Bruce Bueno de Mesquita -- The New Nostradamus

    The days of the digital watch are numbered. You might come to believe that so is everything else with the fate of Floppies, CDs, DVDS etc.,

    Have you ever pondered the significance of Numbered as in “mathematics”—more precisely, game theory, an esoteric branch of mathematics used to analyze interaction. Game theory is math for how people behave strategically. It is a fringe branch of mathematics. Can it be used to forecast the future?

    Says emphatically ‘YES”, the new Nostradamus, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita.

    In fact, the professor says that a computer model he built and has perfected over the last 25 years can predict the outcome of virtually any international conflict, provided the basic input is accurate. 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.

    He is the chairman of New York University’s Department of Politics, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, and the author of many weighty academic tomes. His curriculum vitae runs 17 small-font pages long.

    He has made 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. One of the things government needs most is advice that’s not wishy-washy. The professor tries to be as precise as he can.

    Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.

    He starts with assumptions concerning each actor’s motives. You configure those motives into equations that are, essentially, statements of logic based on a predictive theory of how people with those motives will behave. Minimum fee is $50,000 for a project that includes two issues. Recently, he’s applied his science to come up with some novel ideas on how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

    He may already know, but he won’t say who’ll succeed George W. Bush in the White House. They have a corporate policy that they will not, on a commercial basis, use the model in campaigns.

    If you question his batting average, visit this URL for a comprehensive article about the new Nostradamus.
    www.goodmagazine.com/section/Features/the_new_nostradamus

    He could have forecasted the changing status of Lallu or the Left’s non participation in the nuclear deal in India. He could have predicted the victory for the mighty warriors of Indian Cricket or Viswanathan Anand’s command in world Chess. He could have fathomed the fate of the Govt. in Karnataka much earlier. But unfortunately nobody asked him.

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