In stories (and in the past) important secrets are kept in buried chests, hidden compartments, or guarded vaults. In the real world today, almost the opposite is true: Anyone with a cheap smartphone can roam freely across the Internet, a vast sea of words and images that includes the opinions and conversations of almost every community. The people who will appear in future history books are right now blogging about their worldview and strategy! The most important events of the next century are right now being accurately predicted by someone, somewhere, and you could be reading about them in five minutes if you knew where to look! The plans of the powerful, the knowledge of the wise, and all the other important secrets are there for all to see—but they are hiding in plain sight. To find these secrets, you need to be able to swim swiftly through the sea of words, skimming and moving on when they aren’t relevant or useful, slowing down and understanding deeply when they are, and using what you learn to decide where to look next. You need to be able to distinguish the true and the important from countless pretenders. You need to be like a detective on a case with an abundance of witnesses and evidence, but where the witnesses are biased and unreliable and sometimes conspiring against you, and the evidence has been tampered with. The virtue you need most is rationality.
There’s a lot to unpack in the categorization of “important secrets”. I’d argue that the secret-est data isn’t actually known by anyone yet, closely followed by secrets kept in someone’s head, not in any vault or hidden compartment. Then there’s “unpublished but theoretically discoverable” information, such as encrypted data, or data in limited-access locations (chests/caves, or just firewalled servers).
Then comes contextually-important insights buried in an avalanche of unimportant crap, which is the vast majority of interesting information, as you point out.
I think I agree with all that. My claim is that the vast majority of interesting+important secrets (weighted by interestingness+importance) is in the “buried in an avalanche of crap” category.
Makes sense. Part of the problem is that this applies to non-secrets as well—in fact, I’m not sure “secret” is a useful descriptor in this. The vast majority of interesting+important information, even that which is actively published and intended for dissemination, is buried in crap.
I don’t think that’s true. There’s information available online but a lot of information isn’t. A person who had access to the US cables showing security concerns at the WIV, who had access to NSA surveilance that picked might have get alarmed that there’s something problematic happening when the cell phone traffic dropped in October 2019 and they took their database down.
On the other hand I don’t think that there’s any way I could have known about the problems at the WIV in October of 2019 by accessing public information. Completely unrelated, it’s probably just a councidence that October 2019 was also the time when the exercise by US policy makers about how a Coronavirus pandemic played out was done.
I don’t think there’s any public source that I could access that tells me about whether or not it was a coincidence. It’s not the most important question but it leaves questions about how warning signs are handled open.
The information that Dong Jingwei just gave the US government is more like a buried chest.
I mean, fair enough—but I wasn’t claiming that there aren’t any buried-chest secrets. I’ll put it this way: Superforecasters outperformed US intelligence community analysts in the prediction tournament; whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
When doing deep research I consider it very important to be mindful of information for a lot just not being available.
I think it’s true that a lot can be done with publically available information but it’s important to keep in mind the battle that’s fought for it. If an organization like US Right to Know wouldn’t wage lawsuits, then the FOIA requests they make can’t be used to inform out decisions.
While going through FOIA documents I really miss Julian. If he would still be around, Wikileaks would likely host the COVID-19 related emails in a nice searchable fashion and given that he isn’t I have to work through PDF documents.
Information on how the WHO coordinate their censorship partnership on COVID-19 with Google and Twitter in a single day on the 3rd of February 2020 to prevent the lab-leak hypothesis from spreading further, needs access to internal documents. Between FOIA requests and offical statements we can narrow it down to that day, but there’s a limit to the depth that you can access with public information. It needs either a Senate committee to subpena Google and Twitter or someone in those companies leaking the information.
How much information is available and how easy it is to access is the result of a constant battle for freedom of information. I think it’s great to encourage people to do research but it’s also important to be aware that a lot of information is withheld and that there’s room for pushing the available information further.
whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
There might be effect like the enviroment in which intelligence analysts operate train them to be biased towards what their boss wants to hear.
I also think that the more specific questions happen to be the more important specialized sources of information become.
