FRAMING THE HYPOTHESIS CORRECTLY? David at Liberty and Power notes the difficulty of using the absence of terrorist attacks as evidence for the success of a campaign as well as the presence of a terrorist attack as a continued cassus belli. The same logic problem apparently arises with opponents of war.

When will the pro-war side construct a set of arguments that can be tested by Karl Popper's falsifiability principle? In other words, when will they tell us how their position can be refuted? We are waiting.

Hmmm, did the assembly of U.S., Canadian, Commonwealth, Free French and Free Polish troops and materiel along the Channel coast provoke the buzz-bombs and flying gas mains? In that conflict, a relatively straightforward test was present: the unconditional surrender of the Axis powers, obtained without distinction between the leaders and the led. In the instant conflict, the objective is to identify the leaders and the true believers without benefit of state organizations to reform or destroy, or of identifiable armed forces to render powerless.

There is a somewhat more subtle problem with hypothesis testing to keep in mind, the cases of false positives (evidence points to a terror organization or a weapons program that turns out not to be there) and false negatives (no evidence of a terror organization or a bioweapon that turns out to be used.) Any use of the falsifiability principle ought to include consideration of the loss function and its power against false positives and false negatives (these do not have to be symmetric, all of our practice with t-tests to the contrary.)

SECOND SECTION: Herewith Lexington at Chicago's loss function.

Neither America nor Britain are going to be defeated by these means. The terrorists lack the means to destroy the core of our power. And any attempt to appease the terrorists or placate them will be taken, correctly, as weakness and will only lead to further demands and further violence. They cannot be negotiated with, since their goals are effectively infinite -- the establishment of a regime like the Taliban, imposed on the entire world. So, by whatever twisted course, ongoing violent confrontation, and the ultimate defeat of Islamic terrorism, is going to be the long-term outcome. A lot of people are going to die first. Even so, fear nothing. How we live is what matters, and when we die is, by and large, out of our hands. What we make of this country and this time we live in and what we hand on to those who come after are what matters. Our generation has had the task imposed on it of fighting and destroying these terrorists. It will be hard, and it will be ugly, but we will do what needs to be done.