
Thinking About Thinking (1999) - handojin
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/art4.html
======
wingspar
A pdf version [https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-
analysis/PsychofIntelNew.pdf)

~~~
pasbesoin
All I got was an HTML page, but an archive link worked:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20180925191008/https://www.cia.g...](https://web.archive.org/web/20180925191008/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-
for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-
monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-analysis/PsychofIntelNew.pdf)

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chiefalchemist
> "The reaction of the Intelligence Community to many problems is to collect
> more information, even though analysts in many cases already have more
> information than they can digest. What analysts need is more truly useful
> information--mostly reliable HUMINT from knowledgeable insiders--to help
> them make good decisions. Or they need a more accurate mental model and
> better analytical tools to help them sort through, make sense of, and get
> the most out of the available ambiguous and conflicting information."

I would think the key is the latter. That is, even if you get more data it
does not become __useful__ information unless you're willing and able to
process it.

That aside, it's difficult, if not impossible for us "on the outside" to judge
the value of these concept to the IC as we only get to know what the IC wants
us to know. They're playing the long game. They're playing chess. Maybe it's
just me but when I hear a news story (or a friend / colleague) that says "The
NSA said..." or the "CIA said..." I accept those as close to meaningless. The
IC is, afterall, in the misinformation business.

p.s. I believe the proper term for tbinking about thinking is meta-cognition.
I find it odd that the CIA would avoid using the proper term.

~~~
ACow_Adonis
As an analyst, using the "right term" is down at about the very bottom of my
list of things to do, especially in the form of a book.

More important is communication to your audience, and in that respect "meta-
cognition" is pretty awful vocabulary that strongly limits your audience in
this case.

~~~
chiefalchemist
I see it differently. Meta-congition is fairly straightforward. You have meta,
we know what that is. And we have cognition. Again, obvious.

Put another way, if you're in the IC or getting info from the IC and the use
of the word / concept meta-cognition scares you then something is very very
wrong.

The audience here isn't TMZ viewers. Is it?

~~~
chrissam
You know what's even more straightforward than "metacognition"? "Thinking
about thinking".

~~~
chiefalchemist
Who was the famous thinker who said less words are better?

And please see my comment up a level but still below my original comment. Long
to story, the IC, by definition, shouldn't be afraid to use the word meta-
cognition; it ultimately exposes its analysts to another area of study that
could / would broaden then. The irony being, this is what this book is
championing.

If the IC is too good for dog fooding then we're all in big trouble.

~~~
jonnybgood
Imagine someone coming up to you with no internet available and asks you,
"What is metacognition?". What would be your answer?

~~~
ss248
Isn't that easy to understand the meaning of the whole word if you just try to
understand the parts? If someone is not educated, you just explain the meaning
of "meta" and "cognition" and after that they can just infer the meaning by
themselves. These are relatively popular words.

~~~
chiefalchemist
Not educated? Wouldn't that then be:

Not Thinking About Thinking?

IDK. Given the intended audience, as well as the general process / mindset
he's championing I don't ssee how meta-cognition is a tough word. I mean, if
you don't know it doesn't that literally force you to reconsider your
thinking.

Meta-cognition - given the source, the target audience, the subject matter and
the context is hardly a fancy word.

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abalone
Here's a fun image. I totally fell for it the first time.

[https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intellig...](https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-
intelligence/csi-publications/books-and-monographs/psychology-of-intelligence-
analysis/fig1.gif/image.gif)

~~~
mrfusion
Fell for what?

~~~
wingspar
Duplicated words: end of second lines and start of third

~~~
Ma8ee
Wow, I stared long and well at the pictures without seeing it.

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hx2a
This book is a classic. I've read the whole thing several times and found it
to be thought provoking and helpful. The author gives you tools for "explicit
cognitive processes" to aid analysis of complex situations.

~~~
Myrth
"Bicameral mind" by Julian Jaynes is great too

~~~
hliyan
Excellent book. Read it when I was 17. Although the latter parts are devoted
almost entirely to the historical evidence for the theory of the Bicameral
Mind.

I'm no longer fully convinced that language and metaphor generates
consciousness though.

