读Geopolitical Alpha（三）——The Cons

第二章就开始介绍作者的核心框架：三支柱 —— 老外很喜欢三这个数字，三位一体还是有很大的影响的。

作者首先说了很多人对于政治研究的态度不一：

In the finance world of 2020, politics matter. However, investors still disagree whether political research gives them an edge in terms of performance. Some remain skeptical, while others merely use geopolitics as a retroactive excuse for poor performance.

The criticism I’ve heard most often is that “political analysis is a nice-to-have, but it is not a must-have.” It is marginal to the decision making process – at best, a handy tool when an exogenous event threatens one’s strategic decisions. Another way to put it is, “We will cry geopolitics when something blows up, just so we have a scapegoat to blame for our faulty predictions.”

要么是持怀疑态度，要么就是作为事后的替罪羔羊而已，而且词汇用的很精准：exogenous —— 外生的冲击，认为经济和政治是脱离的。

但是作者说：

My answer to this view is: “Don’t bother. When something blows up, buy everything.”

就是这并不是外生，而是统合为一体的；按照作者的话来说，二战后的近几十年（想必是数据也便于统计），地缘政治一直也是锚：

Each decade’s research had an unspoken geopolitical anchor, even if the macroeconomic analysis danced around it

作者的三支柱是什么呢？

The First Pillar: Materialist Dialectic

Second Pillar: Diagnosticity of Constraints

Third Pillar: The Person versus the Situation

挨个来。

第一个是，嗯，中国人熟悉的，唯物主义辩证法，没错，马克思的唯物主义辩证法 —— 作者生于南斯那夫，也许还是有影响吧，不然也可以追溯培根是不？

在论证唯物主义辩证法之前，作者先讨论了马基雅维利的《君主论》：

Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince is the foundational text of modern political theory. Machiavelli posits that governance is an interplay between Fortuna – fate and all things beyond the control of the Prince – and Virtù – the Prince’s ability to navigate Fortuna.

马基雅维利认为，命运（Fortuna）如长河，而君主借助个人的美德（Virtù）足以摆渡、弄潮 —— 这是对君主的劝诫了。

作者认为，这难点在于弄潮而上，如何识别命运的变化？马克思登场了：

As Machiavelli claims, the flow of Fortuna may be equally as important as the Prince’s Virtù in determining the final outcome. But the forecast must start with its course – Fortuna, rather than the policymaker’s reaction to it; the reaction is a derivative of the flood. And the only way to know the flood is to know the terrain.

And Karl Marx knows the terrain.

作者用大段大段的文字，论述了马克思与黑格尔两者，对于辩证法的差异：

过于精彩，也可能敏感，黑格尔——凯恩斯——马克思轮番上阵，截图了。

此外，借着说马克思的资本主义的根本矛盾，作者又夹杂了一下私货：

所以沿着马克思的思路，要去识别约束 —— 其背后就是矛盾论所强调的主要矛盾和次要矛盾分析了：

For investors used to quantification, a focus on the material world should be welcome. Constraints are observable and therefore empirical.

这就带来了第二个支柱，作者称之为约束的信息诊断力（Diagnosticity of Constraints），为什么强调诊断力？

To find these constraints, investors should observe as much as possible about the real world, right? Wrong.  Not all observable data is created equal, and more information often does not produce superior forecasting results. The quality of the data matters more than its quantity, especially in circumstances where a complete data set is impossible to obtain.

题眼在于：

Not all observable data is created equal...

作者借着引用了CIA情报专家Heuer对于信息的观点：

First, having more information does not necessarily help one’s forecast. More information sometimes only contributes to a higher level of conviction, not necessarily forecast accuracy.

Second, the quality of data is what matters. And the key determinant of quality is diagnosticity, the second pillar of the constraint framework.

什么是诊断力（Diagnosticity）：

Diagnosticity is “the extent to which any item of evidence helps the analyst determine the relative likelihood of alternative hypotheses.”

是能区别核心竞争假设的，情报：

Diagnosticity helps analysts eliminate unlikely, or competing, hypotheses (a process known as “competing hypotheses analysis”). A nondiagnostic variable is one that does not help eliminate any of the hypotheses.

这个，在机器学习的传统方法中就是在做SVD/PCA，在深度学习中就要靠架构和框架，在投资中。。。获得内部信息是非法的，嗯，所以要体现水平，既有内部信息的诊断性，又能合规。

作者再次强调：

Preferences are not diagnostic variables because they are optional; the policymaker chooses whether to act on them.

In contrast, constraints are the gatekeepers that determine whether preferences affect the outcome.

Constraints have high diagnosticity because preference-based outcomes are subject to them.

作者举例Trump vs. Obamacare：

川普的个人喜好不重要；重要的是现实的约束，在美国就是选民的意志 —— 这也就带来了最后一个支柱：人 vs. 情境（The Person versus the Situation），一个常见的问题，基础归因错误（fundamental attribution error）：

Using this and other examples, Ross and Nisbett introduce the concept of the “fundamental attribution error,” a mistake analysts make when they attribute real-world outcomes to characteristics, personality, and moods of individual actors. The individual’s psychological profile is given primacy over the external context; the person takes precedence over the situation.

要关注情境，而不是其中的个人：

The third pillar of the constraint framework is the recognition and avoidance of fundamental attribution error. To forecast politics and geopolitics, analysts have to avoid the fundamental attribution error and focus on the situation, not the person.

时势造英雄；英雄只有改变了约束、进而塑造情境，才能造时势。

随后：

In the next section of this book, I delve into the actual constraints. I define five material constraints that are particularly crucial in forecasting events: political, economic, financial, geopolitical, and constitutional/legal, as well as the constraint wild cards: terrorists and pandemics. I arranged them in order from the most salient to the least.

但是在此之前：

But before I embark on the analysis of material constraints, in Chapter 3 I survey the “other” framework of forecasting geopolitical events – the one that focuses on intelligence, or insights.