>Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 03:28:49 -0500
>From: Kelley
>Subject: Re: The analytical capacity of the US Government
>At 12:50 AM 10/30/01 -0600, Daniel Davies wrote:
>>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
>bah. for ever defect you cite for collective d-making, there >is another
for
>"individual" d-making.
>you didn't provide an agnostic view, in the end, at all.
>kelley
Call me Captain Pedantic, but I said that I _took_ an agnostic view on the question, meaning that, given Max's assertion that it was hard to believe that Thiago's capacity to analyse was greater than that of the US government, it was incumbent on me to _provide_ a contrary view, rather than an agnostic one. I'm trying to make the point that you yourself make above; there are sufficient biases and problems with people's processing of information to make it impossible to make blanket statements one way or the other about whether the US government has more or less analytical capacity than its critics.
My personal bias, as you correctly detected, is that individuals can outperform institutions systematically under conditions of pressure. Otoh, I probably believe this because I depend for my livelihood on its being so. On yet another of my rapidly sprouting hands, however, there is voluminous evidence from, say, memoirs of CIA operatives (I'm thinking particularly of Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" here) that the US Government has repeatedly in the past interpreted the data available to it in ways which the operatives who provided that data considered to be perverse to the point of insanity. These are the people who brought you the Bay of Pigs, after all.
But I'm only prepared to defend the agnostic position; that we really can't say a priori whether or not Thiago or the US government has the greater analytical capability, and should thus probably address each others' arguments on their apparent merits in this instance. I'm not a fan of short ways with the pragmatic case against bombing which depend on the assumption that the powers that be are acting rationally.
dd
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