Historical analysis and policy making often require counterfactual thought experiments that isolate hypothesized causes from a vast array of historical possibilities. However, a core precept of Jervis's “systems thinking” is that causes are so interconnected that the historian can only with great difficulty imagine causation by subtracting all variables but one. Prediction, according to Jervis, is even more problematic: The more sensitive an event is to initial conditions (e.g., butterfly effects), the harder it is to derive accurate forecasts. Nevertheless, if (...) awareness of system effects can help forecasters better calibrate their probability estimates of whether or not certain events will come to pass, systems thinkers who are pessimistic about prediction are diluting their confidence too much. The challenge is a meta-cognitive one: thinking systematically about when to engage in systems thinking; and weighing the costs and benefits of using simple or complex heuristics in policy environments that can shift suddenly from quiescence to turbulence. (shrink)

International relations theories have often been faulted for not advancing falsifiable forecasts. Given the complexities of geopolitics and the near impossibility of satisfying the “ceteris paribus” clause in scientific hypothesis testing, this criticism imposes an unfair standard. It is reasonable however to ask about the predictive track records of international relations theorists who enter high-stakes policy debates. Whether a neorealist of neo-institutionalist proves an adroit or maladroit forecaster sheds little light on the truth status of their preferred theory but considerable (...) light on: (a) how much credence to attach to their claims about the likely outcomes of pursuing various policy options in specific theaters of conflict; (b) how superior forecasters blend abstract covering laws with real-world knowledge to generate well-calibrated probability estimates. (shrink)

Heuristics are necessary but far from sufficient explanations for moral judgment. This commentary stresses: (a) the need to complement cold, cognitive-economizing functionalist accounts with hot, value-expressive, social-identity-affirming accounts; and (b) the importance of conducting reflective-equilibrium thought and laboratory experiments that explore the permeability of the boundaries people place on the “thinkable.”.

Until social psychology devotes as much attention to construct and external validity as it does to internal validity, the field will continue to produce theories that fail to replicate in the field and cannot be used to meliorate social problems.

Timur Kuran's Private Truths, Public Lies makes a compelling case that people often misrepresent their private preferences in response to real or imagined social pressures, that the relative power of competing interest groups to punish opinion deviance and reward conformity determines the patterns and pervasiveness of preference falsification, and that preference falsifi‐cation helps explain such diverse outcomes as the persistence and sudden collapse of communism and the precarious persistence of racial preferences in the United States and of the caste system (...) in India. Although preference falsification is important and raises questions about the legitimacy of the opinions expressed in opinion polls and elections, it does not seem widespread enough to warrant the conclusion that ordinary people lack the courage necessary to make democracy work. (shrink)

Intelligence analysts, like other professionals, form norms that define standards of tradecraft excellence. These norms, however, have evolved in an idiosyncratic manner that reflects the influence of prominent insiders who had keen psychological insights but little appreciation for how to translate those insights into testable hypotheses. The net result is that the prevailing tradecraft norms of best practice are only loosely grounded in the science of judgment and decision-making. The “common sense” of prestigious opinion leaders inside the intelligence community has (...) pre-empted systematic validity testing of the training techniques and judgment aids endorsed by those opinion leaders. Drawing on the scientific literature, we advance hypotheses about how current best practices could well be reducing rather than increasing the quality of analytic products. One set of hypotheses pertain to the failure of tradecraft training to recognize the most basic threat to accuracy: measurement error in the interpretation of the same data and in the communication of interpretations. Another set of hypotheses focuses on the insensitivity of tradecraft training to the risk that issuing broad-brush, one-directional warnings against bias (e.g., over-confidence) will be less likely to encourage self-critical, deliberative cognition than simple response-threshold shifting that yields the mirror-image bias (e.g., under-confidence). Given the magnitude of the consequences of better and worse intelligence analysis flowing to policy-makers, we see a compelling case for greater funding of efforts to test what actually works. (shrink)

Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity – particularly diversity of viewpoints – for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: (1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years. (2) This lack of political diversity can undermine (...) the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike. (3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority's thinking. (4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. (shrink)

We propose a friendly amendment to integrative experiment design (IED), adversarial-collaboration IED, that incentivizes research teams from competing theoretical perspectives to identify zones of the design space where they possess an explanatory edge. This amendment is especially critical in debates that have high policy stakes and carry a strong normative-political charge that might otherwise prevent free exchange of ideas.

In five works spanning a decade, Philip E. Tetlock's interest in counterfactuals has changed. He began with an optimistic desire to make social science more rigorous by identifying best practices in the absence of non-imagined controls for experimentation. Soon, however, he adopted a more pessimistic analysis of the cognitive and psychological barriers facing experts. This shift was brought on by an awareness that experts are not rational Bayesians who continually update their theories to keep up with new information; (...) but instead are affected by political, cognitive, and psychological heuristics, including hindsight bias, cognitive conservatism, and the fundamental attribution error. But techniques of computational simulation-involving the rigorous production of large numbers of counterfactual worlds-make it possible to mitigate both problems that Tetlock identifies: that history, produced only once, is a lousy teacher; and that humans, with their collection of non-Bayesian heuristics, are lousy pupils. Tetlock was wrong to reject this approach as theoretically promising but rhetorically and practically impractical. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock and I agree that forecasting tools are best evaluated in peer-reviewed settings and in comparison not only to expert judgments, but also to alternative modeling strategies. Applying his suggested standards of assessment, however, certain forecasting models not only outperform expert judgments, but also have gone head-to-head with alternative models and outperformed them. This track record demonstrates the capability to make significant, reliable predictions of difficult, complex events. The record has unfolded, contrary to Tetlock's contention, (...) not only in government and business applications, but also in numerous peer-reviewed publications containing hundreds of real-time forecasts. Moreover, reliable prediction is achieved while avoiding significant false-positive or false-negative rates. (shrink)

