The benefit of driving fast, a deadly counterintuition

The misperception of the time savings when driving faster cost lifes.
Actually your benefit diminishes with increased base velocity.

The counterintuitive curvilinearity shown in red screws you badly. You sure always thought its linear. Wrooooong! The higher your initial speed the lower your benefit from flooring it.

Need for speed? How many hours do you gain?  Distance is 100 km, increased speed to V2 = V1 + 30 km/h at various base speeds V1. After approx V1= 50km/h you get diminishing returns [try here].

Together with another non-linear behavior: the quadratic increase of crash energy as a function of velocity

should show you one thing: Driving fast is deadly stupid.

As a heuristics:

Drive faster when you drive really slow, don't speed up on the Autobahn.

Inspired by http://journal.sjdm.org/10/10816/jdm10816.pdf

Predicting History is Easy: Model Politics as a Game

Prof. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita wants that the world knows he can do the unthinkable. With >90% accuracy he can predict the future. This is what his recent popular science book "The Predictioneers Game" claims. Others strongly contradict his claim.

Because his model is not shown in the popular book, I asked him to point me out the right sources. He kindly answered: 

The ISA paper is scheduled for publication in the journal Conflict Management and Peace Science (CMPS). [...] you might want to read European Community Decision Making, edited by Frans Stokman and me and published by Yale University Press or my short boo[k], Predicting Politics (Ohio State University Press) but these are on the old model. The math and structure of the new model is set out in the CMPS paper that is due out within the next few months.

Let me play a game:
What would it mean if his astonishing predictive power turns out to be true? would it mean we know the state of the world in 20 years? would it mean that your fate is given? would it mean that we will all use his method in business and private life in the future? 
what would it mean if his claim is wrong. he wants to put his academic renown at stake to be invited to talkshows? he don't know he is wrong and will be derided and forgotten? Or is he playing an aggressive game to promote his...

[...] company, Mesquita & Roundell,^[1] that specializes in making political and foreign-policy forecasts using an unpublished and proprietary computer model based on game theory and rational choice theory.

The future will tell, because I will read his paper when its published.

Less is more: Braess' Paradox

Like many counterintuitive anomalies, it needs the right combination of conditions to actually pop up in real life; but it has been observed empirically in real transportation networks — including in Seoul, Korea, where the destruction of a six-lane highway to build a public park actually improved travel time into and out of the city (even though traffic volume stayed roughly the same before and after the change)

http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch08.pdf

Dissimnation of a great Technology now easier

The Brunswick Society Newsletter is now online even for nonsubscribers. Sensible decision Brunswickians!
http://www.brunswik.org/newsletters/2010news.pdf

They laught when I said "Influence Diagrams" but when I made better decisions...

I almost forgot them! Influence Diagrams! We have a decision shaping tool at hand. We can do what Paul Meels envisioned. Shaping the qualities of our decision. Let the computer do the number crunch. I will show you my experience with this, have to reiterate over the great book Bayesian Networks and Influence Diagrams, then they will stop laughing.

Big B., Rest In Peace

“He Gave Us Order Out of Chaos” — R.I.P. Benoît Mandelbrot, 1924-2010

Clinical vs Statistical Prediction

Got a very old copy of Meehl's "Clinical vs Statistical Prediction" sent over from the US yesterday. The text is as  promising as I expected. There is no real argument for intuition, but speed in decision when you don't have a model at hand.