Jay Ulfelder notices that, despite their relative accuracy, statistical models are very rarely used by policymakers to anticipate future crises:
The finding that models outperform subjective judgments at forecasting has been confirmed repeatedly by other researchers, including one prominent 2004 study which showed that a simple statistical model could predict the outcomes of U.S. Supreme Court cases much more accurately than a large assemblage of legal experts. Because statistical forecasts are potentially so useful, you would think that policy makers and the analysts who inform them would routinely use them. That, however, would be a bad bet. I spoke with several former U.S. policy and intelligence officials, and all of them agreed that policymakers make little use of these tools and the “watch lists” they are often used to produce.
One potential explanation:
Ken Knight, now Analytic Director at Centra Technology, spent the better part of a 30-year career in government working on risk assessment, including several years in the 2000s as National Intelligence Officer for Warning. According to Knight, “Part of it is the analytic community that I grew up in. There was very little in the way of quantitative analytic techniques that was taught to me as an analyst in the courses I took. There is this bias that says this stuff is too complex to model…People are just really skeptical that this is going to tell them something they don’t already know.” This organizational bias may simply reflect some deep grooves in human cognition.
Ulfelder describes his own model for predicting coups here.
The Dish 