Quote Originally Posted by Ken White View Post
Sure have. My issue is with your "degree of accuracy." Adequate for your trade perhaps -- in my former trade that 'degree of accuracy' can easily get you killed.
Agreed. So the question is whether or not the degree of accuracy in a quantitative model is more or less likely to get someone killed than not using it. In the medical profession--where life and death is equally, and probably more frequently, at question--the answer's obvious.

I'm unsure who constitutes your "we" but I do know that I'm not wasting any money on pshrinks. Or Term Insurance. As for advertising -- some success stories, some abject failures and even the success stories didn't get nearly everyone...
Certainly, but the outliers--or even a sizable deviation under certain circumstances (not life threatening, to be sure)--doesn't overwhelm the value gained from predicting behavior in the aggregate. Optimization doesn't guarantee perfection, only a good bet that practice that considers it is better than practice that doesn't.

If one's ad campaign doesn't work out, few to no lives are likely lost -- if one's war campaign doesn't work out, many lives and perhaps more will be lost.You are familiar with these guys? LINKThey and their founder have been at it since shortly after WW II.

They and others have tried the numerate approach to war for years. None of those attempts ever really took hold. I think perhaps there's a message in that...
Don't get me wrong. I'm the first to say that there's no evidence that the power law Gourley et. al. have rediscovered will yield any valuable prescriptions. You can say the same about any number of aphorisms about violence--war is hell, whoever gets there with the mostest the firstest wins, guns don't kill people blah blah--all accurate and probably not all that helpful when faced with a real need to plan and execute.

On the other hand, you can plainly see the value in quantitative methods in force flow planning, bridging, navigation, decision trees, acquisitions (jokes go here), etc. These methods should and do prove their worth the same way tradition does--by being tested under specific conditions time and time again and under fire. We generalize their lessons at our own risk.