In stories (and in the past) important secrets are kept in buried chests, hidden compartments, or guarded vaults. In the real world today, almost the opposite is true: Anyone with a cheap smartphone can roam freely across the Internet, a vast sea of words and images that includes the opinions and conversations of almost every community. The people who will appear in future history books are right now blogging about their worldview and strategy! The most important events of the next century are right now being accurately predicted by someone, somewhere, and you could be reading about them in five minutes if you knew where to look! The plans of the powerful, the knowledge of the wise, and all the other important secrets are there for all to see—but they are hiding in plain sight. To find these secrets, you need to be able to swim swiftly through the sea of words, skimming and moving on when they aren’t relevant or useful, slowing down and understanding deeply when they are, and using what you learn to decide where to look next. You need to be able to distinguish the true and the important from countless pretenders. You need to be like a detective on a case with an abundance of witnesses and evidence, but where the witnesses are biased and unreliable and sometimes conspiring against you, and the evidence has been tampered with. The virtue you need most is rationality.
There’s a lot to unpack in the categorization of “important secrets”. I’d argue that the secret-est data isn’t actually known by anyone yet, closely followed by secrets kept in someone’s head, not in any vault or hidden compartment. Then there’s “unpublished but theoretically discoverable” information, such as encrypted data, or data in limited-access locations (chests/caves, or just firewalled servers).
Then comes contextually-important insights buried in an avalanche of unimportant crap, which is the vast majority of interesting information, as you point out.
I think I agree with all that. My claim is that the vast majority of interesting+important secrets (weighted by interestingness+importance) is in the “buried in an avalanche of crap” category.
Makes sense. Part of the problem is that this applies to non-secrets as well—in fact, I’m not sure “secret” is a useful descriptor in this. The vast majority of interesting+important information, even that which is actively published and intended for dissemination, is buried in crap.
I don’t think that’s true. There’s information available online but a lot of information isn’t. A person who had access to the US cables showing security concerns at the WIV, who had access to NSA surveilance that picked might have get alarmed that there’s something problematic happening when the cell phone traffic dropped in October 2019 and they took their database down.
On the other hand I don’t think that there’s any way I could have known about the problems at the WIV in October of 2019 by accessing public information. Completely unrelated, it’s probably just a councidence that October 2019 was also the time when the exercise by US policy makers about how a Coronavirus pandemic played out was done.
I don’t think there’s any public source that I could access that tells me about whether or not it was a coincidence. It’s not the most important question but it leaves questions about how warning signs are handled open.
The information that Dong Jingwei just gave the US government is more like a buried chest.
I mean, fair enough—but I wasn’t claiming that there aren’t any buried-chest secrets. I’ll put it this way: Superforecasters outperformed US intelligence community analysts in the prediction tournament; whatever secrets the latter had access to, they weren’t important enough to outweigh the (presumably minor! Intelligence analysts aren’t fools!) rationality advantage the superforecasters had!
When doing deep research I consider it very important to be mindful of information for a lot just not being available.
I think it’s true that a lot can be done with publically available information but it’s important to keep in mind the battle that’s fought for it. If an organization like US Right to Know wouldn’t wage lawsuits, then the FOIA requests they make can’t be used to inform out decisions.
While going through FOIA documents I really miss Julian. If he would still be around, Wikileaks would likely host the COVID-19 related emails in a nice searchable fashion and given that he isn’t I have to work through PDF documents.
Information on how the WHO coordinate their censorship partnership on COVID-19 with Google and Twitter in a single day on the 3rd of February 2020 to prevent the lab-leak hypothesis from spreading further, needs access to internal documents. Between FOIA requests and offical statements we can narrow it down to that day, but there’s a limit to the depth that you can access with public information. It needs either a Senate committee to subpena Google and Twitter or someone in those companies leaking the information.
How much information is available and how easy it is to access is the result of a constant battle for freedom of information. I think it’s great to encourage people to do research but it’s also important to be aware that a lot of information is withheld and that there’s room for pushing the available information further.
There might be effect like the enviroment in which intelligence analysts operate train them to be biased towards what their boss wants to hear.
I also think that the more specific questions happen to be the more important specialized sources of information become.
Some secrets protect themselves....things that are inherently hard to understand, things people dont want to believe...