The book "Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis" by the same author is more recent and goes into details and applications.
They go over many biases and attentional phenomena, tools to prevent or mitigate, visualization techniques to address problems (timelines, etc.) with several examples.
It also goes into explaining the context that practitioners evolve in a context where information can be scarce, contradictory either by happenstance or by design by actors who want to confuse.
Here's a RAND report titled "Assessing the Value of Structured Analytic Techniques in the U.S. Intelligence Community".
Thanks for submitting. Just ordered physical book on Amazon.
I’d like to share a tangential thought in case others have noticed the same. One thing I’ve found odd with the CIA and “Intelligence” community is they seem to use the terms “Information” and “Intelligence” interchangeably. Labeling their Information as Intelligence, I would think introduces cognitive bias. Perhaps Authority Bias or another.
Going with the DIKW paradigm:
- Data
- Information (The symbols and words we assign to the Data)
- Knowledge (Which I’ll define as a storage of Information with Metainformation attached to it. Kind of like a computer filesystem. The actual file is Information and has Metainfo like Source, Timestamp, filetype, and other contextual properties which is useful for processing and thinking about during decision-making.
- Wisdom (Which I’ll defined as the process of consciously running Knowledge through your Mind and Emotions and Third-party Cognitive Fallacy Checklists) and then drawing a Conclusion.
When they say “Intelligence-gathering”, really they mean “Information-gathering.”
Long story, short: if I ran the CIA, I’d change the name to “Central Information Processing Agency”
I would put data first, with signal and noise components determined second. Although this probably some subset of the information in the structure you present?
This is a great book. Highly recommended if your are making decisions based on gathered information. Not just for spies. I'm coming back to that one regularly.
> 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.
That seems to fit regular people and regular news these days. Too much "information"; not enough actual information; and too many biases.
If you're interested in trying the analysis of competing hypotheses technique (ACH) from book, I maintain an open-source implementation here: https://www.opensynthesis.org/
I'll argue parts of it as early as kids have language, along with some statistics. Structured thought, deduction from observations, reasoning about probability, all are foundational and would help support other coursework (not necessarily sacrifice other topics).
This seems like it would be an advantage if other people weren't aware of this information. I wonder why they decided to publish it publicly like this.
It's not like the information is based on his own private research, all of the information would already be available to anyone who wants it. Even then, they waited twenty years before publicly publishing the book (assuming the 1999 publishing date is correct.)
They go over many biases and attentional phenomena, tools to prevent or mitigate, visualization techniques to address problems (timelines, etc.) with several examples.
It also goes into explaining the context that practitioners evolve in a context where information can be scarce, contradictory either by happenstance or by design by actors who want to confuse.
Here's a RAND report titled "Assessing the Value of Structured Analytic Techniques in the U.S. Intelligence Community".
- [0]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...