Guest Post: Blip 02: Anecdote before Statistic
Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere. Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:
Anecdote Before Statistic
by Charles Cameron
Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, one time commandant of the Army War College and author of books on strategy made one of those observations the other day that catch my attention out of the corner of my eye, and trigger a mini-avalanche of thought in response. What Scales said, in an interview with Government Executive, was:
Armies break anecdotally before they break statistically
Scales was discussing the dispiriting recent upwards trend in Army suicides, which has been discussed here and elsewhere – but that’s not what caught my eye or triggered the mini-avalanche.
What struck me was the pairing of the words “anecdote and “statistic”. Because that’s a pairing that’s already very prominent in my own thinking. So let me just say this:
When we think about “connecting the dots” and the intelligence community — whether it’s to discuss how the IC failed to notice this, or was overwhelmed with that excess of data, or might like the other form of massive data visualization tool — we generally think in terms of vast quantities of data, and technical means for making the appropriate connections.
My own focus is on anecdotes, not data points – on individuals and their thoughts, rather than on groups and their statistics – and on the human, pattern-recognizing brain, rather than on high tech tools and their associated budgets.
Look: Gen. Scales is right, anecdotes come first. And whether we’re thinking about our own troops, or our involvements with others in Afghanistan, or Yemen, or wherever, let’s remember that anecdotes convey morale and context in a way that statistics never can.
So let’s begin to think a but more about our best human analysts, working with anecdotes rather than data points. The statistics and the data glut can follow later
October 17th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
The primary problem, in the IC at least, is not excess data, but ambiguous data. A perpetual problem is misinterpreting ambiguous data unambiguously. That speaks to the problem of mindsets, which it was it sounds like you’re getting at with "anecdotes."
October 18th, 2010 at 1:49 am
Charles, You are on to something. Add to your list visuals and metaphors—Polanyi was big on metaphors in the transmission of explicit knowledge. Context and meaning should precede numbers; thing is, context is often lacking as we attempt to interpret the "excess of data." Context allows us to be positioned to ask the right question—because an "answer" is rarely manifest in a collection of ambiguous data.
October 18th, 2010 at 2:44 am
Yes. I’m with you both, I think. I have a more general "sense of things" and a specific tool I’ve designed, and where as the tool itself maps what you might call "rhymes between ideas" (homologies, analogies, metaphors, parallelisms and oppositions), the "sense of things" explores it to get at mindsets, hidden assumptions, contextual understandings and misundersztandings. One of my key notions is the importance of blind spots — so much more critical than what one can actually see — so for instance a lot of my own monitoring has to do with apocalyptic sentiments which are both emotionally very powerful and easily dismissed as superstitious foolishness by the secular / not deeply devotional mind.
October 18th, 2010 at 4:55 pm
As far as books go, the vast majority of the frontline accounts of war the Iraq and Afghan Wars that I’ve read have included chapters about the lasting mental and physical impacts of this kind of modern warfare along with the good and the bad of the attempts to address these problems.
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There are plenty of those right now, and I’m sure there are many, many more on the way.
October 20th, 2010 at 6:09 pm
Thank you — such books are treasure troves from my POV — as are the writings of the jihadists. What I’m aiming for is a way of presenting the conflicting human feelings and understandings present in a single individual, or regarding a given topic in a small group, in a conceptual map format, with few enough nodes that the human mind can fairly easily see the major parallelisms and disjunctions, as an alternative to the linear format, always driving to its conclusion, that the white paper represents. Not as big as a book, therefore, let alone as vast as an enormous database that requires complex software like Starlight to graphically represent it, and not solely quantitative… but something you could sketch out on a napkin, showing nodes and connections, in a way that would be easily grasped and get some of the human and contextual side of an issue across. That’s why anecdotes (and quotes) are the "atoms" of my approach.
October 21st, 2010 at 1:51 am
Charles, You approach is brilliant, and I hope you share with us when you’ve completed the task.
October 22nd, 2010 at 3:27 pm
They Fought for Each Other by Kelly Kennedy might be a good place to start. The unit in this account, Charlie Company 1/26th Infantry Regiment, did break, including a notable and tragic suicide while in the war zone. It also includes follow-up with wounded warriors who where sent home and the challenges they faced.
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My review: http://wp.me/pq4hj-fo
October 23rd, 2010 at 1:20 am
Thanks — I’ll look into it. The question in your review — "What happens when, in the face of fierce ongoing resistance by the insurgents, the soldiers are unable to continue to engage in non-kinetic counterinsurgency activities with the population?" – is just the sort of defining point that we most need to be able to grasp richly, profoundly, and anecdote and quote get to the heart of such things, while a full lengthy narrative can deliver histories, individuals, friendships and antipathies into the mix too. Much appreciated.
October 23rd, 2010 at 4:24 am
Scott — thanks. I’ve started to lay out my overall approach in a series of posts beginning today here on ZP.
October 23rd, 2010 at 4:26 am
Sorry, let me try that link again: here