Maybe we don’t actually know what we think we know

I came across this blog post the other day, talking about the recent spate of bad news coming out of Afghanistan. First there were the sometimes violent protests in response to NATO personnel inadvertently burning a number of Qu’rans taken from the detention facility in Parwan. Then there was the revelation that Staff Sgt. Robert Bales had evidently murdered 16 Afghan villagers, nine of them children. The burnings were unfortunate to say the least and the murders were downright tragic, but I want to focus on the blog post itself, because it illustrates some of what I was trying to say in my previous post on evaluating models. The blogger writes: