Notes and words for “Psychology of Intelligence Analysis” by Richards J. Heuer Jr.
1. Words
| disabused | ||
| preordained | ||
| prodded | ||
| pernicious | ||
| beset | ||
| beget | ||
| entail | ||
2. Remarks
2.3. Study stakeholders!
2.10. People like logic an consistency. (People look for patterns.)
People like similarity between cause and effect both in nature and in size. People feel that correlation equals causality.
2.11. Draw contingency tables! (Yes, I mean you, the reader.)
| 0 | 1 | |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | x | y |
| 1 | z | k |
2.15. Trick to assess quality of information. If the opposite had occurred, would I have been surprised?
2.16. Analyst’s checklist
- Define the problem
- Generate hypotheses
- Collect information
- Evaluate hypotheses
- Select the most likely hypothesis
- Monitor quality in hindsight
2.17. Disprove yourself all the time! And read your enemies more than your friends.
- Sensitivity testing. What would change the assumption output?
- How do you find that this is no longer true?
- Are you attributing your own characteristics to other people?
2.21. Read your old documents!
2.22. Use scientific method.
2.25. Types of thinking (influenced by my programming language experience)
- Situational logic
- similar to imperative programming. Cause and effect are unique and concrete. Predict forward by extrapolation, or backward by reverse execution.
- Theoretical logic
- use generalisation to obtain for the same goals. (Similar to functional programming?)
- Logic by analogy
- machine learning? pattern transfer?
- Logic by data
- kinda same?
2.27. How the data may discribe the model:
- Data on variable value in model instances.
- Additional variables.
- Trustworthiness of variable data metadata.
- Variable coupling medatada.
3. Summary for myself
Intelligence people’s work consists of writing reports. This is one of the reasons why literature is considered such an important subject in school. How many books do these people create each year? How much is declassified? How much is destroyed? How can this be compared to the FSB, GRU, and SVR? Who gives them assignments?
It is impressive how much the way a human society works resembles how a living organism works, consisting of different organs.
It is hard to make yourself think about problem solving directly.