Comment by ilyagr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilyagr | Hacker News Reader

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I think your point is quite interesting to think about, but I do not think that is a good way to think about history. What would happen if the US didn't invade Iraq is impossible to know. Your comment seems to suppose that there were two possibilities: what we have now, or status quo of 2002. In actuality, there are infinitely many possibilities. If one of the dictators died, their sons could become the new dictators. The Arab Spring may not have happened, or could have happened and led to a stable Syria/Iraq/etc. It is impossible to list the possibilities; almost certainly something different that I cannot imagine would have happened.

However, by invading Iraq, we introduced a new humongous source of chaos to an already chaotic situation. Chaos and destruction cause historical events to become even less predictable than they usually are and impossible to control. What is predictable is that they tend to support the worst in people and suppress the best. I think it's quite safe to say that the cure was worse than the disease (Saddam, at least), and we are responsible for that. History tells us that this usually happens when people try to solve problems by invading countries.

In other words, I think we shouldn't pretend we can predict outcomes of chaotic situation. One thing we can be guided by is that the things we feel are bad (war, oppression, genocide, etc.) cause more chaos and create far more misery than the politicians and the public doing the bad thing imagine when they convince themselves it's necessary/worthwhile/inevitable. Also, no situation is so very bad that you cannot make it worse (as apparently astronauts like to say).

One of the reasons I like crowd prediction is that it seems to be slowly leading to well distributed groups of people who are able to make educated guesses even with one or two conditionals.

While governments have professional analysts, they don't do all that much better than chance even on direct predictions and then what they do share with the public is filtered by their biased interests.

Not only do we not know, for example, if the chaos after an accelerated arab spring was a better outcome from the perspective of maintaining western financial/political interests at a cost of preventing a more gradual transition into stable democracies. But more importantly, we also don't know if government analysts had that hypothesis and they still chose to interfere.

Personally, I don't think western democracies will continue to function with that type of secrecy of knowledge combined with increasing computational modeling/prediction capabilities.

Is there a data set somewhere that shows concrete predictions made by groups of people and how often they are right/wrong?

There are research projects/papers on the topic with claims that are all based on Brier scores. I'd say Brier scores are inherently biased by choices in framing/asking questions, but at least measure everyone uniformly/fairly who is given the same questions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Good_Judgment_Project

For full datasets, I'm not sure if they provide it since not all researchers are good about open data. You could look at open prediction markets which are directly observable but they wont give you any insight into how professional analysts compare with the crowd.

At that birth rate and that economy- the revolutions- or wars are bound to happen every 37 years, even with food-aid and oil-money. So we know what would have happened, cause it has happened. Several times over and over again. Different names, different reasons, the results are the same. Iranian Revolution, Iran-Iraq War, Six-Days War. You can decorate it all you want, but in the end, its despots and robber-chieftains, venting the teapot they ride. Its also very sad. How many minds lost to the sand, so many good ideas, we never heard off.

Al Assad is a good example of another dictator taking over. But in the case of Saddam and Qaddafi, it is less clear who would have taken over. And perhaps what could have happened is a progressive, peaceful transition to democracy. But the example of the Balkans show that you can put a lead on ethnic hatred for a very long time, but it will pop up sooner or later.

I think that isn't fair assessment of what happened in Balkans. The nations in Balkans aren't that delineated by blood as they are by religion, which implies the divide is more or less artificial. Some national tensions will always exist, but they were stocked by Miloshevic and co.

Imagine if Trump realizes that he can't rule all of America, but he could totally rule Southern States. So he devises a plan to divide the states and cause a rebellion. Eventually he manages to persuade some Nothern States officials that they are better off without Southern States and that they implicitly or explicitly agree to divide the USA between them. That's a more accurate version of what Miloshevic did.

If I want this to happen, should I vote for Trump or not?

This a theoretical example using a highly divisive figure (Trump). It's not meant to reflect Trump's true intentions.

Well that's lame. You got my hopes up for nothing! Not to mention, some Trump fans might not like your using him for rhetorical purposes. They think he is a genuine American patriot, not some automatic do-the-transgressive-thing fake persona.

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