“Scenarios and forecasts are fundamentally different animals, though they share the quality of being subject to rather easy manipulation by those responsible for architecting the process. The one (scenarios) imagines possible futures, some of which may be well outside the realm of what one might call a “forecast” for the purposes of getting groups to think outside a conventional frame. The other (forecasts) are IMHO useful in the current geopolitical context only to the extent that they incorporate dynamic, highly distributed opinion-forming mechanisms (of which highly distributed sources are a necessary but insufficient component)… which brings the whole thing back ’round to prediction markets – those clever devices that Tradesports is using to precisely forecast things like presidential elections better than polls or pundits, but which died an ugly death in the public square with the tarring and feathering of Adm. Poindexter and the Policy Analysis Market 3 years ago.
Net/net: Yes, the CIA could benefit from both interactive scenario-based thinking processes and prediction markets. They will not benefit if they seek simply to divine a single “most probable” future scenario. Once birthed, those behemoths tend to live on for decades in big institutions and reduce rather than facilitate the clear synthesis of unexpected data.”
Thanks Art !
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Younghusband:
September 2nd, 2006 at 3:07 am
There should be small agencies geared to particular methods of intelligence gathering (electronic intercept, covert spying, reading the newspapers of the world, etc)
A comment after my own modular heart!
I wouldn’t send the CIA back to the OSS simply for the reason that military INT and civvie INT are two completely different beasts. The military would have no foxtrotting idea what to do. There is definitely a role for a civilian int agency. MI5, CSIS, etc have a lot of flexibility that law enforcement agencies like the FBI don’t have. Another important tool in the belt.
PS – Mark, I second the recommendation. the PIA is required reading round these parts.
mark:
September 2nd, 2006 at 3:23 am
Hi YH,
I thought you’d like that one.
“The military would have no foxtrotting idea what to do”
Col was corect earlier about Mil types standing out like sore thumbs as well. The military bearing is a difficult thing to erase, psychologicaly speaking. And one agency instinctively drops another bureaucracies priorities to the bottom of their ” to-do” list. The FBI will never be an intel agency and only a reactive and domestic counterintel agency.
I’ve read parts of the monograph previously -stumbled on the whole thing yesterday. The author is *very* smart.
Art Hutchinson:
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:36 pm
Scenarios and forecasts are fundamentally different animals, though they share the quality of being subject to rather easy manipulation by those responsible for architecting the process. The one (scenarios) imagines possible futures, some of which may be well outside the realm of what one might call a “forecast” for the purposes of getting groups to think outside a conventional frame. The other (forecasts) are IMHO useful in the current geopolitical context only to the extent that they incorporate dynamic, highly distributed opinion-forming mechanisms (of which highly distributed sources are a necessary but insufficient component)… which brings the whole thing back ’round to prediction markets – those clever devices that Tradesports is using to precisely forecast things like presidential elections better than polls or pundits, but which died an ugly death in the public square with the tarring and feathering of Adm. Poindexter and the Policy Analysis Market 3 years ago.
Net/net: Yes, the CIA could benefit from both interactive scenario-based thinking processes and prediction markets. They will not benefit if they seek simply to divine a single “most probable” future scenario. Once birthed, those behemoths tend to live on for decades in big institutions and reduce rather than facilitate the clear synthesis of unexpected data.