There has been a lot of buzz lately about Sean Gourley and his group's findings regarding the right-of-power relationships they have found in insurgency-based conflicts. For a quick rundown, go here: http://seangourley.com/ and watch the 7 minute TED video. Let me be honest. This is another great example of academics armed with math/statistics based techniques running amok with statistical inference and the naive belief that they can predict the future. First, let's get some perspective. The discovery of power-right relations in conflicts is not new. Lewis Fry Richardson discovered a power-right relationship between the intensity of conflict and the frequency of its occurrence as early as the 1940s. Since then that discovery has been the result of the search for a theory. So far, no one has been able to find a satisfactory explanation for why the relationship exists, but it has continued to be one of the most robust findings in the conflict literature. Then Gourley et al come along, and suddenly the discovery is new again. But his group applied the idea to the insurgency to see if the relationship exists there too, and sur...