[CLUE-Talk] Bush to order bipartisian review of Iraq allegations of WMD

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Randy Arabie (randy at arabie.org) wrote:
> > next year.
> 
> Whithout answering your question, I'd like to share this:
> 
>    The Logic of Intelligence Hype and Blindness
> 
>    Bruce G. Blair, Ph.D, CDI President, bblair at cdi.org 
>    Dec. 11, 2003 (updated Dec. 30, 2003) 
> 
>    http://www.cdi.org/blair/intelligence.cfm

>
> Mr. Blair took two recent intelligence "failures" (9/11 and Iraq WMD) 
> and applied a rule of logic known as Baye's law to the pre-existing   
> opinion of the intelligence community and a post-incident analysis of 
> available intelligence and produced conclusions that were not only    
> plausible but reasonable.                                             
>

Heh.  That's the same statistical / probabilistic arguement that my spam
filter uses.  It is not a perfect fit here.  Although I would call it
Baye's Formula.

The bottom line for me is this: even if you accept completely that GWB
and Blair acted in good faith (which I am not), *and* they the used
sophisticated Bayesian analysis (which leaves aside the sticky issue of
figuring out the probability of the known events), the fact is that they
acted on incomplete information. When you do that, you are taking a risk.

When it turns out you guessed wrong, you own up to it.

The current plan seems to be: Blame them!

That sucks, and I won't abide by it.

Tim
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