Jules van Binsbergen

speaker

478 appearances 6 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Aug

Jules van Binsbergen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 6 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions · Rerun: Ep68 “Is It Better to Overestimate or Underestimate Your Enemies?” with H.R. McMaster · 1 Jul 2026 podcast

And actually, the Lauder Institute has recently really oriented itself towards addressing many of these large geopolitical themes.

And so our students are really addressing these themes in class and in their master's theses.

And so we thought it would be a good idea in this episode to address some of them.

As we know, the world has really moved from what I would say a unipolar world in which the US was very dominant into a multipolar world where other forces in the world have really grown in strength, both economically and politically.

And so I think, Jonathan, it's high time for us to have a conversation about this.

In several other episodes, we have addressed similar concerns, not with respect to intelligence officers, but for example, in one episode, we talked about the fact that whenever there are warnings for the weather, those warnings are always hugely overstated because if the weather ends up being better than we thought, then nobody really is losing their job.

But if there's a big storm and people weren't warned for it and something goes bad, then that has large effects for those people.

So I do indeed think that what in statistics we call the type one and the type two error,

There's a trade-off between those two errors, and we need to ask the question, what are the relative costs of the two?

But one thing that I'm not sure about, Jonathan, is don't you think there can be substantial costs to overestimating your enemy as well, not just in the short term, but also in the long term?

Then I do think that if we're really studying the whole equilibrium, there's one other thing that we also should do.

You have clearly introduced the incentives of one set of agents, but we need to complete the equilibrium, right?

Because there are also other sides' enemies that are intentionally trying to influence each other's intelligence services.

So is it possible that Saddam Hussein had an incentive to make people believe that he had weapons of mass destruction even when he did it just because he thought that that would give him strategic benefits?

I'm not saying that exposed he actually received any strategic benefits from it, but that's not the question.

The question is whether he thought that he would by pretending that he had them.

So as soon as you go, and we've talked about this in earlier episodes as well, right?

Higher order beliefs become really important here about what you believe the other person believes that you believe and so forth.

I think that that is also something that we shouldn't ignore, which is that the other person's signaling.

And I think particularly also the economic argument for China's dominance.

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