zenpundit.com

METACOGNITION [ Updated]

Intelligence analysts, strategists and educators all require clarity of thought for their respective domains. Frequently, they rely upon – or too often assume they are using – formal logic for organizing and sequencing concepts or deconstructing patterns of information into component, isolated, parts. Generally, we can also assume that our respective thinkers all represent persons of with considerable vertical expertise, masters of a particular field or subfield of knowledge and, consequently, frame new information according to the received intellectual culture and rule-sets of their professional discipline as well as logical reasoning.

On average, this primarily analytical approach to engaging the world is very efficient and productive. Time is saved by recourse to preexisting and commonly accepted conceptual categories when integrating new data and the accumulation and verification of new knowledge is orderly and most of the time a valid and reliable process. Problems arise with this process however when new data

a) Seemingly represents familiar old data because our habitual use of our conceptual categories, our received intellectual culture from professional training, our entire worldview and the underlying genetic predispositions in terms of cognitive behavior render us blind to the implications of the new which lay hidden in plain sight.

Or

b) If the new data contradicts all that we have been led to believe to be true.

The cognitive distortions that can arise then have various manifestations, among them:

Educated Incapacity

Denial

Magical thinking

Self-referential logical errors

Non sequitors

Mistaking correlation for causation

Paralysis by analysis

How to avoid this mental fog of distortion ? One possibility is the deliberate practice of metacognition during the analytical process to help prserve the integrity of the “Observation” and “Orientation” stages of John Boyd’s OODA loop. Metacognition is a term coined by pyschologist and cognitive theorist John Flavell to describe the processes involved in ” thinking about thinking”. Metacognition has rationally methodical as well as intuitive aspects, both of which are useful in accomplishing the task of mental self-regulation, monitoring and evaluation:

Rational:

Asessment: Identification of state of knowledge, attention and task at hand

Executive control of behavior: Self-regulation

Metamnemonic planning: Selection of mnemonic strategies appropriate for the task

Schema Training: Generation of new conceptual-categorical structures

Evaluation: Of changes in knowledge

Intuitive:

Fingerspitzengefuhl or ” fingertip feeling”

Tip of the tongue feeling or memory retrieval

Rechecking your analytical premises against your ” hunch”when the data seems to be contradictory as well as systematic self-assessment of your reasoning process helps identify errors, blind spots and weakly supported assertions that represent more ideology than empiricism. In short, metacognition preps the brain for a burst of insight by bringing into simultaneous or sequential focus:

New data

Your premises

The operative rule-sets

Your logical reasoning

Your intuitive expectations

Past knowledge

Your evaluation of the validity and reliability of the above

You are now poised to look at the big picture, discern the interconnections and look further afield for analogies and parallel patterns.

LINKS FOR READERS:

This post has stirred some considerable traffic today so I thought I might highlight a few
“gurus” on my blogroll who also feature systemic, strategic, analysis on a regular basis:

Thomas P. M. Barnett

Art Hutchinson’s Mapping Strategy

John Robb

Nicholas Carr ‘s Rough Type

Dave Chesbrough’s net-centric dialog

Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail

WHILE I’M GETTING MY OWN ACT TOGETHER…

I suggest you check out Jeff Medcalf’s post on war powers and the NSA wiretapping at Caerdroia:

“The Constitution does not limit the President to fighting the enemy abroad, nor require a separate declaration of Congressional intent to fight the enemy in the United States. The President’s power is to fight the enemy defined in the declaration of war, wherever that enemy is.

The only valid way to claim that the surveillance is illegal is to claim that the AUMF does not trigger the President’s war powers because the AUMF is not a declaration of war. But nowhere in the Constitution is the President’s power to make war divided between “real wars” and “so so wars”: there is no way to grant the President the power to make war except to declare war. The Constitution does not require that such a declaration contain particular wording, such as “a state of war exists between the United States and [enemy]”. So on what grounds, other than claiming that the Constitution is a “living document” and means whatever we want, can anyone claim that AUMF is not a declaration of war? If not, then what is it?”

Jeff has hit the nail on the constitutional head. There is no such legal distinction unless specifically articulated by the Congress in the language of their AUMF which makes the ” not a real war” argument legally specious. And in the case of the 9/11 resolution, the Congress itself declared the terms of the War Powers Act to be satisfied by the AUMF.

International law is even more of a slam dunk than American Constitutional law as IL requires only the de facto recognition of a ” state of armed conflict”. We have a de jure recognition by NATO which has invoked Article IV, recognizing 9/11 as an act of war for which ” an attack against one is an attack against all”.

The Bush administration may be politically inept but they are constitutionally correct and their critics are wrong. AUMF trumps FISA. Separation of powers trumps statutes.

POSTING PROBLEMS CONTINUE APACE

Knocked out again. Some comments are visible only if you click to make a new comment. For example I responded to Fabius Maximus but my comment is neither registered numerically nor can you see it without posting a new comment.

Blogger was down again last night and when it went up again it did not accept my post so if you are annoyed at my prevailing radio silence I have to plead technical difficulties in this instance.

I’ll try to get something to ” stick” today.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND JIHADI-SALAFI INTIMIDATION[ Updated]

The UK Spectator which was kind enough to link to Zenpundit today on an unrelated matter has a Telegraph article with the disturbing implication that the Jihadi-Salafi radical movement is succeeding in its campaign of intimidation over the Danish political cartoon to assert sharia precepts and special exceptions for Islam in Western societies. The moral problem is not one of the general population in Western countries but of elite authority which is reacting, Danish and some EU officials excepted, with truckling cowardice and opportunism.

It is manifestly true that the sharia prohibits artistic representations of the Prophet and that the original cartoon was insulting in a rather juvenile way. The sharia however prohibits a lot of things that are normal states of affairs in Denmark, Britain or the United States – or are considered Constitutional rights– and as the body of Muslim religious law, the sharia has absolutely no standing in the secular, liberal democratic West whose populations, while multicultural to be sure, are overwhelmingly Christian. We do not for example, give veto power over our society to Talmudic scholars or the canon law of the Catholic Church, so it might not be a good idea to be backtracking on core Western values in the face of threats from an unrepresentative but violent, totalitarian, minority within a predominantly foreign religion.

The Danish cartoon, however unfairly broadbrush, was aimed at the terroristic activities of these selfsame Salafi radicals and Jihadists, who naturally, are alarmed at being accurately criticized for prostituting one of the world’s great religions with their violent brand of extremist politics. Handing this group concessions instead of, say clapping them into the clink for making death threats, sends entirely the wrong message to moderates and secular intellectuals in the Muslim world at large. If the mighty West stammers in the face of relatively minor, semi-disorganized, thuggery from Islamist radicals, how much more important is it for them to keep their own mouths shut ?

The U.S. State Department, while no doubt relieved that for once somebody else’s consulates are on fire, has disgracefully undercut the Europeans on free speech in order to try to win brownie points with the Muslim street. I grant you that many FSO’s are graduates of Ivy league schools where PC values are put on a far higher moral plane than the Bill of Rights but this move was rather dumb on conventional diplomatic grounds. If helping the Bosnian Muslims, Indonesian Tsunami victims and Pakistani earthquake victims barely made a dent in negative public images Muslims have of America, verbal concessions on a cartoon are not going to do the trick. Indeed, it will only invite the contempt of Jihadi radicals who see it for what it is – a retreat borne out of weakness and lack of confidence in core American values. And in Europe, advocates of a ” tough” policy on Islamist extremism can only feel that we have pulled the rug out from under them after years of complaining that the Euros were too weak and vacillating in the face of extremism and terror.

It would have better to simply have said nothing at all. Our governmental elite lacks not only spine but sense.

UPDATE:

Dan and Bill at Duck of Minerva have endorsed raf’s post at ‘Aqoul for its perceptive observations and distinctions within the MENA world on this issue; I concur, very useful effort on raf’s part.

Memorandum has more links to blogs posts and pundits on the cartoon crisis than I can even begin to list. Surf away !

I’ll also concede that Dan is correct that American humanitarian aid has helped the American image somewhat in the targeted countries – I was thinking along the lines of Arab public opinion instead of the general Muslim world which is, of course, quite diverse in its interests. Nevertheless, State message was still remarkably boneheaded and inept.

MILITARISTIC RECOMMENDED READING

John Robb of Global Guerillas has a staccato surge of systempunkt – one, two, three, four, five and six.

Dan of tdaxp – expands on 5GW as the SecretWar – ” 5GW: Soundless + Formless + Polished + Leading “

Eddie at Live From the FDNF has a powerful and extensive post “Blue-Hat” Treatment For Darfur” on the Dar Fur crisis expanding into the destabilization of Chad while the peacekeeping mission implodes.

Matt at Mountainrunner has insinuated my gravatar has possessed the Secretary of Defense ! ( We should be so lucky)

CENTCOM.mil has translated beheading lunatic Abu Musab Zarqawi’s latests screed – where he aims a large amount of rhetorical fire at Iraqi nationalists and salafis.

That’s it.