Form is insight: the funnel, part 2
[ by Charles Cameron — a post in my importance of form in intelligence series — following up on part 1 with a series of quotes zeroing in from context via analysis to decision — Pakistan, Afghanistan, OBL ]
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The 2nd funnel is from Duke's Structural Biology & Biophysics Program "folding funnels" page
In Part 1 of this post, I introduced the form of the funnel. I want to use this form, this recognizable and repeating pattern in nature, mathematics, and the transfer of oil into car engines, to illustrate a movement in time, an imperative in intelligence, and a loss in nuance. With regard to Obama and Osama.
I shall do this by offering a series of quotes that, in various voices, take us through the zeroing in process, by which an unimaginably complex world gets sorted into a complex analytic understanding and reduced from there to a yes/no decision and a single, definitive (fatal) command.
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Let’s start here:
The universe is a complex system in which countless causal chains are acting and interacting independently and simultaneously (the ultimate nature of some of them unknown to science even today). There are in fact so many causal sequences and forces at work, all of them running in parallel, and each of them often affecting the course of the others, that it is hopeless to try to specify in advance what’s going to happen as they jointly work themselves out. In the face of that complexity, it becomes difficult if not impossible to know with any assurance the future state of the system except in those comparatively few cases in which the system is governed by ironclad laws of nature such as those that allow us to predict the phases of the moon, the tides, or the position of Jupiter in tomorrow night’s sky. Otherwise, forget it.
Further, it’s an illusion to think that supercomputer modeling is up to the task of truly reliable crystal-ball gazing. It isn’t. … Certain systems in nature, it seems, are computationally irreducible phenomena, meaning that there is no way of knowing the outcome short of waiting for it to happen.
That’s Ed Regis, responding to the Edge Question for 2008, What Have You Changed Your Mind About?
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What do we do about it? The great (one might say visionary) biologist Francisco Varela has something important to say about that:
Let me try and be clear in the terminology here: for every system there is an environment which can (if we so decide) be looked at as a larger whole where the initial system participates. Since it would be impractical to do this at all times, we often chop out our system of interest, and put all the rest in the background as “environment.” To do this on purpose is quite useful; to forget that we did so is quite dangerous.
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Moving on and zooming rapidly in, here’s the state of the FBI’s understanding of Al-Qaida very shortly after 9/11.
…the business of counterterrorism intelligence gathering in the United States is akin to the construction of a mosaic. … At this stage of the investigation, the FBI is gathering and processing thousands of bits and pieces of information that may seem innocuous at first glance. We must analyze all that information, however, to see if it can be fit into a picture that will reveal how the unseen whole operates. … What may seem trivial to some may appear of great moment to those within the FBI or the intelligence community who have a broader context.
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Michael Taarnby gives us a sense of the various drivers in play in his paper, Profiling Islamic Suicide Terrorists: A Research Report for the Danish Ministry of Justice, 2003 — note that he’s working on suicide bombers, but many of the same drivers are at work more generally among jihadists:
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