Say Anything Blog

The BBC has a good article up on the reform of the US intelligence process. and how it led to a change in the US risk assessment of Iran.

I thought this part was particularly interesting:

The weakness of consensus

The aim is to avoid the weakness of all systems where co-ordination is the requirement. Co-ordination can lead to consensus and consensus can hide doubts and flaws.

The same weakness was evident in the British system of having a Joint Intelligence Committee, which came to a similarly wrong conclusion over Iraq despite doubts in the system lower down.

One example from Iraq concerned the source known as Curveball, who was given undue prominence, especially in the assessment of so-called mobile chemical weapons vehicles.

The system has also been strengthened by the creation of an overarching Director of National Intelligence (DNI), to whom the NIC reports. It was created after the failures to predict and interdict the attacks of 9/11.

Again the danger of creating yet another post is that intelligence gets reduced in a longer and longer process of examination into the lowest common denominator.

Of course this is interesting to apply to other situations, like the so-called consensus on global warming or the consensus on that dreck Y2K.  The nature of consensus is that it can sweep doubts and uncertainties under the rug in the interest of forming a well-defined narrative.

In the consensus-forming scenario, a given expert has the greatest uncertainty regarding his own contributions but agrees that the things he isn’t expert on are likely true.  So you end up with a bunch of people, who are experts in their own area, but agreeing on things that they have no expertise in, and a consensus that is formed on ignorance, rather than on informed understanding.  And this consensus carries the weight of a “team of experts”

There are places where paying attention to consensus makes sense, for example, if you talk to physicists about the value of some measured physical quantity, they are speaking from authority.  However, global warming, international intelligence or even Y2K are all areas where the field is complex enough that no one person can really be an expert on everything.

In this case, consensus is driven by man’s desire to create a narrative to explain something that is very complex, and as a result what you have is an agreed to story, rather than a true finding of facts.