Playing For The Farm Team

Finally, somebody in the intelligence community is going to the source of every piece of up-to-date knowledge in the universe for the power of predictive crisis points:  asking people the internets!

On Friday, Applied Research Associates, Inc (ARA) will launch the Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES), a website that lets members of the public test out methods to crowdsource intelligence predictions. Funded by Iarpa, the intelligence community’s advanced research shop, ACES invites users to try their hand at making predictions and sharpening up their forecasting skills. The resulting data, ARA and Iarpa hope, will let spooks find out if the crowd can build a better crystal ball for the intel world.

It’s called Aggregative Contingent Estimation System (ACES) and it’s the spy agencies’ attempt to tweak traditional crowdsourcing methods build a better crystal ball and help analysts sharpen their skills.  Funded by Iarpa and built by Applied Research Associates, Inc (ARA), the project will test out crowd-based forecasting for the intelligence community by testing its methods out on a website. That site opens to the public this Friday.

“We’re trying to make good use of everybody’s individual opinions and trying to determine what aspects of them might be important and would lead to a good forecast,” says Dr. Dirk Warnaar, the principal investigator for the ACES project at Applied Research Associates.

 

The idea behind tapping into collective intelligence is simple: There’s bits of useful information distributed among the members of diverse crowds, so aggregating their judgments should yield a better answer — better even than experts’ — to a particular question.

But ARA is looking to do something just a little different from traditional crowdsourcing methods. While many similar tools assign equal weight to participants’ inputs, ACES will be looking for the most accurate predictors over time and weighting their judgments more heavily than other users.

So nice to know that America is now using "ask the audience" for advice on strategic intelligence.  Judging from the kind of folks I see on the net daily, I can't possibly imagine how this could ever go wrong.  Although, they probably should think about hiring the people who end up providing the most accurate analysis.

Hey, it might work.  Do I want to base serious national security decisions on it?  Not so much.