This sounds similar to being an IT guy in a big organization. They have 5 minutes, they think they know better (and occasionally they do), they might listen to you and you have to beg them to do so.
Except the ending. That sounds like someone who has spent too much time around politicians and become infected.
Despite the downvotes I'm inclined to agree with you. For a recent counter-example, Robert David Steele is an ex CIA open source intelligence analyst who didn't become numbed and deluded like this and actually has some meaningful anti-statist insights about the world at large. You know, gems like:
Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditized by the Industrial Era.
We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.
We live in a constellation of complex systems. It is impossible for any single person or even any single organization or nation in isolation to understand complex systems.
It is our obligation to speak of what we know as we know it, not dissembling or deceiving. This could be considered the 'moral truth', and ultimately it is what can be validated by others so that a consensus can be arrived at and shared.
- Robert David Steele, 'The Open-source Everything Manifesto'
To me this is an excellent argument for the disbandment of the CIA and related agencies. This is obviously a thoughtful, knowledgeable, conscientious person. He probably has colleagues who are the same. Yet, when organized as they currently are, they can't think their way out of a paper bag. There must be a better way to do this work.
What would be the replacement? Despite abuses and missteps, CIA does serve a valuable role. It would similar to the argument to disband police departments because of abuses. There could be a better way to stop criminals, but while that's being figured out, you get your car stolen and your sister raped.
It may be more of a problem with the "service mentality" the document is talking about. Bad things happen when what your customer actually wants is "Find me a pretext to invade the Middle East and reshape it in a more US-friendly form, because Western intervention in the area has always turned out fine."
Bingo. The problem is that in the intel community they used to have that salty old graybeard that would tell general X and politician Y the cold hard truth to power that they need to hear, instead of what they want to hear. Post 9/11, there is evidence that it was mostly vp Cheney who physically intervened in this process, personally pulling in analysts and grilling them...
The problem to me is that the same chilling effects we have seen develop in the journalistic community have also grown in the intel community, and when you have analysts who spend more time kissing ass than calling people out bullshit like they should, we are only going to end up in worse geopolitical situations.
NSA right now holds cards over CIA, keep that in mind as well.
Well it's more of an insight gained mostly from reading former-spooks books and similar. The fact is that the resources, both monetary and physical, are much larger than the company (CIA). It employs many more people as well, and a lot of people don't realize that the agency (NSA) has paramilitary divisions as well.
The main reason I say though is because NSA has the upstream under their thumb. Pretty much anything the company does is going to be visible to the agency but not the other way around, which creates an information power disparity that is inevitable with the current organizational structures.
On this topic it is worth highlighting the following line from that document: Newcomers to the IC may not
realize that the CIA presence in the Oval Office
during the George W. Bush administration was
the exception, not the rule.
Which is reportedly the case, without exaggeration. According to one CIA agent's memoir, the group in charge of monitoring Iraqi WMD activity was literally told, by their boss, "Let's face it. The President wants us to go to war, and our job is to give him a reason to do it."
(Source: "Blowing my cover", the memoir of ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, who says that hearing about this was the reason she quit.)
TFA alludes to some of this. The CIA grossly overestimated the strength of USSR, for decades. They are routinely surprised by the actions of rivals, allies, and others. A decade ago, when the FBI and military already had perfectly sufficient interrogation capabilities, the CIA hired a couple of dumbasses to develop a horrific kidnapping-and-torture regime that betrayed not only our values but also our security. Although they have emphasized the "threat" posed by radical Arabs for at least two decades now, the CIA has yet to develop human assets native to the Middle East in anything like the numbers that they had devoted to the Soviet Bloc.
Some would balance this shoddy record against the assumption that "well we have to have some top-secret intelligence-sabotage-and-kidnapping service." That simply isn't true. Through most of USA history we didn't have anything like that at anything like the CIA's scale. National leaders do need to know about other nations, but that work could be done better by normal non-classified and accountable researchers, who at least in the beginning would not be wedged so solidly in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. The sort of intelligence that enables military action has been really poorly executed by the CIA, and we'd be better off without it.
I work as a digital marketing analyst (think Google Analytics). While reading this piece, I find myself nodding and agreeing with 90% of it. As it turns out, the way that decision-makers incorporate data and expert opinion doesn't change when whether they're in charge of $10k ad budgets, or ten-year occupations of a foreign country.
Some observations of my own, that I can see echoes of in this paper:
Decision-makers have a mental model where analysts' job is to synthesize facts and provide them, and it is the job of the decision-makers themselves to put the facts together into a big picture and/or plan of action. This is generally a poor set-up. Firstly, "facts" with any certainty are thin on the ground, there's only inferences from small spots of data in between clouds of blind spots. Secondly, the analysts have more experience with the trends that they study, and often more training in how to incorporate them into a big picture. Most managers will say "I want all the data," but if you give them what they ask for, they will most often draw incorrect conclusions. You have to spoon-feed them, even though neither party particular wants that.
