posted
David Brooks' editorial addresses how the drive for empirical consistancy rather than wisdom has narrowed the quality of CIA intelligence.
quote:This week the presidential panel on intelligence pointed to the same failings found by other reports. It said intelligence analysts "displayed a lack of imagination." They created artificial specialties - separating regional, technical and terrorism analyses. They built layers of hard analysis on fuzzy and impressionistic information.
This commission does what so many others have done. It tries to reorganize the bureaucratic flow charts to produce better results.
But the problem is not bureaucratic. It's epistemological. Individuals are good at using intuition and imagination to understand other humans. We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition. There is a powerful backstage process we use to interpret the world and the people around us.
When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the C.I.A. does, you anesthetize all of these tools. You don't produce reason - you produce what Irving Kristol called the elephantiasis of reason.
It seems to me that social science, in its effort to justify itself in the face of hard science, has become increasingly dependent upon empirical technique rather individual thought.
The careful manipulation of data has a tendency to feel like thinking, tempting social scientists to adopt unseemly priorities that have resulted in the social scientists losing their way, thereby degrading their respective disciplines, and in my opinion, unintentionally making themselves irrelevant and besmirching the dignity in education.
posted
I think the biggest problem in U.S. intelligence is overpopulation of underqualified analysts, overflow of useless data diluting the stream of valuable intel, and not enough real experts. I think the hierarchy of the intel community is way too bottom heavy.
The problem is that "useless data" v. "valuable intel" is a normative decision, determined by a thinker's sensitivity to many relevant factors, including culture, narratives, religion, environmental needs, and penetrating insight into the human condition, not to mention knowledge concerning their own biases.
It's work for thinkers, not analyists. Analyists would pick it part on inappropriate grounds, and are patently incompetent in making these kind of decisions, as these concerns cannot be fit into a simple algorithm, or formula, or even be reduced to a method.
It's like sending a lawyer to do a philosopher's job.
posted
I think there are parts of intelligence that deal with things on a more general sense. An expert like Zagoria would probably be better equiped to think of China on a grand scale. But he can't see all of the little things that go on except what he is given or what he comes into contact with, what moves where, who said what. As long as Zagoria is fed properly, he can work better, and do the job those analysts aren't capable of.
But he doesn't go into China. He doesn't fly in the planes that intercept the data, or tap the wires, or position the satellites. He needs a few intelligent middlemen. He can use their data, but someone needs to say, "this is important." He can't sift through all of it. We have an entire archive that has enough trouble doing that themselves.
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posted
Then again, I think there is an intuition that only a real student of foreign culture could pick up on, even if there is little or no intel avaiable to support him.
I wonder if we could do this: I'm not an expert in this particular area of history, even though I find it very interesting. In the Second World War, Germany decided to turn against the Soviet Union, an ally, to the complete surprise of Stalin.
1. Was there any intel, anywhere, that Germany would do this?
2. If not, did anyone forsee that this would happen?
Does anyone know anything about this? I'd like to use it as a second scenario to work with.
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posted
Stalin was given warnings by his own intel people about German troop movements, but because an attack on the USSR by Germany was so obviously counter to any rational interest of Germany's, Stalin refused to believe the reports and therefore forced his military to be tactically and strategically surprised.
Besides, Hitler had given his word, and Stalin seemed to believe he had a monopoly on lying.
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posted
The deepest problem in military intelligence (milintel) is epistemological rather than systemic: It is easy to gather information, but hard to tell which information is useful, accurate, timely, reliable.
In philosophical terms, to "know" meaning "to be acquainted with the data" is quite a different issue from "knowing" meaning "to have certainty that the data is correct."
And even when the data is correct, there is always guesswork about causality, which is by its nature fundamentally unknowable and always subject to guessing.
So rational guessing based on induction is only good if the particular case is consistent with previous correct (or seemingly correct) guesses, and THAT is fundamentally unknowable;
While rational guessing based on deduction is only good if the premises are accurate AND there are not unthought-of alternate conclusions.
So: It is impossible to know if the data is accurate or complete or timely; it is impossible to know if the interpretations of the data are accurate; and it is impossible to know which contradictory interpretations or conclusions or data are more important and/or reliable than their competitors; and you can't think of possible interpretations that you haven't thought of yet until you think of them.
