Kind of glad I couldn’t make it to the conference, I probably would have stroked out after hearing this:
The intelligence community’s move to a network-centric environment should receive a boost in the next year as two avenues of change move closer together.
The first effort involves training younger analysts to not only look for information, but to find meaning in the data. (emphasis mine)
That’s kind of the whole point of analysis. If you’ve not been training people to do this until now (Analysis 101 indeed) then what in the world have you been training them to do?
Yes, I’m getting a little carried away – they’ve recognized a problem and are trying to fix it – but this is indicative of the feckless way that analysis and analysts have been treated for a long time. Used to be if you couldn’t quantify your work mathematically (.6 chance of X happening) then you weren’t doing your job. Then if your work wasn’t footnoted like a high school term paper – source count was more important than conclusions – then you weren’t doing your job. Now we’re back to emphasizing the fact that we’re rational beings, not automatons. Rest assured though, another “failure” will come along and we’ll all have to be statisticians again.
This is a highly skilled trade, not a scientific discipline. You will never be able to say 1+1+x=3 because you never have enough information to say definitively what value x has, if any. All that money we spend, the equipment and infrastructure we build to gather and process information, its all for one purpose and one purpose only: to render it in a fashion that allows for the ready application of the little gray cells.
Further readings on the issues here.
