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Doing Business with Hackers, Terrorists and Dictators
June 7, 2021
The Newsletter
Dr. Kenneth Dekleva served as a Regional Medical Officer/Psychiatrist (including 5 years at the U.S. Embassy Moscow, Russian Federation) with the U.S. Dept. of State during 2002-2016, and is currently Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Director, Psychiatry-Medicine Integration, UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX. The views expressed are entirely his own and do not represent the official views of the U.S. Government, the U.S. Dept. of State, or UT Southwestern Medical Center.
How a college-based team of students, faculty and volunteers bested government intelligence community prognosticators and gave birth to Superforecasting.
May 19, 2021
Over the next couple of months, other countries will probably surpass the U.S. on rates of COVID-19 vaccination. The reason is not lack of supply, but vaccine hesitancy. How can more Americans be persuaded to get their shots? Insights from behavioral economics can help.
The U.S. as a whole is approaching having 40% of the population fully vaccinated, but the proportion varies widely from state to state. Almost half of people in Maine have had their shots, but only about 30% in Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana and Wyoming.
About a quarter of Americans say they don’t want to get vaccinated. That share has declined slightly over the past six months, but it’s higher than in most other countries. In almost every developed economy except France, the share of people who would get vaccinated if offered the chance is 10 to 20 percentage points higher than in the U.S. So as vaccines become increasingly available worldwide, the vaccination rate in the U.S. stands to la
Early on in the pandemic, it seemed as if the media was asking anyone with potentially relevant expertise – scientists, doctors, statisticians – to tell us what was coming. These individuals were frequently asked to give off-the-cuff answers to questions about how bad the pandemic might get, even though there was little data to go on.
The use of expert predictions like these are important. They have the potential to shape public opinion and policy and influence how events unfold. Yet these have often been disregarded, particularly on social media, where alternative predictions by non-experts (including misinformation about experts’ forecasts) spread easily.
How the U.S. Government Can Learn to See the Future
Editor’s Note:
Intelligence assessments are made under tremendous time pressure with imperfect information, so it is no surprise that they are often wrong. They can be better, but the intelligence community often fails to use the best analytic techniques. Julia Ciocca, Michael C. Horowitz, Lauren Kahn and Christian Ruhl of Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania explain the current deficiencies in assessment techniques and argue that rigorous probabilistic forecasting, keeping score of assessments, and employing the “wisdom of crowds” produces better results.
Daniel Byman
In 1973, then-Secretary of State and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger argued that policymaking could be reduced to a process of “making complicated bets about the future,” noting that it would be helpful if he could be supplied with “estimates of the relevant betting odds.”