~~~
k_vi
> I'm no longer fully convinced that language and metaphor generates
> consciousness though.

It might just be a subset of what generates consciousness.

~~~
hliyan
What would you say is the set of things that generate consciousness?

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OliverJones
I read this a couple of days after watching Doug Limman's movie "Fair Game."
([https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0977855/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0977855/))
Liman is known for playing the amoral chief of staff in House of Cards.

This CIA training book is all about avoiding self-deception and getting as
close as possible to the truth. Those are good aspirations for any trade. Try
debugging a complex system without doing those things. You can't.

But there's a whole lot more to making the truth useful. People with power
must also avoid self-deception: they must listen. That didn't happen back in
2002-2003.

The movie is about Bush 43 and Cheney's push to convince the world about
nuclear weapons in Iraq. That administration infamously disclosed the identity
of a CIA undercover person called Valerie Plame. They did so to discredit her
spouse Ambassador Joe Wilson.

Mr. Wilson made a fact-finding trip to the nation of Niger (north of Nigeria)
to verify the administration's claim that Niger's uranium mines sold vast
quantities of yellowcake uranium oxide to Iraq. Mr. Wilson's investigation
proved that claim was false. Therefore, he needed to be discredited. Therefore
the White House outed his spouse, wrecking her career and losing the lives of
her contacts in various places.

CIA people come off as the good guys--earnest purveyors of truth--both in the
movie and this training book. But even they can't prevent the kind of
collective self-delusion that comes when politicians' minds are made up.

How many of us hackers embark on projects we know are doomed to failure? How
many of us know how to validate our hunches with the right amount of
information? Many of us, because that's the easy part. How many of us know how
to convince people above us in the food chain? Far fewer. That's a place where
training might come in handy.

~~~
wingspar
Real question: Where were lives lost as a result of Valerie Plame being outed?
Wikipedia doesn’t seem to know about it

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair)

------
alexandercrohde
I read one chapter of this, and it seems like a reasonable ambition. However I
have to ask -- Do they do _any_ research at all on whether teaching these
methods actually results in greater thinking by any objective measure (be it
IQ, analysis, whatever)?

This must be the standard to be taken seriously. Anybody can wax on about how
to avoid systemic biases, but it's my understanding that the research shows
studying biases doesn't remove them.

~~~
joe_the_user
Serious question,

Is there any alternative theory or method about how to avoid systematic bias
other than being aware of systematic bias?

Also comment, I think the studies of awareness bias involved very simple
phenomena. That may or may not carry-over to more complex processes.

~~~
Retric
Actually test your bias objectively and receive feedback.

EX1: If you only add people to your team that pass your interview process you
never test if it’s actually effective.

If you replace that with say a score card to rate people on various metrics
then compare actual preformace with your metrics then you have some feedback
to improve the system.

EX2: For a one time event like a music / art / writing contest. Remove the
bias inducing elements by just judging the output.

~~~
whatshisface
You would have to hire hundreds before the things that hiring processes can't
test for get smoothed out.

~~~
Retric
Many people do higher hundreds of people. Finding good metrics for each job is
harder, but large organizations with reasonable turnover can have a lot of
data to work with.

------
Inu
So the author joined the CIA in 1951 and "spent the next 24 years working with
the Directorate of Operations." [1] That means that he probably participated
in some of the disastrous covert operations of that era. [2] I don't know if
that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence analysis.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richards_Heuer)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change#1950s)

~~~
abledon
you could also analyze it and say he probably participated in many successful
covert operations that we've never heard of!

~~~
sjburt
Most of the CIA records have been released over the years, and any major
operations have entered the public record by now. Dulles was also very keen to
brag about his successes and intent to bury his failures.

The fact is that the CIA in that period was absolutely inept. It failed to
build any significant intelligence networks in either the Soviet Union or
China, mispredicted critical events such as China's entrance into the Korean
War, and squandered thousands of lives by attempting to parachute them into
Eastern Europe, China, or North Korea to meet up with fictitious resistance
forces. The CIA itself and its intelligence sources were routinely comprised
by the Soviets and fed false information to the President.

