Sweet Angelique / Obama and the drone files

I just woke up running. I was late for my job at some sort of industrial facility. I had eaten breakfast at their commissary in the yard, and had thought I had plenty of time, then suddenly the gates were lowering. It was a zero tolerance place for tardiness. The gates all came all the way down, and I would have been walking home for the day with no pay except that one of the supervisors was fooling around and reopened one of the gates. As I and one other person ducked under and tried to hustle to our start positions… we were both strangely stricken. Our legs wouldn’t move. We were both leaning over on one arm trying to walk. I was yelling to my co-worker, jeez, when I don’t have to be anywhere I can walk just fine…

It was the special paralysis that holds one’s limbs still when one is asleep, so that one does not sleepwalk or run into walls. I’ve had this happen quite a few times when waking, but so far I have never recognized the sign. I’ve just thought I was very old, or far gone in cardiac deconditioning, or something.

Funny thing: At this moment my leg muscles still ache with the phantom strain, quite palpably. As far as they know, a moment ago they were straining hard trying to walk through invisible wet cement.

***

Good. It’s only 4:30 in the morning, but I have taken my morning ADD pill. There are some things that have been building up to write about, like… (Ha. I just looked up “bolus,” and it does not mean what I thought it meant. Never mind then.)

There are some things in our lives, in our everyday lives and in our mass life, that are like a runaway dog. They are important things, and they are not where they should be, and they are running wild.

(The first morning bird has started piping, with the first hint of that deepest blue glow in the sky.)

***

As I vacillate over what I should write about first, the general picture or the specific case that has been bugging me: A certain Angelique paid me a wonderful compliment three weeks ago. I was not expecting it at all. I have never been sure what she makes of me; I am fonder of her than I can say, and we do get on all right, but we don’t have identical styles – they don’t so much match as gyre and gimble – and at one point I was pretty sure I was totally incomprehensible to her and creeped her out and she was just too afraid or nice to tell me so. (In fact, I got so certain of this that I actually got absolutely furious at her for not telling me and just allowing me to go on with my pronoid-narcissistic illusion that we were lovely friends because it was easiest! I very nearly went and read her the riot act about it! :o) Life is a mirror maze.)

She said:

I’ve been thinking about you lately, too. You’re one of the only *truly thinking* people I know at the moment- or at least one of the only people speaking his mind, and asking questions.

I am at the moment staying up til ungodly hours of the morning watching various things on YouTube… Would absolutely love to have massive chat with you- ideally in person while on acid. Lol

The acid part may really be the best part; if you’ll do acid with someone… well, you’d rather not be there with just anyone. But the “truly thinking” thing… I cannot think of another compliment that would be simultaneously so warming and, with the “one of the only”, so colossally depressing.

Thank you, Angie. You seem to be one too, actually. :o) Or I don’t think you’d have noticed me trying to be one, for one thing.

Now let’s see if this is the sort of morning where I actually earn that…

***

I’ll do the specific first.

Ever since I read the New York Times story that revealed that President Obama has been personally approving all of the drone strikes, something has been bothering me. And it has not been something that I have seen anyone talking about.

There are obviously multiple things to be bothered by about the drone strikes, and that bother me. The deaths of bystanders; the peculiar and probably contrived undercounting of dead bystanders; the secrecy; the unaccountability; the fact that people have been and will continue to be sufficiently enraged by these flying murdering robots to decide to attack us back. Let’s take those things as read. I am taking about this specific business of President Obama deciding to personally check each proposed drone strike and approve it.

This is what I think: President Obama should not be doing that. He is making a fundamental mistake.

I don’t say that because the intelligence on each specific drone strike, the intelligence about the target, the chance of innocent bystanders being killed, and so on should not be carefully checked and judged.

I say it because it should be carefully checked and judged.

Look: You’re President Obama. You’re in charge. The way in which you have your selections be as accurate as possible, with multiple priorities applying and with the stakes high and with incomplete and possibly confusing information, is that you work out very specific and exacting criteria and matrices and policies. You refine those policies depending on what happens. And you check whether or not those criteria and those procedures are being followed, and how well they’re being followed. You can do this.