Philip E. Tetlock's finding that "hedgehog" experts (those with one big theory) are worse predictors than "foxes" (those with multiple, less comprehensive theories) offers fertile ground for future research. Are experts as likely to exhibit hedgehog- or fox-like tendencies in areas that call for explanatory, diagnostic, and skill-based expertise-as they did when Tetlock called on experts to make predictions? Do particular domains of expertise curtail or encourage different styles of expertise? Can we trace these different styles to (...) childhood? Finally, can we nudge hedgehogs to be more like foxes? Current research can only grope at the answers to these questions, but they are essential to gauging the health of expert political judgment. (shrink)

Until recently, torture was regarded as an unthinkable act. But in the dark years following September 11, 2001, many people have defended it openly as they have many other kinds of action previously considered taboo. And the underlying issues are complicated. Yet at least a virtually absolute prohibition on interrogational torture can be rationally defended.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Buddhist-Christian Studies 21.1 (2001) 119-122 [Access article in PDF] The Lotus Sutra and Process Philosophy Philip E.Devenish Rissho Kosei-kai In 1994, Rissho Kosei-kai began to sponsor an annual summer conference to which international scholars were invited to discuss and explore the Lotus Sutra. Some of the earlier conferences focused on themes such as "The Lotus Sutra and Ethics" and "The Lotus Sutra and Social Responsibility." These conferences have (...) encouraged a more widespread understanding of the Lotus Sutra among Western scholars and, as a result, a greater exposure to the Lotus Sutra on the part of students in the universities where these scholars teach. An additional feature of the conferences is the exposure of these scholars to Rissho Kosei-kai as a significant religious organization in modern Japan.This year's conference involved eleven scholars, six from the United States and five from Japan. It was held at Bandaiso, Rissho Kosei-kai's retreat center, about four hours north ofTokyo by bus. Its theme was"The Lotus Sutra andProcess Thought." Process thought is a kind of philosophical thinking developed primarily in America over the last century that shares certain features with the basic point of view expressed in the Lotus Sutra.The Lotus Sutra is not primarily a philosophical or theological text, but rather a religious one. It focuses less on analyzing reality than on coming to terms with it, responding to it, and also on changing it. However, a religious text always presupposes concepts and ideas that it employs in order to express its intuitions about what is important in life. Professor Gene Reeves, the organizer of this and the previous conferences in the series, has shown in his writings that Lotus Sutra Buddhism shares with process thought several basic commitments. One is to what he calls "a philosophy of integration" of teachings and practices, of people with nature, and of wisdom, compassion, and practice. Another is their shared "philosophy of becoming," according to which everything that exists depends on the basic process of causal relations, which makes it possible for anything at all to exist. Lotus Sutra Buddhism and process philosophy also agree that all individual realities exhibit a basic character of creativity and that creativity characterizes ultimate reality, whether this is understood in some sense as "the Buddha" or as "God." Moreover, both movements teach the possibility of religious salvation for all people as well as an ethics grounded in universal respect and compassion.Many of the participants in the conference expressed their conviction that process [End Page 119] thought, as it is developed particularly in the writings of the philosophers Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), Charles Hartshorne (b. 1897), and John Dewey (1859-1952), provides an especially clear and rich articulation of these themes and that Lotus Sutra Buddhists have much to gain from the study of this philosophy. At the same time, there was equally deep appreciation for the type of Lotus Sutra Buddhism given social and religious expression in Rissho Kosei-kai and, in particular, for its stress on the practice of "appropriate" or "skillful" means (upaya).Professor Joseph Grange, of the University of Southern Maine, drew attention to the overall consonance of the Lotus Sutra and Whitehead's later writings in overcoming dualism in thought and life. Professor Steve Odin, of the University of Hawai'i, discussed the ways both Lotus Sutra Buddhism and Whitehead formulate an interrelational vision of reality wherein each event is a microcosmic reflection of a macrocosmic whole, especially in the doctrine of the Lotus Sutra tradition of ichinen sanzen, or "three thousand realms in one thought." The present author, an independent scholar, focused on the convergence of the two movements of thought in the religious and ethical notions of peace and compassion.Professor Yoshitaka Goh, of the Japan Biblical Seminary, stressed the specifically historical character of human salvation, in which the past shapes the possibilities for our lives in the present. Professor Warren Frisina, from Hofstra University, New York, analyzed the relations between knowledge and action in the Lotus Sutra and the thought of John Dewey, showing that each... (shrink)

Futurists have imagined the Internet as a separate “cyberspace” and as a force for an idealized marketplace. Business practice and economic theory, however, lead to a different picture. (1) “Always-on” connections bring new interface problems and social skills. (2) Reduced transaction costs and increased economies of scale bring outsourcing, concentration, and globalized economy of focused monopolies. (3) The economies of scope inherent in modular computing systems bring “shallow diversity”: processes and products generated by a common underlying framework. This new picture (...) omits many countervailing factors. Even so, the very existence of alternative scenarios should sharpen questions for research. (shrink)

It is commonplace that negative duties are more stringent than positive duties. it is also commonplace that this distinction requires defense, in particular against those who regard it as a mere apology for the privileges of the wealthy and secure. i conclude, though real, the distinction between negative and positive duties is not as deep as some philosophers have supposed--that it makes best sense in terms of a deeper distinction between the intended and the foreseen consequences of our actions.

I here criticize the use of science-fiction examples in ethics, chiefly, though not solely, by defenders of abortion. We have no reliable intuitions concerning such examples—certainly nothing strong enough to set against the strong intuition that infanticide is virtually always wrong.