The two "successful" operations of the era (Iran and Guatemala) replaced
democratically elected leaders with brutal authoritarian regimes, and both of
them barely succeeded though an embarrassing comedy of errors.

~~~
derefr
Was any intelligence agency of the era _not_ incompetent? The GP's assertion
of:

> I don't know if that makes him a trustworthy authority on intelligence
> analysis.

...only really applies if there is someone who _is_ a "trustworthy authority
on intelligence analysis."

If everyone is just flailing around, then we may as well listen to the
experiences of a person who's been flailing around for the longest time. At
least they've made a lot of mistakes you can learn from.

~~~
tlear
GRU and KGB first directorate. Also Soviet counter intel was orders of
magnitude better, it helps when you can roundup anyone you want and brutalize
anyone you want any time you want.

Western intel agencies were like children playing against professionals.

Another example is Mossad orders go magnitude better. Can you imagine
Americans, British or hell anyone really pulling off Spring of Youth? Consider
the depth of intel needed to pull something like that off. Obviously the Yom
Kippur war will be mentioned.. thing was warning were passed to Golda Meir..
Israel should have mobilized and struck first but political decision was made
it was not really fault of intel.

~~~
varjag
GRU and KGB track record is littered with high profile failures.

~~~
bainsfather
Could you list them please?

~~~
varjag
Sure, here are some:

Georgi Agabekov, uncovered 400 KGB agents in Iran.

Vladimir Petrov, uncovered 600 KGB agents, including Kim Philby.

Gordievsky, head of KGB residenture in London, exposed all of it.

The failure of Berlin Tunnel.

Polyakov, head of GRU China sector. Exposed 1650 Soviet and 19 foreign GRU
agents and operatives.

Penkovsky, provided 7500 pages of documentation on Soviet missile designs and
rocket fuel types to CIA.

~~~
arethuza
The KGB had a _much_ harder time recruiting once the realities of life in the
Soviet Union became widespread after WW2.

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mythrwy
Thinking analytically is skill that can be taught, certainly, but it's turtles
all the way down.

Which is to say is, one part of consciousnesses can take control of another
part through training, yes. But who is it that is taking control? Until we
self-determine this (or accept some form of math as an arbitrator of reality
where applicable) one bias or conditioning is simply replaced with another.
Can't get the most accurate models like that.

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nj65537
The style of writing makes this read like a sledgehammer. It is strangely
refreshing.

~~~
gronne
Give a man a hammer...

------
norswap
I'm surprised to find no mention of Rationality: From AI to Zombie
(alternatively known as The LessWrong Sequences), which seems to treat the
same subject matter: [https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-
zombies/](https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/)

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bhhaskin
Kinda random, but it is interesting how they are including a public key in a
javascript file.

~~~
magnetic
What do you find interesting about it? What am I missing?

------
dang
Previous discussion of the book this is from:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852250](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852250)

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paraschopra
I recently made a Google Spreadsheet to help think better. Designed it from
the perspective of helping original thinking while reducing confirmation and
availability bias. Check it out
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b9Kjw9pW5cDwGJaJl561...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1b9Kjw9pW5cDwGJaJl5614NMPIxB_sjflderZzC7rB1w/htmlview#gid=1447928622)

Feedback appreciated!

~~~
ioayman
That is very interesting!

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carapace
> A basic finding of cognitive psychology is that people have no conscious
> experience of most of what happens in the human mind. Many functions
> associated with perception, memory, and information processing are conducted
> prior to and independently of any conscious direction. What appears
> spontaneously in consciousness is the result of thinking, not the process of
> thinking.

So... who is it that has (or doesn't have) free will?

~~~
krapp
Everyone has free will.

It just happens that free will is the effect and not the cause, output rather
than input. Buddhists were right about the self being an illusion.

------
grendelt
Metacognition - think about it.

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taspeotis
I'm surprised that the word "metacognition" [1] doesn't appear in this article
at all.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacognition)

~~~
chiefalchemist
I was thinking the same thinking. The book "Your Brain at Work" is all about
metacognition. I'm sure there are plenty of others. But that's the one I've
read and I recommend it often.

