The US intercepted communications where Saddam told his units to ensure that they had no chemical weapons that inspectors could find. Of course, that communication didn’t happen in English. That communication seems to have been misinterpreted by the US intelligence community as evidence that Saddam is hiding WMDs.
Even in the English given, I can see alternate interpretations. Make sure you destroy any you have. Make sure they can’t find any you have.
Anyone knows how intelligence works? Given those two interpretations, do they get assigned priors that trickle up?
My impression from the Saddam days is that the scenario that Saddam destroyed his weapons the best he could, while trying to maintain the appearance that he had them, really hadn’t trickled up to general consciousness, if anyone had considered it at all.
People are overly confident in thinking they’ve covered the possible motivations a person might have had. “He wouldn’t have done this unless.”
Any actual science out there on this particular effect?
Anyone knows how intelligence works? Given those two interpretations, do they get assigned priors that trickle up?
If we can believe Tetlock, the US intelligence community didn’t assign any probabilities to the interpretations. Afterwards they felt like the screwed up and funded projects like the ACE challenge that Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project won via IARPA to find out how things should be done.
The problem with probabilities is that that they produce accountability. If you say X is likely to happen and X happens you can pretend that you meant that it happened with 95% probability and if X doesn’t happen you can pretend that your prediction was that it was supposed to happen with 60% probability. As a result there are institutional incentives against using probability.
I don’t know what the status quo happens to be within the intelligence community but when I look at the current US administration, I doubt that pushing the CIA to use probabilities more for their assessments is high on the list of priorities.
At the same time getting intelligence right in cases like this is important. That’s part of the reason why IARPA spending isn’t as evil as weapons research and why 80,000 hours is justified in putting IARPA-Program Manager on their job board.
Even in the English given, I can see alternate interpretations. Make sure you destroy any you have. Make sure they can’t find any you have.
Anyone knows how intelligence works? Given those two interpretations, do they get assigned priors that trickle up?
My impression from the Saddam days is that the scenario that Saddam destroyed his weapons the best he could, while trying to maintain the appearance that he had them, really hadn’t trickled up to general consciousness, if anyone had considered it at all.
People are overly confident in thinking they’ve covered the possible motivations a person might have had. “He wouldn’t have done this unless.”
Any actual science out there on this particular effect?
Yeah, the story I heard was that he probably wanted Iran to think he still had them...
If we can believe Tetlock, the US intelligence community didn’t assign any probabilities to the interpretations. Afterwards they felt like the screwed up and funded projects like the ACE challenge that Tetlock’s Good Judgement Project won via IARPA to find out how things should be done.
The problem with probabilities is that that they produce accountability. If you say X is likely to happen and X happens you can pretend that you meant that it happened with 95% probability and if X doesn’t happen you can pretend that your prediction was that it was supposed to happen with 60% probability. As a result there are institutional incentives against using probability.
I don’t know what the status quo happens to be within the intelligence community but when I look at the current US administration, I doubt that pushing the CIA to use probabilities more for their assessments is high on the list of priorities.
At the same time getting intelligence right in cases like this is important. That’s part of the reason why IARPA spending isn’t as evil as weapons research and why 80,000 hours is justified in putting IARPA-Program Manager on their job board.
Did they even have “Saddam is faking it” as a possibility?