The one thing you must not do to address this and make sure it’s done properly is to “take this delicate business in-house” – that is, look at the files and make the decisions yourself.

Because that is where (and I exaggerate only slightly, and I’m not completely sure that I am exaggerating) every smart person goes wrong.

Because you are not a carefully weighed, nitpickingly specific, statistical and procedural bureaucratic model. You are you.

And you are not magically rational.

Really. President Obama is not, and you are not, and I am not. There aren’t “the rational people and the irrational people,” us the cognoscenti and those others – that is the whole point and problem of rationality. We are all the irrational people; we are all those others.

We are all sailing by, and wielding our little tools of evaluation in accordance with, our senses of plausibility and proportion… and our senses of plausibility and proportion are hallucination machines. And, to the extent that you are using yourself because you are such a fine rational person and you want it done right, you are completely in the grip of confirmation bias, which is, above all, confirmation that you are being this fine rational person as you go along. If you rely on your good judgment, you are listening to your own lute-playing minstrel, and I don’t care how good your record has been; that’s what got you relying on your good judgment.

People with good judgment do not rely on their good judgment; they are people with good judgment because, if, and precisely when they do particular quite specific things that are what good judgment is. The other … is maya. And it’s the so-welcoming sea we swim in.

What is President Obama going to do when he looks over these files? Files prepared by others in which the summary has been stacked up toward a conclusion, but that will look professionally well done? With him having the say? He’s going to do what you or I would do. He’s going to look at the files, and he’s going to “weigh” things, and a little flag is going to pop up in his head that says either “seems legit” or “doesn’t seem legit.” And that flag is not guided by highest-level specific processes, because it isn’t. Because it never is.

He might be able to craft or have others craft that detailed set of criteria, and check on it and enforce its use by his subordinates. That’s doable. But he himself, ruling himself? That’s a different thing. It is a mistake to do it himself to make sure good judgment is used.

Gentle Patient Reader, I am not in truth getting it across here; please read or at least skim one or two of the papers I’ll link at the end, so that you can get an idea of what an utter flotsam-on-the-waves madhouse is subjective judgment!

And then there’s the other thing.

The problems of subjectivity and particularly of confirmation bias are bound up with ego. They can’t not be. And that poses another problem.

President Obama, in setting and watching and judging policy, has to judge the drone strikes and the drone program as a whole. This is an essential part of his responsibilities and his function. If he is personally signing off on each particular strike, having judged it…

… then he is in the position of having to weigh and judge and try to think critically about – not just the program and its outcomes and effects – but the specific times that he, himself, has decided to pull the trigger!

It’s different. It can’t not be.

I’ll repeat it, and I’m having trouble leaving out profanity and obscenity for emphasis:

President Obama should not be personally approving every drone strike! It is a mistake.

It’s exactly the sort of mistake that a smart person makes. “I’ll take care of it myself. To avoid sloppiness and unnecessary stupidity by poor thinkers with tunnel vision.”

***

That’s really the thing. For all the talk about the irrational people and the poor thinkers whom we see around us, for all our observation and analysis of what they get wrong, if we are not ourselves aware that we are just as bad as they are, just as bad as they are, then we are just as bad as they are.

Really. You. You do not have common sense. Yes, you who I find worth talking to and put on my Bookmarks list, you with all your fine qualities, you do not have common sense. You do not have a well-trained intellect – not the way you are going to think you do. You might – it is on the edge of truth and of possibility – get the nervous habit of thinking that there are certain things that you have to go through and do in certain situations. And you should. You should try to. Those things are the necessary things. Those things are the whole subject. But you will not always do them… you definitely do not automatically do them… and you absolutely do not train your mind to be doing those things and factoring them in without your thinking about it so that you can now trust your judgment!

I am an addled wanderer with a poor memory, so I generate aphorisms compulsively to try to help myself along. One that I have been thinking about is, “The one thing you must have critical thinking about is critical thinking.”

