The latest from the AT debates
Our old friend Hugh Gusterson is at it again. In the latest edition of Anthropology Today (23.4, August 2007) he has written a response to David Kilcullens earlier comment. Those with access can get the entire article (it is only 1 page), but, I think, his conclusions define it fairly well:
Quote:
What is advocated here amounts to a social science inspired approach to Empire, using ‘information warfare’, ‘ethnographic intelligence’ and culturally informed soldiers as a velvet glove around the brute fist of military might that Empire requires. Do anthropologists really want to be part of this sordid, neo-colonialist project?
No decision scientist (as in "No rocket scientist")
Quote:
Originally Posted by
marct
"The US Congress voted to authorize military action in Iraq in response to arguments made by the Bush administration about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. As we all know, there were no such weapons, and it is now widely believed in the US that the Bush administration misrepresented the evidence about them in order to secure Congressional authorization to invade Iraq."
This is an intriguing position since it relies on knowledge not in evidence at the time of the decision.
* This is "Decision Making Under Uncertainty 101:" The quality of a decision made under uncertainty cannot be judged by later outcomes that weren't known with certainty at the time of the decision.
Of course, there is an allegation here that "Bush really knew," but I vividly remember Jacques Chirac nodding affirmative and saying "oh probably, probably!" when interviewed by one U.S. journalist and asked point blank whether he thought Iraq had WMD. Some of this is no doubt hindsight bias, in a very formal sense.
There is a wonderful paper by the psychologist Baruch Fischhoff on this, for those of you who are interested. It appears that most of us are not even able to correctly recall our own past states of uncertainty--that is, how uncertain we were prior to events which removed the uncertainty. Baruch is (well, was) the foremost expert on this, and has a wonderful, non-technical discussion of it for historians here:
Fischhoff, Baruch. 1980. For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgment. New Directions for Methodology of Social and Behavioral Science 4:79-92.
At any rate, one can make that (*) principle sound so obvious. Yet in the real world, people find it nearly impossible to live by it. There are, of course, practical reasons for holding people accountable for the outcome of the decisions they made under uncertainty. But that is obviously not the same thing as holding them culpable or criminal.