Is insider information worth looking for? [LINK]
A claim that the valuable information just about entirely found by intelligently filtering public sources, in particular about the field of international relations.
A claim that the valuable information just about entirely found by intelligently filtering public sources, in particular about the field of international relations.
General Anthony Charles Zinni, Former Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Central Command (CINCENT):
This is an important and underappreciated point, but notice that he’s not saying “I could do my job 96% as well—or even 80% as well—with nothing but public knowledge”.
I strongly disagree with your interpretation. The person quoting him is saying that. Maybe the person quoting him is trying to trick the reader, but I haven’t been able to track down the context.
He’s definitely NOT describing how well he could do his job.
Imagine trying to play checkers when you couldn’t see 13 squares (20.3% of the board), or solving a chess quiz when the contents of 2 squares (3.125%) (chosen by a malicious intelligence) are unknown.
The thing about non-public information is that it is selected for value- but it is selected for value to the opponents of the people keeping it secret. If you aren’t the enemy of the people who are concealing information, there’s a good chance that the information they are concealing isn’t interesting to you.
I think it’s likely that insider information is a shortcut to aggregating information from public sources. Ie, you can go to a bunch of effort to find all the public information about what a company is doing or planning to do and get a pretty good answer, but someone working in that company is likely to have that knowledge sorted and organized and known already, simply by virtue of wanting to know it for their job.
Yes. A tremendous amount of what is classified is classified not because no one else can learn these facts or these facts are not out there in an unclassified form somewhere, but rather because it would be highly meaningful if it was known that the CIA or the NSA or Seal Team 6 or whomever was currently batting these particular facts around,.
After all, all unclassified information is ultimately generated or gathered from not intrinsically classified sources.
GJP seems to be proving that, with actual quantified data; excerpting from a recent email I received as a participant:
My current score is .33, fairly close to the “expert” stream score, so with some basic notions and Google it’s possible, apparently, to do nearly as well as “experts”. (The team I’m on has a so-so aggregate score, only .41 - I assume that the best teams are made up of reasonably good forecasters that are also good at pooling their work.)
What’s GJP? Any links to info on this study and what the various numbers mean?
Good Judgment Project, see also my recent two-part post.
The study is ongoing. It’s an effort to have “normal” people make predictions on world events, assessing individual-, team- and project-level performance as Brier scores.
Tetlock makes this same point with actual data: access to classified information does not improve forecasting.
Does it factor in forecasting that was itself classified?
ETA: The forecast of someone in the Manhattan Project about nuclear bombs would’ve been much more accurate than almost anyone else’s but those forecasts would’ve stayed entirely in the organization.
Presumably, in that case, access does help. But typically it’s more important to forecast what others will do than what your country will do.
I later googled Tetlock and saw that it was about far more general forecasting than what I think of when I think of insider information.