Club Troppo have grabbed a fabulous comment from under a post on “Interfluidity” and turned it into a blog post. Here’s clips of that comment. I can tell I’ve got some reading to do…
It is now well known that Commanders will make better decisions not by desperate attempts to use the limited low-value knowledge they have, but by filtering and even disregarding all low-value knowledge as being essentially worthless and assuming instead that they have none. When you assume and accept your own ignorance in a scenario of great uncertainty, you shift your focus from forward movement to security – from concentrating on engaging in future risks, to concentrating on discovering and shoring up the vulnerabilities in one’s defenses against an unknown surprise attack. You seek to make your systems less brittle and more robust, while at the same time you reallocate your resources from trigger-pulling to information-collecting so that you can acquire the real, useful, high-value information “actionable intelligence” that you really need to make progress.
[DT – yes, this gells with what Gladwell is saying too, and other folks. If you have access to rubbish information you can get hooked on ‘processing’ because it allows you ex post facto arse covering, rather than THINKING]
If we are to build meta-non-evaluable institution, then that’s probably what they should do – as a kind of rationally-paranoid “national security veto” over incautious policy. Sometimes, it’s good to force the elite leaders of society’s institutions to behave in a manner as if the fields they lead are not, in fact, expert and invulnerable, but actually ignorant and fragile. The Dinosaurs were expert and invulnerable in their world – but in life, everything is ignorant and fragile when things change. And things always change. They taught me that in the Army.
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