Cloudlike Defense (Tetlock's Belief System Defense)

THE UNEXPECTED ALIEN ATTACK

In the sixteenth episode of Star Trek: The Original Series’s first season, the starship Enterprise’s shuttle has just crash-landed on a hostile alien planet. Spock is in command, and he decides on a plan: the Enterprise crew will fire off a few warning shots to show off their superior weaponry, and the aliens will realize they’re outmatched and retreat.

That’s not how things play out. Instead, the aliens are angered by the Enterprise’s display of aggression, and they attack, killing two crew members. The ship’s doctor, McCoy, berates Spock for his failed plan:

McCoy: Well, Mr. Spock, they didn’t stay frightened very long, did they?

Spock: Most illogical reaction. When we demonstrated our superior weapons, they should have fled.

McCoy: You mean they should have respected us?

Spock: Of course!

McCoy: Mr. Spock, respect is a rational process. Did it ever occur to you that they might react emotionally, with anger?

Spock: Doctor, I’m not responsible for their unpredictability.

McCoy: They were perfectly predictable. To anyone with feeling. You might as well admit it, Mr. Spock. Your precious logic brought them down on us4 — Figure unavailable in the source files.

There, see what happens when you try to be logical? People die.

Just kidding. Spock wasn’t actually being logical. He was too attached to his model of how people “should” think, according to him, to pay attention to how they actually do think. Presumably Spock has had many interactions with other non-Vulcans in the years before this event, and many opportunities to notice that their behavior follows different rules than he expects. Why hasn’t he learned from those experiences and improved his ability to predict how people will behave? Because when someone’s behavior violates his expectations, he shrugs and says, “Well, that was illogical of them,” and doesn’t try to understand what he’s missing.

Spock’s reaction illustrates one of Tetlock’s seven belief system defenses, discussed in chapter 10. Another is the “I Was Almost Right” defense. Here, Spock is employing what Tetlock calls the “Politics Is Hopelessly Cloudlike” defense: when a forecaster’s confident prediction doesn’t come true, they shrug and say something like, “Well, this stuff is unpredictable.”5 If this represented a lasting update toward agnosticism, that would be one thing. But somehow, when it comes time to make the next forecast, the forecaster is once again confident in their ability to predict global politics.

If you want to become better at predicting people’s behavior, then shrugging off the times when they violate your expectations is exactly the wrong response. Spock should have leaned in to his confusion about the aliens’ decision to attack: “What am I missing? Why might this behavior make sense to them?”

In fact, there are many reasons why a nation might choose to attack despite being outmatched, and academics and military strategists have thought long and hard about why. Political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita catalogued conflicts between nation-states between 1816 and 1974, and found that 22 percent of the conflicts were cases in which a weaker nation attacked a stronger one.6 In some cases, the weaker side simply had more at stake; in other cases, they were counting on allies to back them up. There’s even the “madman” strategy: show yourself to be an unpredictable actor, with no instinct for self-preservation, and hope that the enemy decides it’s too risky to tussle with you. Understanding factors like these can make the difference between being prepared for a future attack or caught dangerously off guard.