet and having amazingly good luck with it. Anyone remember that from a television show?
Reminds me of the 1970’s and the Trancendental Meditation idea of 1% meditating for world peace and the lowering of violent crime in major US cities
Heard the CIA guy testify that he relied on Langley experts for information rather than agents on the ground in Benghazi. Brilliant!
Stanford Research Institue did some interesting research on a thing called Remote Viewing that is similiar to the subject of this article.
They supposedly used ordinary people asking them to visualize various locations unknown to them resulting in some fairly acurate descriptions of what they were asked to view.
It’s not groupthink. That’s a specific -thing- and it’s a different psychological affect of people operating in groups. This is more properly “crowd think”.
It’s the flash mob of geopolitical prediction. Get a bunch of reasonably plugged-in people to all sit together and process their guesses into a stack of fair estimates based on some current set of facts.... And chances are pretty good that all of the most probable outcomes will be guessed. Once the list of guesses is defined, those guesses are ranked by crowd-sourcing again into a short list of most probable to least... And shazam. Predictions. Maybe even some pretty good ones.
Gestalt Psychology in a different wrapper
Remember “Intrade”? (shuttered by US online gaming laws) https://www.intrade.com
Similar idea is back & funded with BitCoin: https://www.predictious.com
(GOP currently favored to win back Senate)
Make money if you are good at predicting!
The “Foundation Trilogy” by Asimov had as its basis the study and mathmatical mapping of history to predict the future
Cliodynamics: The Journal of Theoretical and Mathematical History, a part of the UC system, continues to publish pieces on this subject
There is more to it than just the crowd think aspect. There are certain limitations imposed upon members of the intelligence community that do not exist in the open community. Due to the problems of handling classified intelligence, the risk of moles compromising sensitive intelligence and agents, and the need to compartmentalize the intelligence and analysis; there are often situations where intelligence available from open sources does not come to the attention of the intelligence analysts. Even when the open source intelligence does come to the attention of the intelligence analyst, they are often denied the opportunity to include it in an intelligence analysis, communicate the intelligence to other analysts, or act upon the open source intelligence.
In one real world example, an open source publication presented some information about the Soviets deploying some improved anti-aircraft AFV (armored fighting vehicles), but the intelligence officers of a military unit tasked with the job of suppressing this surface-to-air threat were not allowed to read the article or publication, disseminate the information in the article, or use the information found in the article in their own intelligence analysis or tactical doctrine.
The person working with only open sources faces a disadvantage having no access to classified intelligence, but also has the advantage of not being confined to sources and methods that must be safeguarded with counter-intelligence procedures.
Some intelligence analysts do have access and opportunity to use open source and classified intelligence, but they always face the problem and limitation where the use of the open source could inadvertently also compromise a classified source. To avoid such eventualities, the intelligence analyst may have to censor the open source to avoid problems with the classified sources.
“It’s the flash mob of geopolitical prediction. Get a bunch of reasonably plugged-in people to all sit together and process their guesses into a stack of fair estimates based on some current set of facts.... And chances are pretty good that all of the most probable outcomes will be guessed. Once the list of guesses is defined, those guesses are ranked by crowd-sourcing again into a short list of most probable to least... And shazam. Predictions. Maybe even some pretty good ones.”
Makes sense. Sounds like fun
I’d say its probable that more times than not a crowd sourced cloud of analysts would end up compromising a brick and mortar source. But there’s some safety in anonymity. The bad guys won’t know which guess was the right one.
It sounds like a meeting of freepers.
This article is about how a large group of people can more accurately gauge the actions of various groups with the information available to the public than a small group of “experts with classified knowledge” can.
ESP and remote viewing have less than nothing to do with general analysis of available information.
The CIA is busy staffing gays and wondering how to staff illegals than making predictions.
Indeed... common sense. A good parent knows what a kid is up to at any age and how he or she could become if made unawares. Keep a garden well, keep a world well.
The bureaucracy of the CIA has a IRS like agenda of licensing activities andcounter licensing covert activities. They simply try to ascribe social security numbers.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.