Like the fictional Leon Panetta, Obama may have been bothered by the wide variation in estimates. The disagreement made him think they were unreliable. So he retreated to what probability theorists call the ignorance prior, the state of knowledge you are in before you know whether the coin will land heads or tails or, in this case, whether Osama will be in the master bedroom when the Navy SEALs come knocking. And that was a mistake because it meant Obama did not make full use of the information available at the table.7 But unlike that of the fictional Leon Panetta, Obama’s mental dial didn’t
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