I would think the key is the latter. That is, even if you get more data it does not become __useful__ information unless you're willing and able to process it.
That aside, it's difficult, if not impossible for us "on the outside" to judge the value of these concept to the IC as we only get to know what the IC wants us to know. They're playing the long game. They're playing chess. Maybe it's just me but when I hear a news story (or a friend / colleague) that says "The NSA said..." or the "CIA said..." I accept those as close to meaningless. The IC is, afterall, in the misinformation business.
p.s. I believe the proper term for tbinking about thinking is meta-cognition. I find it odd that the CIA would avoid using the proper term.
A large part of "intelligence analysis" is just using domain-specific knowledge to take primary sources and translate/summarize them, such that you remove the need for others to have domain-specific knowledge in understanding that data.
As such, if you're pedantically using ten-dollar words just because they're "correct", you're not doing your job as an analyst.
High-level IA is about other things, but that doesn't mean you unlearn the skills you have ground into you as a desk worker.
That being said, if this book is afraid to venture outside its safe zone (and mention meta-congition, even in a passing reference) then this book, by defintion, has failed to do what IC analysis is supposed to do. Ironic, huh.
I think it's ssafe to say history is on the side of my analysis of this analysis ;)
So back to metacognition. This is clearly phrased in a way everybody can understand as 'thinking about thinking.' The latter is, at worst, slightly more verbose. By contrast let's consider another fairly esoteric term such as 'cognitive dissonance.' There is really no way effectively communicate and convey the idea of cognitive dissonance, with all its nuance, in a comparably brief phrase so it makes sense to use the word. But metacognition? It's really just taking a simple concept and replacing it with a fancy sounding word.
I don't know why we do this in so many fields. It just creates artificial barriers to communication and clear conveyance of ideas.
More important is communication to your audience, and in that respect "meta-cognition" is pretty awful vocabulary that strongly limits your audience in this case.
We actually use this as a strategy in my project. When talking to sponsors, funders, etc, we use very plain language: "We are going to X to Y all Z". In the real version, the average number of syllables is less than 1.5 and the longest word has 3 syllables.
But the claim is pretty outrageous so they also want to know the money is going to serious effort. To verify that, they want external validation, so we have to publish peer-reviewed papers. Those papers are loaded with jargon from multiple fields and we intentionally emphasize the lowest possible performance metrics so almost no one is really going to understand how insanely good the results are, and how impactful they are to the domain in question.
Put another way, if you're in the IC or getting info from the IC and the use of the word / concept meta-cognition scares you then something is very very wrong.
The audience here isn't TMZ viewers. Is it?
Meta-cognition: Thinking About Thinking
would have been appropriate. Certainly better than:
Thinking About Thinking (But Don't Think Too Much)
as seems to be implied by some.
"In a game of chess, you must never let your opponent see your pieces", as renowned military strategist Z. Brannigan said.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
The fact is that the CIA in that period was absolutely inept. It failed to build any significant intelligence networks in either the Soviet Union or China, mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean War, and squandered thousands of lives by attempting to parachute them into Eastern Europe, China, or North Korea to meet up with fictitious resistance forces. The CIA itself and its intelligence sources were routinely comprised by the Soviets and fed false information to the President.
The two "successful" operations of the era (Iran and Guatemala) replaced democratically elected leaders with brutal authoritarian regimes, and both of them barely succeeded though an embarrassing comedy of errors.
So the CIA is about as good as mainstream economists, then?
Hey what a coincidence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
I expect authorities in most (actively practiced) subjects to have experienced a major failure or few, let alone a subject as involved as IA can be.
Covert operations that are perfectly planned can go wrong.
Who's talking about failure?
> the analysis was correct but the execution botched
Are you willing to say this about all items on this page from 1951 - 1975? I haven't looked at it in-depth, but here's literally the first thing I scrolled onto, Bolivia 1971
> The U.S. government supported the 1971 coup led by General Hugo Banzer that toppled President Juan José Torres of Bolivia. Torres had displeased Washington by convening an "Asamblea del Pueblo" (People's Assembly or Popular Assembly), in which representatives of specific proletarian sectors of society were represented (miners, unionized teachers, students, peasants), and more generally by leading the country in what was perceived as a left wing direction. Banzer hatched a bloody military uprising starting on August 18, 1971 that succeeded in taking the reigns of power by August 22, 1971. After Banzer took power, the U.S. provided extensive military and other aid to the Banzer dictatorship as Banzer cracked down on freedom of speech and dissent, tortured thousands, "disappeared" and murdered hundreds, and closed labor unions and the universities. Torres, who had fled Bolivia, was kidnapped and assassinated in 1976 as part of Operation Condor, the US-supported campaign of political repression and state terrorism by South American right-wing dictators.
