treatments, subjects should be warned that there may be as yet unknown risks associated with the drug/treatment but that they will be advised if any new information becomes available that may affect their desire to participate in the study. Reforms to methodology Estimative statements can be improved in four ways; either by: Adding quantitative source reliability and confidence measures to estimative statements Complementing estimative statements with stochastic analyses Standardizing WEPs Standardizing WEPs and complementing estimative statements with ratings of source reliability and analytic confidence Quantification of source reliability and analytic confidence Michael Schrage, an advisor to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Security Studies Program, wrote in a Washington Post editorial that requiring analysts to produce and include quantitative measures of source reliability and confidence along with their findings would reduce ambiguity. Yet Schrage also reported that former Interim Director of Central Intelligence John E. McLaughlin’s attempted to enact this at the CIA, but, like Kent’s initiative, it was not adopted. Former acting CIA director and longtime analyst John McLaughlin tried to promote greater internal efforts at assigning probabilities to intelligence assessments during the 1990s, but they never took. Intelligence analysts "would rather use words than numbers to describe how confident we are in our analysis," a senior CIA officer who's served for more than 20 years told me. Moreover, "most consumers of intelligence aren't particularly sophisticated when it comes to probabilistic analysis. They like words and pictures, too. My experience is that [they] prefer briefings that don't center on numerical calculation. That's not to say we can't do it, but there's not that much demand for it." Stochastic analysis Since combining quantitative, probabilistic information with estimates is successful in business forecasting, marketing, medicine, and epidemiology it should be implemented by the intelligence community as well. These fields have used probability theory and Bayesian analysis as forecasting tools. Using probability theory and other stochastic methods are appealing because they rely on rationality and mathematical rigor, are less subject to analytical bias, and such findings appear to be unambiguous. As an opposing argument, it is indisputable that few analysts or intelligence consumers have the stomach for numerical calculation. Additionally, Bruce Blair, Director of the Center for Defense Information, a proponent of quantitative methods for the IC, points out; intelligence information from secret sources is often murky, and the application of advanced math is not sufficient to make it more reliable. However,