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Max wrote:
>Alternatively, you go to the practical approach -- U.S. force >is not
merely
>unethical, it will backfire in its own terms. This assumes >your analytical
>capacity surpasses the collective powers of the U.S. Gov. >This I doubt,
>no disrespect intended.
As a longtime admirer of Norman W Dixon's fantastic book "On the Psychology of Military Incompetence" and a longtime sceptic of "collective powers" of reasoning, I would have to take a rather more agnostic position on this question than Max, with only minimal disrespect for both sides:
1) Thiago is an individual, rather than a hierarchical structure, which gives him a significant advantage in information processing as he has nothing like the same level of incentive to misrepresent information to the level above him.
2) Thiago is not currently contemplating inflicting violence on anyone, so he is not subject to anything like the level of mental stress which the US Government is subject to.
3) Thiago is not (as far as I know) a highly-promoted member of a military organisation. Dixon makes a very credible case that military organisations systematically select during peacetime individuals who have a troubled relationship with their own capacity to inflict violence, and that these individuals typically deal with their cognitive dissonance by ignoring important information.
4) Thiago is not answerable to US public opinion and does not have to be seen to be "doing something".
5) Thiago has no direct economic or political interest in the creation of an oil pipeline through Afghanistan or in Lockheed's sales figure.
6) Thiago is in regular contact with people who disagree with him, and thus is not subject to the "firehouse effect" (basically, firemen at stations which have a lot of downtime often tend to agree with each other on opinions which outsiders regard as weird, because they spend so much time talking to one another).
7) Thiago's statements are not the product of committee negotiations, meaning that they are not subject to the committee effect (small groups of people tend to reach conclusions which are much more extreme than those which any of the members might reach independently; committees reinforce peoples' confidence in their own conclusions)
Any one of the above organisational pathologies could cause sufficient friction in the US Government's analytical process to make it entirely possible that a reasonably intelligent individual could produce better analysis of the situation, even given the disparity in resources.
dd
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