actually affect people’s lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, for better of for worse. Making policy, therefore, imposes a moral burden that is heavier than many people care to acknowledge. Thirdly, there is what is sometimes called “the 51-49 principle.” That is, in the thick of the policy fray, we are driven out of pure self-defense to treat 51 percent confidence in our projection as though it deserved 100 percent confidence, with the result that we sometimes mislead not only others but ourselves as well.
Projection = Model + Evidence
In this section I discuss, in a very general way, the logic of combining models and evidence to produce useable projections of