Fool Me Two Dozen Times….

As a follow-up to Rob, I think we need, once again, to return to dsquared’s one minute MBA:

Fibbers’ forecasts are worthless. Case after miserable case after bloody case we went through, I tell you, all of which had this moral. Not only that people who want a project will tend to make innacurate projections about the possible outcomes of that project, but about the futility of attempts to “shade” downward a fundamentally dishonest set of predictions. If you have doubts about the integrity of a forecaster, you can’t use their forecasts at all. Not even as a “starting point”. By the way, I would just love to get hold of a few of the quantitative numbers from documents prepared to support the war and give them a quick run through Benford’s Law.

Application to Iraq This was how I decided that it was worth staking a bit of credibility on the strong claim that absolutely no material WMD capacity would be found, rather than “some” or “some but not enough to justify a war” or even “some derisory but not immaterial capacity, like a few mobile biological weapons labs”. My reasoning was that Powell, Bush, Straw, etc, were clearly making false claims and therefore ought to be discounted completely, and that there were actually very few people who knew a bit about Iraq but were not fatally compromised in this manner who were making the WMD claim. Meanwhile, there were people like Scott Ritter and Andrew Wilkie who, whatever other faults they might or might not have had, did not appear to have told any provable lies on this subject and were therefore not compromised.

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The raspberry road that led to Abu Ghraib was paved with bland assumptions that people who had repeatedly proved their untrustworthiness, could be trusted. There is much made by people who long for the days of their fourth form debating society about the fallacy of “argumentum ad hominem”. There is, as I have mentioned in the past, no fancy Latin term for the fallacy of “giving known liars the benefit of the doubt”, but it is in my view a much greater source of avoidable error in the world. Audit is meant to protect us from this, which is why audit is so important.

I’m also concede willing to concede that a couple of the very narrow claims Matt made aren’t terribly germane. But the overall point certainly holds. The only potential value from the O’Pollahan op-ed are claims made about the situation on the ground in Iraq. To take them seriously we would have to trust the ability of the people making the arguments to think critically about the propaganda they’re being fed, search very assiduously for disconfirming information, etc. Given that O’Pollahan have 1)a remarkably extensive history of atrocious misjudgments about the situation in Iraq and the competence of the Bush administration and 2)have an obvious stake in defending the disastrous war their reputations were staked on, that their claims about “on the ground” improvements cannot be trusted is the least that can be said. The fact that the claims they make that can be assessed with publicly available data continue to have a strong tendency to be tendentious or false makes this even more clear. It may not be true as a matter of formal logic that it is impossible for them to be right, but I think you’d be smarter to put your money in Baltimore Orioles 2007 World Series futures.

In related news, Thers makes a wish: “You know what I want? The 3-Card-Monty concession outside the Washington Post editorial board room.” I think the bidding for that starts at $500,000….