Yes, that doesn't invalidate everything he writes, of course. It just means he leaves all the stuff out that a person capable of being complicit in such things cannot be able to do, so it should absolutely be taken with a huge grain of salt, like dating advice from someone who might be a highly intelligent and charming sociopath.
"Botched execution", that's like saying a robbery was just the attempt to give a person a hug gone wrong. Yeah, maybe they didn't want to end up shooting the whole family including the children and a bunch of bystanders, maybe they "just" wanted to kill the father, knock the mother out, and run away with the purse. That's the "mistakes" they're making, it's a very vulgar euphemism in light of what it describes.
This must be the standard to be taken seriously. Anybody can wax on about how to avoid systemic biases, but it's my understanding that the research shows studying biases doesn't remove them.
Is there any alternative theory or method about how to avoid systematic bias other than being aware of systematic bias?
Also comment, I think the studies of awareness bias involved very simple phenomena. That may or may not carry-over to more complex processes.
Don't see why implicit biases should be any harder to combat than any other bias you see in a scientific field, and scientists all have to learn and work hard to combat them to avoid results that don't hold up to scrutiny. I assume engineers are similar, you probably have bad habits coming in or poor intuition about how things should fit together. By example and practice you train your intuition to align with reality.
EX1: If you only add people to your team that pass your interview process you never test if it’s actually effective.
If you replace that with say a score card to rate people on various metrics then compare actual preformace with your metrics then you have some feedback to improve the system.
EX2: For a one time event like a music / art / writing contest. Remove the bias inducing elements by just judging the output.
I don’t think they do. We really have very limited control over it. But I think that, just like you can become a professional athlete in just one sport (as opposed to many sports), you could also become very good at avoiding a specific type of bias.
practicing actually avoiding it..
one can be aware but still not listen to the 'voice of objectivity' -
personal preferences very often override morals/ethics/etc, and we are very good at rationalizing.
Looks like evolutionary psychology with a dash of environmental psychology.
Interesting quote from the abstract:
“Intelligence is naturally defined as behavior that increases the likelihood of reproductive success, and bounds on rationality are determined by physiological and environmental constraints.”
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
I'm no longer fully convinced that language and metaphor generates consciousness though.
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180925191008/https://www.cia.g...
This CIA training book is all about avoiding self-deception and getting as close as possible to the truth. Those are good aspirations for any trade. Try debugging a complex system without doing those things. You can't.
But there's a whole lot more to making the truth useful. People with power must also avoid self-deception: they must listen. That didn't happen back in 2002-2003.
The movie is about Bush 43 and Cheney's push to convince the world about nuclear weapons in Iraq. That administration infamously disclosed the identity of a CIA undercover person called Valerie Plame. They did so to discredit her spouse Ambassador Joe Wilson.
Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to the nation of Niger (north of Nigeria) to verify the administration's claim that Niger's uranium mines sold vast quantities of yellowcake uranium oxide to Iraq. Mr. Wilson's investigation proved that claim was false. Therefore, he needed to be discredited. Therefore the White House outed his spouse, wrecking her career and losing the lives of her contacts in various places.
CIA people come off as the good guys--earnest purveyors of truth--both in the movie and this training book. But even they can't prevent the kind of collective self-delusion that comes when politicians' minds are made up.
How many of us hackers embark on projects we know are doomed to failure? How many of us know how to validate our hunches with the right amount of information? Many of us, because that's the easy part. How many of us know how to convince people above us in the food chain? Far fewer. That's a place where training might come in handy.
Feedback appreciated!
So... who is it that has (or doesn't have) free will?
It just happens that free will is the effect and not the cause, output rather than input. Buddhists were right about the self being an illusion.
Which is to say is, one part of consciousnesses can take control of another part through training, yes. But who is it that is taking control? Until we self-determine this (or accept some form of math as an arbitrator of reality where applicable) one bias or conditioning is simply replaced with another. Can't get the most accurate models like that.
