My Comment on Can forecasting conflict help to make better foreign policy decisions? in The Monkey Cage
As a novice one thing that sounds appealing is inherent limitations in both the worlds are agreed by scholars in both the camps, if I may say. Jay sometime ago discussed about few limitations as a data guy in the context of excessive romanticism on "Big Data". But he actually explained the limitations of accurateness in the domain of social science[i]. A physics scientist doing an experiment in a lab has an opportunity to try with different variations of his newly formulated equation, finding, idea etc. But in the case of a Political scientist, outputs generated by statistical models at best can end up on the table of a policy decision maker or it could be useful for new paper editor.
The argument on false positive and false negatives is highly relevant. What if a false positive becomes a pre-cursor for Cold War -II or WW III. I am not sure if forecasted political events gain much of a fanfare beyond academic circles, or in other words policy decisions rarely taken based on forecasts. At the same time we cannot discount the fact that a decision taken based on a specific forecast will always add value and support to the argument made.
It is helpful to distinguish the Warfare forecasts and others, because there are chances of things going terribly wrong even if they are statistically correct. Observational studies comes in handy for many policy decision makers and they continue to remain as an important tool if not the only one for decision making, which is still better than taking decisions based on a gut feeling.
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