政府在這上麵投$5000萬，讓大家對下一次恐怖事件的發生去猜謎。 這也叫科學？
如果這是科學的話，用手識字特異功能，應該更算是科學了。
U.S. intelligence tests crowd-sourcing against its experts
Might large groups be better predictors of wars and terrorism than analysts in government spy services?
August 21, 2012|By Ken Dilanian
WASHINGTON — Nine years ago, Congress blocked a Pentagon agency from setting up a website that would have allowed anyone with a credit card to bet on the likelihood of foreign assassinations, coups and terrorist attacks.
The idea was to take advantage of the "wisdom of crowds," a social science maxim that contends the average of a group of forecasters, under certain circumstances, tends to be more accurate than even the most knowledgeable single forecaster.
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Now terrorism futures are back.
DARPA's sister agency — the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which funds experimental projects for the U.S. intelligence community — is running a four-year, $50-million program that pays people willing to predict major world events, including wars and terrorist strikes. Unlike the earlier scheme, participants can't profit from their predictions.
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Initial results are promising, according to Philip Tetlock, a University of Pennsylvania professor who leads one of the teams. His 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?" showed that political pundits often fared worse in predictions than the proverbial dart-throwing monkey.
"The idea that the average of a group of forecasters is more accurate than any one forecaster goes back 100 years," Tetlock said. In 1906, British scientist Francis Galton determined that the average of 787 guesses about the weight of an ox at a county fair was startlingly accurate.
The teams are trying to beat the average by using algorithms that, over time, give greater weight to the most successful crystal gazers among their participants and weed out the worst. Tetlock's group, the Good Judgment Project, is in the lead so far.
"In year one, we beat the unweighted average by about 57%, which was big," he said. A control group, run by Mitre Corp., averages scores without giving weight to participants who tally the best results.
Predicting world-changing events is never easy. U.S. intelligence agencies failed to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, to predict the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and, more recently, to anticipate political upheaval across the Arab world.(蘇聯倒台，9-11、阿拉伯之春事件, 磚家們都沒能預測出來, 因此隻能乞求群眾預測？)
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Crowd-sourcing would mean, in theory, polling large groups across the 200,000-person intelligence community, or outside experts with security clearances, to aggregate their views about the strength of the Taliban, say, or the likelihood that Iran is secretly building a nuclear weapon.
For now, there is deep skepticism in intelligence circles.
"I don't believe in the wisdom of crowds,(不相信有群策群力)" said Mark Lowenthal, a former senior CIA and State Department analyst (and 1988"Jeopardy!" champion) who now teaches classified courses about intelligence. "Crowds produce riots. Experts produce wisdom."
Others argue that intelligence analysis can benefit from data-driven social science. The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, was an early investor in a private company called Recorded Future, headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., and Göteborg, Sweden, which uses data on the Internet, from securities filings to Facebook posts to government statistics to make connections and spot trends.
A National Academy of Sciences report last year commissioned by former National Intelligence Director Dennis C. Blair found that intelligence practices "have been only weakly informed by the behavioral and social sciences." It recommended that "science and evidence-based protocols" be introduced and evaluated alongside the spy agencies' traditional reliance on expert judgment.
