Stop Ingesting Crap
Yes, you!
This is a short, simple statement which you should hear in me using my outside voice.
STOP INGESTING CRAP! JUST STOP IT!
OK, let me transition to inside voice here. One of the things you will find if you pick Psychology of Intelligence Analysis from Reading: Required & Recommended is that if there is even a HINT of deception in raw intel as a manager you should insert a filter layer between that content and any analytical effort.
I think the problems runs MUCH deeper than that.
Attention Conservation Notice: If this is a new concept to you, you ignore it at your peril.
Cognitive Biases:
There are all sorts of books and articles about cognitive bias out there. I first encountered this notion reading Psychology of Intelligence Analysis in … 2012? And I got Kahneman’s Thinking:Fast & Slow shortly after that. You can get PIA from the HCAT Dropbox folder if you want to read it.
If you search for “cognitive bias” in Google Images you will find literally hundreds of slides like this:
Or this:
There’s a wealth of literature and presentation material available. I’ve mentioned two written sources I’ve used here and the better of them the CIA made freely available.
Filtration:
So you are aware that you have bias and you start working on how to spot it in yourself, how to create procedures to catch it, how to arrange teams and process so that you interdict it before people are making decisions based on it. I am just far enough back from the day to day action that I can:
Capture things as they happen.
Maintain a timeline of events.
Maybe engage someone to serve as a filter before I see things.
Convene a small group to review important trends.
There aren’t enough hands and eyes to do A/B team analysis. And worse, there are factual matters to examine, and influence operations aimed at spinning those very same factual matters. If you are filtering junk in order to understand an issue … then you find you must swing to a hyperspectral intake of all content on the topic without regard to its veracity in order to see the nature of the spin … how do you avoid the cognitive tricks inherent in that spin impacting your fact based work?
David Attenborough voice: The hapless analyst simply can not accomplish both.
As an example, the very last plausible use I had for Twitter was a Tweetdeck configuration where I had names of key people in groups of six, like Russian and Ukrainian military officers. I didn’t follow anyone with that account, it was just searches on those names, and strictly limited to verified accounts. The value of this configuration immediately went to zero the day that verified status stopped being a treasured honor and instead became an easily purchasable commodity.
I still have a Twitter account. It follows a few dozen news sources and analysts I recognize. I periodically look at the trends and as I’m drafting this, midnight Sunday, I see this shite regarding Kosovo.
I would like to see some facts about what is happening. Instead I get obviously biased hot takes. This looks like news, but it’s worse than useless as far as understanding the geopolitical situation.
Purge Propaganda:
If I see anyone using the following as if they are valid sources, they instantly discredit themselves: Fox, Breitbart, OANN, Newsmax, and all of their cheesy imitators.
The same goes for things like Common Dreams, DailyKos, and the like. For both sets, their headlines are only a hint that something important might have happened, and you need to seek out a quality source to see the facts of the matter. The left leaning sites, lacking the bulk and foundation that Fox provides in terms of a credulous audience, are a bit more circumspect, but they also have their list of things that just ain’t so, which they still can not leave alone.
I’ve spent the last three months trying to break my MSNBC habit. I’ve been giving CNN an even break and they just aren’t getting the whole job done. Both of them can get a story of the moment correct, but I am surprised how dependent I am on MSNBC’s practice of putting that sort of news in long term context. CNN just doesn’t do that.
I do that for the MAGA world meltdown, I’ve been keeping a Maltego graph of things for the last three years. I treasure the context keeping that JustSecurity does with things like this piece: Timeline: Rep. Devin Nunes and Ukraine Disinformation Efforts
But there are more problems that need timelines and books than there are reporters and authors who can cover them, nor should the average citizen be required to pay this much attention.
The media in this country have failed in their duties as the 4th Estate, and while it’s easy to make Fox the instigator and chief villain, there are other forces at work. The Internet has brought us a lot of benefit, but at a frightful cost to local news coverage. As state house reporters have melted away bad behavior has flourished. The half billion dollar injection from Press Forward is welcome, but it’s not going to save local news.
What’s going to happen with the Zoomers? The oldest of them were born just after Fox News arrived. The internet has always been an “always on” thing for them. The iPhone appeared just as they entered their teens. I don’t have a good read on this, and I’m almost afraid to go looking for studies about this.
Conclusion:
As I publicly worried in Reality Under Siege, AI is here, and that’s going to give me even more regular cause to haul out my favorite screen shot from Simulacra & Simulation:
Our broken news system is consistently at the second stage of masking and denaturing. The ideological outlets far too often carry things that are emotionally pleasing to their audiences but which later turn out to be fabrication - that would be the third stage. AI might make that third stage pervasive. I have heard YouTube clips of long dead singers covering current songs. We are precipitously entering a world where we can sample and remix reality to our liking. That’s great for creative efforts, but as a basis for policy making … disaster is inevitable.
We really should do something about this, while we still have an opportunity to do so.