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| WMD and Decisions Under Uncertainty |
| 2004-02-16 |
EFL from Tech Central Station"Tim Russert: But can you launch a preemptive war without iron clad, absolute intelligence that he had weapons of mass destruction?I enjoy teaching statistics in high school even more than I enjoy teaching economics. Part of the reason is that the Advanced Placement exam in statistics is so much better than the exam in economics. You can pass the economics AP just by memorizing some verbal jargon and graphical tricks. For statistics, you really need to understand the subject. Last year’s statistics exam, for example, had an excellent question about decision-making under uncertainty, which is what President Bush faced in Iraq. Instead of giving students an artificial exercise to crank out the answer based on a formula, the question described a realistic scenario and then asked: "Define the parameter of interest and state the null and alternative hypothesis... In the context of this situation, describe Type I and Type II errors and describe the consequences of each"... -snip- illustration of statistical theory using the example of Florida elections Next, let us describe Type I and Type II errors. A Type I error would be to back down from confronting Iraq and subsequently suffer a WMD attack. A type II error would be to invade Iraq when in fact we would not have been hit with WMD even if we left the regime alone... The goal of UN resolution 1441 was to get the Hussein regime to disarm in a transparent way. The regime failed to do so. In fact, the report of David Kay, the American inspector who was disappointed that he was unable to find weapons stockpiles, indicates that some weapons programs were still active, even though they apparently failed to produce usable weapons. To wait to invade until we had ironclad intelligence that Iraq had WMD stockpiles would have been to take a huge risk of Type I error. The costs of such a mistake would have been unacceptably high. To avoid going to war, I would argue that we needed clear assurance that the Hussein regime was co-operating with UN resolution 1441. To give the regime the benefit of the doubt would have been a dubious approach for dealing with the uncertainty. If the United States has committed a Type II error, meaning that Iraq never posed a threat, then the blame should not fall on our intelligence. It should fall primarily on the Iraqi regime for its continued concealment, deception, and defiance. There is no way that we could have relied on intelligence alone to dismiss the notion that Iraq was a threat. Only the regime itself, by fully co-operating with inspectors and by dismantling suspect programs, could have averted war. In an essay on the role of Harvard Business School in shaping President Bush’s thought process, Thomas Lifson writes, "The very first lesson drummed into new students, as they file into the classrooms of Aldrich Hall, is that management consists of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. There is never perfect information, and decisions often have to be made even when you’d really prefer to know a lot more. Given this reality, students are taught many techniques for analyzing the data which is available, extracting the non-obvious facets, learning how read into it the reasonable inferences which can be made, while quantifying the risks of doing so, and learning the costs and value of obtaining additional data." This is standard decision making in the military as well. I thought Bush didn’t pay attention in any of his classes and was just Cheany’s puppet. This paragraph implies that Bush is capable of high-level thinking. The question from Tim Russert that I quoted at the beginning of this essay implies that we should not have invaded Iraq unless we had "iron clad absolute intelligence" that Iraq had weapons stockpiles. Russert, and many other Americans, want to see the decision in black-and-white terms. Wait a minute. I thought Bush was the simplistic Black & White thinker. Former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin described the challenge of making decisions in an environment with unknown parameters. In his portrait of Rubin in the New York Times, Jacob Weisberg wrote, ’"At Harvard and Yale Law School I learned to think about the uncertainties and the ambiguities of life intellectually," he says. "When I got to Goldman, Sachs, I learned it was a matter of financial life and death to learn to be probabilistic. If you thought in absolutes and black-and-whites, sooner or later you got wiped out. The odds would catch up with you."’ Decision-making under uncertainty means living with probabilities, not absolutes. Tim Russert needs to take a class in AP Statistics. He would get no better than a 3 and would still be Valadictorian for network journalists |
| Posted by:Super Hose |
| #4 I notice that "stockpiles" qualifier is being used here in every sentence here. Maybe I'm seeing too much into it...but I think it's going to become the meaning of is, when they find lots of wmds and wmd programs....just no "stockpiles". Time will tell. |
| Posted by: B 2004-2-17 12:09:35 AM |
| #3 Next, let us describe Type I and Type II errors but do it very slowly - the HE LIED crowd is not good at math. |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2004-2-16 4:51:10 PM |
| #2 Here it is DAR. In the interest of saving Fred's bandwidth click on Calling Iraqs Bluff. Then scroll down to # 5. That will take you to Old Spooks comments on 1/30/04. |
| Posted by: GK 2004-2-16 2:12:07 PM |
| #1 OldSpook had an excellent comment on threat analysis quite similar to this from a post two weeks ago. If I could search the comments or if I were home (I saved it), I'd repost it. |
| Posted by: Dar 2004-2-16 11:20:45 AM |