I found this piecein Good Magazine on Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Chairman of NYU’s Politics Department and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. According to the article, Bueno de Mesquita has developed a game theoretical computer model that "can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate." The article goes on:
What’s more, his predictions are alarmingly specific. His fans include at least one current presidential hopeful, a gaggle of Fortune 500 companies, the CIA, and the Department of Defense. Naturally, there is also no shortage of people less fond of his work. "Some people think Bruce is the most brilliant foreign policy analyst there is," says one colleague. "Others think he’s a quack."
...
The criticism rankles him, because, to his mind, the proof is right there on the page. "I’ve published a lot of forecasting papers over the years," he says. "Papers that are about things that had not yet happened when the paper was published but would happen within some reasonable amount of time. There’s a track record that I can point to." And indeed there is. Bueno de Mesquita has made a slew of uncannily accurate predictions—more than 2,000, on subjects ranging from the terrorist threat to America to the peace process in Northern Ireland—that would seem to prove him right.
After testing Bueno de Mesquita’s model the CIA found it had a 90% accuracy level and that it provided far more specific information than the standard intelligence reports from the Director of Intelligence (though I’m surprised they would release that information). The model flows from standard rational choice theory, whereby actors’ motives are configured into equations to determine the rational outcome.
One could see how Bueno de Mesquita’s model is controversial. When I began reading the article I was immediately reminded of Marx’s historical materialism–and we all know how well that turned out. It seems Bueno de Mesquita’s model differs only superficially from Marx’s in that it does not rely strictly on economics and it is not (yet at least) sheathed in idealism. Is this enough to redeem it? It seems enough people think so.
I tend to yield on the side of cautious skepticism with regard to any theory, be it rational or religious, that makes predictive claims on the future. Though there is something of a deterministic element in history, I believe history is still subject to ‘accidents’ of circumstance and the power of agency (accidents at least in the sense of what the human mind is now capable of ascertaining) . But then again perhaps I am the naive one.
From Schmitz Blitz: schmitzblitz.wordpress.com