There’s a great dramatisation of the Bin Laden/probability discussion in “Zero Dark Thirty”. The organisationally savvy CIA bureaucrats circle around career-protecting both-sides-of-the-fence probabilities - “a soft 60%”. Maya, the heroine and source of the analysis that Bin Laden was in the compound in Abbotabad, is finally asked her view after the chaps have pronounced: “It’s a 100% … OK, I know you guys don’t do certainty, so 95% … but it’s a 100%”.
Yes this film is actually addressed in the Super-Forecasting book. They say the dramatisation tells the story through how we want to perceive the world - in certainties. The reality is however that no-one could ever be certain here because - well for one thing - no-one had actually seen Osama Bin Laden in that compound (it could have been a drug baron or some other bad dude on the run). I don't do justice to the book's summary at all there, but if you're interested in hearing more about the decision, I couldn't recommend it more (as evidenced by writing two posts about it now).
Was keen to watch "Zero Dark Thirty" too, and you've provided more fuel to the fire. Next on the watch list for sure, thank you.
Outstanding. Feels like a first course in Empirical Philosophy.
First we put down ideologies, then we embrace uncertainty in order to fathom our next steps in the world as it really is…A tall order and often impractical (hence System 1) but you show us the rewards (depth of understanding) and remind us that writing past things down (calibration) plays an important role in perceiving what we write down next.
Tempting (for me) to add Feynman diagrams. The world at its root is deeply probabilistic, these little sketches show a way through. How to know what will happen in an interaction at the smallest scale? Identify every possible way the particles could interact, determine the probability of each, compile. Sum over all possible histories because all those things could and probably did happen. Everything everywhere all at once. At the macro level this is less a practical tool, more a humbling awareness.
How appropriate that your mediation indicated what the East can show us with a stop on the Way of the Ramen.
There’s a great dramatisation of the Bin Laden/probability discussion in “Zero Dark Thirty”. The organisationally savvy CIA bureaucrats circle around career-protecting both-sides-of-the-fence probabilities - “a soft 60%”. Maya, the heroine and source of the analysis that Bin Laden was in the compound in Abbotabad, is finally asked her view after the chaps have pronounced: “It’s a 100% … OK, I know you guys don’t do certainty, so 95% … but it’s a 100%”.
https://youtu.be/irG0wGzw7Ok
Yes this film is actually addressed in the Super-Forecasting book. They say the dramatisation tells the story through how we want to perceive the world - in certainties. The reality is however that no-one could ever be certain here because - well for one thing - no-one had actually seen Osama Bin Laden in that compound (it could have been a drug baron or some other bad dude on the run). I don't do justice to the book's summary at all there, but if you're interested in hearing more about the decision, I couldn't recommend it more (as evidenced by writing two posts about it now).
Was keen to watch "Zero Dark Thirty" too, and you've provided more fuel to the fire. Next on the watch list for sure, thank you.
Outstanding. Feels like a first course in Empirical Philosophy.
First we put down ideologies, then we embrace uncertainty in order to fathom our next steps in the world as it really is…A tall order and often impractical (hence System 1) but you show us the rewards (depth of understanding) and remind us that writing past things down (calibration) plays an important role in perceiving what we write down next.
Tempting (for me) to add Feynman diagrams. The world at its root is deeply probabilistic, these little sketches show a way through. How to know what will happen in an interaction at the smallest scale? Identify every possible way the particles could interact, determine the probability of each, compile. Sum over all possible histories because all those things could and probably did happen. Everything everywhere all at once. At the macro level this is less a practical tool, more a humbling awareness.
How appropriate that your mediation indicated what the East can show us with a stop on the Way of the Ramen.