People don't understand the limits of data, and they sure as heck don't understand uncertainty. If you make 100 predictions, and are 99% sure about all of them, then on average one will be untrue. And all you'll ever hear about was that you were 99% sure and were wrong. In my job, there's actually a consideration about not providing data that we don't totally trust (as opposed to providing with caveats), because a single data point that's wrong erodes trust in data in general. It sounds like that's not an option to the CIA: if they're tasked with a question, they must provide an answer (which is a problem itself).
We've found that if we our client to use our analysis, we actually need to write it with his audience in mind. We literally write it with the design goal that the client be able to copy-paste our words or graphs into his own deliverable. Because that is literally what will happen. The more effort it is for the client to consume our work, the more likely they are to save themselves the time and ignore it. And as bad as that is, it's also probably the best way. If the client re-words things, he may misunderstand things. Encouraging plagiarism cuts down on the game of telephone.
"...the client be able to copy-paste our words or graphs into his own deliverable. Because that is literally what will happen."
I've spent most of my career in marketing, and as far as I can tell, this happens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The one exception I've encountered was working at Apple, where people expected you to hammer out a beautiful and convincing Keynote deck on your own. Everywhere else, people more or less copypasted whatever decks, charts, graphs, and bullets their agencies had sent them.
The problem with copypasting is that it can lead to a game of telephone. A sequential erosion in the quality of information. If you're not keeping track of who's been lifting and plagiarizing and pasting which information from which sources, at how many steps along the value chain, you end up with a deck full of secondhand information and hearsay. The quality of the information (or confidence in the information) fades a bit with each subsequent generation of copypasting. Sort of like lossy data encoding. At larger organizations, as you might imagine, there will be many "generations" of each presentation. This makes the lossiness issue even worse.
The culprit here is always time. It's exactly as the author of this article points out. People don't set out to make shitty decks, or to copy and paste information, or to tl;dr their way through analysis. But that's just what people have to do to survive. If you're spending (conservatively) 20-30 hours a week in meetings, and many of those meetings leave you with deliverables on tight deadlines, you're going to be eking out any and all efficiencies that come your way.
I've never done any copypasting, and if I'm being honest with myself, it's probably hurt me more than it's helped me.
-> ...and they sure as heck don't understand uncertainty.
Man this could not be more true. You can get people to (sometimes) understand basic probability if they don't have a math background, but try something like bounded probability for explaining the likelihood of the severity of an event and they'll get lost.
"Our ability to “raise the level of the debate” or to “help policy-makers make the best decisions possible” or to “speak truth to power”—however one defines the mission—rests on one thing and one thing only: our reputations for analytic rigor, objectivity, and total integrity. Lose that and we lose everything"
It would have been interesting to see at least some acknowledgement of, and response to, the fact that the CIA currently has acquired itself a reputation for extracting false intelligence clumsily through relentless torture and brutalization. How, despite all the very smart and experienced people working for the organization, does that come to be the output? What goes wrong there?
The point about "because" is very well-taken: Every "may" and "likely to" and "could" requires a
"because" statement or its equivalent—the reason we believe what we believe
It is important to remember that any "may", "likely to" and "could" statement can be replaced with a "might not" statement with precisely the same meaning, unless you quantify the probabilities (difficult and often so imprecise as to be pointless).
We see this all the time in tech journalism: "New technology might not lead to breakthrough in flying cars!" has exactly the same meaning as "New technology may lead to breakthrough in flying cars!" but for some reason we always see the latter and never the former.
I recommend reading any article with unqualified "may" statements with them flipped to "might not". It will rapidly become clear how much of this kind of journalism is hopeful nonsense.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 62.8 ms ] threadExcept the ending. That sounds like someone who has spent too much time around politicians and become infected.
EDIT: Why was this even posted? Useless garbage.
Human beings, who had spent centuries evolving away from slavery, were re-commoditized by the Industrial Era.
We are at the end of a five-thousand-year-plus historical process during which human society grew in scale while it abandoned the early indigenous wisdom councils and communal decision-making. Power was centralised in the hands of increasingly specialised 'elites' and 'experts' who not only failed to achieve all they promised but used secrecy and the control of information to deceive the public into allowing them to retain power over community resources that they ultimately looted.
We live in a constellation of complex systems. It is impossible for any single person or even any single organization or nation in isolation to understand complex systems.
It is our obligation to speak of what we know as we know it, not dissembling or deceiving. This could be considered the 'moral truth', and ultimately it is what can be validated by others so that a consensus can be arrived at and shared.
- Robert David Steele, 'The Open-source Everything Manifesto'
You sound anti-statist. Maybe you want stuff like this: http://mises.org/library/myth-national-defense-essays-theory...
The problem to me is that the same chilling effects we have seen develop in the journalistic community have also grown in the intel community, and when you have analysts who spend more time kissing ass than calling people out bullshit like they should, we are only going to end up in worse geopolitical situations.
