{"id":3568,"date":"2010-10-17T03:56:42","date_gmt":"2010-10-17T03:56:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3568"},"modified":"2010-10-17T03:56:42","modified_gmt":"2010-10-17T03:56:42","slug":"guest-post-blip-02-anecdote-before-statistic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=3568","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Blip 02: Anecdote before Statistic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Charles Cameron<\/strong><\/a> is\u00a0the regular guest-blogger\u00a0at Zenpundit,<\/strong> and has also posted\u00a0at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism,<\/strong> for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable<\/strong> and elsewhere.<\/strong>\u00a0 Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford<\/strong>, under AE Harvey<\/strong>, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies<\/a><\/strong> and the Senior Analyst<\/strong> with the\u00a0Arlington Institute<\/a>:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Anecdote Before Statistic<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Charles Cameron<\/strong><\/p>\n

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<\/a>, was:<\/p>\n

Armies break anecdotally before they break statistically<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Scales was discussing the dispiriting recent upwards trend in Army suicides, which has been discussed here and elsewhere \u2013 but that’s not what caught my eye or triggered the mini-avalanche.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

My own focus is on anecdotes, not data points \u2013 on individuals and their thoughts, rather than on groups and their statistics \u2013 and on the human, pattern-recognizing brain, rather than on high tech tools and their associated budgets.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Look: 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Charles Cameron is\u00a0the regular guest-blogger\u00a0at Zenpundit, and has also posted\u00a0at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,46,110,526,24,346,389,471,525,113,78,23,336,47,462,562,436],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-analytic","category-bias","category-charles-cameron","category-cognition","category-connectivity","category-counterintuitive","category-cultural-intelligence","category-epistemology","category-framing","category-ideas","category-insight","category-intellectuals","category-intelligence","category-metacognition","category-perception","category-psychology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3568\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}