The business of intelligence gathering is thus to collect all the lies and facts that are available and give them to idiots who will try to guess, from that data and their own experience and biases and lack of imagination and hyperactive imagination and fear and bravado and wishful thinking what in the world that data means about the enemy's capabilities and intentions.
If you guess right, you're a genius. If you guess wrong, in some countries you're shot, and in other countries you're promoted.
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quote: We know from recent advances in neuroscience, popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink," that the human mind can perform fantastically complicated feats of subconscious pattern recognition.
And we know from advances in various fields that neural nets (broadly defined) can similarly perform fantastically complicated feats of mentation. link to my neural network thread.
That said, I agree with this:
quote: When you try to analyze human affairs using a process that is systematic, codified and bureaucratic, as the C.I.A. does, you anesthetize all of these tools. [intution, etc]
The structure of the group is critical to it's effectiveness and creativity. Compartmentalization of info that is intrinsic to intelligence work hinders the free flow of info, and stunts their neural net. Posts: 6316 | Registered: Jun 2003
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I agree with your premises, but they aren't strong enough to support this thesis:
quote: It is impossible to know if the data is accurate or complete or timely; it is impossible to know if the interpretations of the data are accurate; and it is impossible to know which contradictory interpretations or conclusions or data are more important and/or reliable than their competitors; and you can't think of possible interpretations that you haven't thought of yet until you think of them.
Impossible is such a strong word. Rather, it's fit to say that, such behavior is not disposed towards probablistic analysis.
The work of the social scientists should be to contextualize this data so that it's not merely a blind guess. I'm of the opinion that the good political theorists are wise to cultural narratives in particular and the human condition in general, and this wisdom gives shape to the data that is gathered. This sort of artistic knowledge offers a richer sense of predictive power than baldly reducing everything to rational analysis, then throwing darts.
It seems to me that this is both inductive and deductive. Inductive in that we are using past narratives from that culture to predict future behavior, and deductive in that we are also examining behavior endemic the human condition.
Neither cultural narratives nor the human condition give themselves to strict rational computational analysis. That's not true, such analysis would be appropriate if we were studying people who worship the efficiency God, British Utilitarians or American Businessmen for example.
quote: The business of intelligence gathering is thus to collect all the lies and facts that are available and give them to idiots who will try to guess, from that data and their own experience and biases and lack of imagination and hyperactive imagination and fear and bravado and wishful thinking what in the world that data means about the enemy's capabilities and intentions.
Well, when they were tired of the Usual idiots, they called Tom Clancy, who said that they should hire dashing young men from the CIA to plant bombs. I believe that with acute sensibilities and insight, the combination of experience, bias, imagination, fear, bravado, and wishful thinking can lead, more or less consistantly, to penetrating analysis.
Further, when you give up on this human ability, it seems really efficacious to just nuke everybody.
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Morbo, You are right. Brooks says that at the end of the article, but there is no way that this article is strong enough to support his conclusion. I used it as a title because OSC's last piece advanced the exactly opposite thesis.
posted
That's a controversial definition, especially as "knowledge" traces back from the greek gno- or gignowskien. And in ancient greece, until the end, knowledge with respect to human affairs had a strong sense of "how it always happens to appear to me."
Socrates planted the seed for "knowing" to have the burden of certainty, but knowledge and certainty didn't wed until Descartes, and I'm not sure those ideas belong together. Next people will be looking for proof, and it doesn't seem to me that you can prove anything that we all know.
What's possible, what's certain, and what we know are distinct in a relevant manner.
I know it seems like I'm quibbling, but this is important. It's the reason why social science neuters itself, giving it's had to bad math and bad statistics.
posted
This conversation reminds me of when I dated an epistomologist...
I've always gone by the maxim, "You do the best with what you've got." You can't know more than you know. You can research, but eventually the time comes to make a decision. You must make it on the information you have at the time and make the best decision possible. Like Card says, sometimes you're a genius and sometimes you get shot. But I'm also with Irami. Whether it's "artistic knowledge" or "a gift from God", I do believe that certain individuals may have more insight than others. And I'd rather have those folks as leaders. But then, we're getting into more mystical territory here. Can "insight" be measured or dealt with in any logical fashion? How can we "know" that our hunches are correct? And yet some of us have learned to trust our instincts. Not very measurable. Not very scientific. But a different way of knowing.
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