There’s existence proofs of people clearly understanding geopolitics and using their predictive ability (and accumulated power) to direct the course: Bismarck, Hoover, etc.
From that, I think it is clear that useful understanding of geopolitics is not a superhuman ability. Maybe it’s a top 0.1% thing, but even so it is plausible that a given person writing on them does actually understand the system enough to have useful opinions.
If it’s the top 0.1%, how do we distinguish them from the similar fraction of people that have been right on accident so far? I would expect that the number of lucky people is comparable to the number of skilled people if the skill is really really hard. Incidentally, this is how I think about investors. Some beat the market, but there are such a huge number of people it is nearly impossible to tell if they won by skill or by luck.
There’s existence proofs of people clearly understanding geopolitics and using their predictive ability (and accumulated power) to direct the course: Bismarck, Hoover, etc.
From that, I think it is clear that useful understanding of geopolitics is not a superhuman ability. Maybe it’s a top 0.1% thing, but even so it is plausible that a given person writing on them does actually understand the system enough to have useful opinions.
If it’s the top 0.1%, how do we distinguish them from the similar fraction of people that have been right on accident so far? I would expect that the number of lucky people is comparable to the number of skilled people if the skill is really really hard. Incidentally, this is how I think about investors. Some beat the market, but there are such a huge number of people it is nearly impossible to tell if they won by skill or by luck.