NSA right now holds cards over CIA, keep that in mind as well.
Can you elaborate a bit or suggest some reading on that point?
The main reason I say though is because NSA has the upstream under their thumb. Pretty much anything the company does is going to be visible to the agency but not the other way around, which creates an information power disparity that is inevitable with the current organizational structures.
(Source: "Blowing my cover", the memoir of ex-CIA agent Lindsay Moran, who says that hearing about this was the reason she quit.)
Can you elaborate on this? Is this based on first-hand experience, media coverage, or some other source?
Some would balance this shoddy record against the assumption that "well we have to have some top-secret intelligence-sabotage-and-kidnapping service." That simply isn't true. Through most of USA history we didn't have anything like that at anything like the CIA's scale. National leaders do need to know about other nations, but that work could be done better by normal non-classified and accountable researchers, who at least in the beginning would not be wedged so solidly in the pockets of the military-industrial complex. The sort of intelligence that enables military action has been really poorly executed by the CIA, and we'd be better off without it.
Some observations of my own, that I can see echoes of in this paper:
Decision-makers have a mental model where analysts' job is to synthesize facts and provide them, and it is the job of the decision-makers themselves to put the facts together into a big picture and/or plan of action. This is generally a poor set-up. Firstly, "facts" with any certainty are thin on the ground, there's only inferences from small spots of data in between clouds of blind spots. Secondly, the analysts have more experience with the trends that they study, and often more training in how to incorporate them into a big picture. Most managers will say "I want all the data," but if you give them what they ask for, they will most often draw incorrect conclusions. You have to spoon-feed them, even though neither party particular wants that.
People don't understand the limits of data, and they sure as heck don't understand uncertainty. If you make 100 predictions, and are 99% sure about all of them, then on average one will be untrue. And all you'll ever hear about was that you were 99% sure and were wrong. In my job, there's actually a consideration about not providing data that we don't totally trust (as opposed to providing with caveats), because a single data point that's wrong erodes trust in data in general. It sounds like that's not an option to the CIA: if they're tasked with a question, they must provide an answer (which is a problem itself).
We've found that if we our client to use our analysis, we actually need to write it with his audience in mind. We literally write it with the design goal that the client be able to copy-paste our words or graphs into his own deliverable. Because that is literally what will happen. The more effort it is for the client to consume our work, the more likely they are to save themselves the time and ignore it. And as bad as that is, it's also probably the best way. If the client re-words things, he may misunderstand things. Encouraging plagiarism cuts down on the game of telephone.
I've spent most of my career in marketing, and as far as I can tell, this happens everywhere. Well, almost everywhere. The one exception I've encountered was working at Apple, where people expected you to hammer out a beautiful and convincing Keynote deck on your own. Everywhere else, people more or less copypasted whatever decks, charts, graphs, and bullets their agencies had sent them.
The problem with copypasting is that it can lead to a game of telephone. A sequential erosion in the quality of information. If you're not keeping track of who's been lifting and plagiarizing and pasting which information from which sources, at how many steps along the value chain, you end up with a deck full of secondhand information and hearsay. The quality of the information (or confidence in the information) fades a bit with each subsequent generation of copypasting. Sort of like lossy data encoding. At larger organizations, as you might imagine, there will be many "generations" of each presentation. This makes the lossiness issue even worse.
The culprit here is always time. It's exactly as the author of this article points out. People don't set out to make shitty decks, or to copy and paste information, or to tl;dr their way through analysis. But that's just what people have to do to survive. If you're spending (conservatively) 20-30 hours a week in meetings, and many of those meetings leave you with deliverables on tight deadlines, you're going to be eking out any and all efficiencies that come your way.
I've never done any copypasting, and if I'm being honest with myself, it's probably hurt me more than it's helped me.
In support of that, lifting right from the article,
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden once famously said, “If it is a fact, it ain’t intelligence.”
Man this could not be more true. You can get people to (sometimes) understand basic probability if they don't have a math background, but try something like bounded probability for explaining the likelihood of the severity of an event and they'll get lost.
It would have been interesting to see at least some acknowledgement of, and response to, the fact that the CIA currently has acquired itself a reputation for extracting false intelligence clumsily through relentless torture and brutalization. How, despite all the very smart and experienced people working for the organization, does that come to be the output? What goes wrong there?
It is important to remember that any "may", "likely to" and "could" statement can be replaced with a "might not" statement with precisely the same meaning, unless you quantify the probabilities (difficult and often so imprecise as to be pointless).
We see this all the time in tech journalism: "New technology might not lead to breakthrough in flying cars!" has exactly the same meaning as "New technology may lead to breakthrough in flying cars!" but for some reason we always see the latter and never the former.
I recommend reading any article with unqualified "may" statements with them flipped to "might not". It will rapidly become clear how much of this kind of journalism is hopeful nonsense.