Philip E. Tetlock: belief

Transcript context

…If you were in charge of the CIA and had a free hand, how would you reform it? Whoa, boy! [laughs] Well, there’s a long history to efforts to reform the CIA. It was founded in 1947, and there have been various efforts since then. People have been unhappy with the CIA for many reasons over time, Vietnam being a big one. But there are lots of other reasons that people have expressed unhappiness. Both liberals and conservatives have, at various points, been unhappy with the performance of the intelligence community. In 2001, it came to a crisis point, I think, and then there was a commission to reform intelligence analysis. After the WMD fiasco in Iraq, the pressure grew even more. One reason why we’re even talking right now today, is that the intelligence community was forced, essentially by the recommendations of the reform commission, to take keeping score more seriously, to take training for accuracy and monitoring of accuracy more seriously. That’s when they created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, which is the R&D branch housed within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Its job is to support innovative research that will improve the quality of intelligence analysis. That can be defined in various ways, but accuracy is certainly one very important component of that. But it’s not accuracy with a liberal skew or a conservative skew. It’s supposed to be just plain, “just the facts, ma’am” accuracy. To predict. That reflects values, obviously. Which questions they choose to predict — that reflects values. Whenever a bureaucracy tells me they’re value-free, I start getting more suspicious very quickly, right? I never believe them. It might be okay for them not to be value-free, but the cynical response is the correct one here.…

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