Unfortunately that aphorism isn’t going to help.

Because the enemy is in charge.

I’m going to put up the links now, and I think I’ll follow them with a dark horse surprise. But one thing that I have found over and over in pieces like these, and that you’ll find mentioned more than once in these ones, is a reality and obsessive justified worry, that has been mine as well since way back: It can be a very bad thing for a person to learn about biases and about problems with critical thinking.

A very central example is confirmation bias – the tendency to notice, look for, and seek out information that confirms what one presently thinks, that confirms that one is right and has been right all along. A person who learns what confirmation bias is… can begin diagnosing confirmation bias everywhere, most particularly in arguments that he or she disagrees with. This person’s own confirmation bias has been made more bulletproof. This person has just become stupider, invisibly to himself or herself.

I have seen this happen over and over and over on the internet, and have been eating my heart out over it. Ditto with the whole range of other known named biases. People discussing the delusive bias phenomena clearly shown by the opposing side, in high scholarly wordy I’m-beating-them-to-death-with-my-Ph.D prose… and saying that this entirely disposes of what they were talking about when it doesn’t, and wouldn’t even if the bias were carefully detected, which it generally isn’t. This is a disaster. An utter disaster for critical thinking.

It is necessary to understand two things:

1. Any of this is only useful if, and to the extent that, it is aimed at oneself. That is the only important thing about it. It is a horror otherwise.

2. That it is necessary to consciously engage with “opposing” arguments, or arguments that aren’t yours, in their strongest possible form, as strong as you can find. Meaning that you try to find substance in them besides the bias you think you see, that you actually go and try to find supporting evidence for them that the proponents didn’t put in, etc. Because the temptation and undertow will always be the other way, to engage with their weakest and most obviously fallacious and mistaken forms. I once wrote a whole paper more or less just on the various reasons why this is necessary to do, but what matters is just the specific, concrete attempted practise.

(And then other things after that. For that matter, 3. It is more important to know what is wrong with “your own” position, what is uncertain about it, what facts are uneasy or inconvenient for it, and so on, than it is to know the reasons that show it’s right. You’ll construct your own asking-both-questions-and-answers self-consistent closed box anyway. We all do. You won’t stop. You cannot stop. That’s why you should try to put your conscious effort the other way. What you need to try to find and know is the things that could make you potentially wrong. That’s the only chance that your opinion has of genuinely depending on actual reasons. Otherwise it is not going to.) (An image I sometimes think of: What’s the important part of a knife? Not all the solid metal. Only the edge – only the place where it encounters what isn’t it.)

I am too minded to expand both of the previous two paragraphs into essays in themselves. But here are the things I really wanted you to read – and, actually, if I could make a request, to pass on to others, particularly the first couple:

“Cogitive Biases Potentially Affecting Assessment of Global Risks”, by Eliezer Yudkowsky (PDF)

“Why Smart People Are Stupid”, by Jonah Lehrer

“How Makers of Foreign Policy Use Statistical Forecasts: They Don’t, Really”, by DARTTHROWINGCHIMP (not as core as the last two, but relevant to same picture)

And the dark-horse entry I was thinking of: the action crime-caper film (or is it that?) Revolver, with Jason Statham. Yes, it is relevant. If you don’t feel like reading a damn PDF, but you’re ready for a nice movie in the evening, go for that one.

***

I read a lot, struggle to keep up with some things… yes. But there’ll always be uncertainty, and there has to be. It is a concern how well one is doing “rationality” compared to the pack (never mind the Dunning-Kruger effect). It should be a concern. But if I was going to daydreamingly self-strokingly suppose that an alien brain-scan would peer into all of our dreaming minds and discover me to be better in this respect than a lot of others… when, exactly, would that actually be true? Bleeping when?

Not all the time. Not even close; not even vaguely. It’s not like that.

(Mostly I have a headful of dumbfounded impressions based on vague memories and “ersatz direct seeing” moviemaking and nothing. And my exceptions? What difference do my canned exceptions make?)

Angie, I love you. And I’m … trying. I’m really trying.