CIA High Priest, Richards Heuer

CIA High Priest, Richards Heuer

The book

He wrote the authoritative book on the subject, “The Psychology of Intelligence Analysis.”  You can download the PDF version of the book free from the CIA, here.

My specialty is Engineering Technical Analysis, and I have learned a lot from this book on Intelligence Analysis.  Analysis as a subject can be cross-functional from many areas of study and practice.

The CIA developed several analytical techniques because they make policy recommendations to places like the military and to executives in the government, and even Congress.  These recommendations can have serious consequences – costly consequences if they are wrong.  So, the CIA has a high interest in analytical techniques that are very reliable.  Theories and policies here cost dollars and cents – and lives in many cases.

Just Enough Information (Then stop!)

With the advent of large databases, what are we to do with them?  Actually, nothing.  Information is not important unless it drives a decision.  Driving a decision takes much less information that one would think.  Furthermore, using all information available makes the decision-making process more error prone when the analyst moves past the critical amount of sufficient information.  More data is bad – very bad.

Some people call it Analysis Paralysis.  Too much data will overwhelm your mental faculties and you will begin to make serious errors in judgment, or fail to act completely.

Disprove Everything

If you can recall our discussion on science here, you will know that Karl Popper told us that we cannot prove anything in science; we can only disprove things in science.  Heuer created a straight-forward tool to use this concept in practice call the “Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.”  You can use the tool yourself with a simple piece of paper or a spreadsheet.  See how to do it from the CIA website, here.

The idea is that evidence can support almost an infinite amount of hypotheses, thus, if your theory has “supporting evidence,” so does perhaps 10 others using the same evidence.  What we are doing here is trying to list as many hypotheses that we think are viable, and then we seek to disprove every one of them.  Are you a real scientist?  Are you a fake?  This separates the men from the mice.  Show me how many hypotheses you have disproven in your path to your favorite hypothesis.  What evidence will disprove your hypothesis?  If this is not stated clearly, you are a fake, or at the least, you do shoddy, inferior work.

Implications for Science

We are told that the Scientific Method is what scientists use.  However, a core piece of the puzzle is evidence that will disprove a hypothesis.  Every “scientific” endeavor must define what evidence will disprove the theories.

Next time you hear someone talking about “science,” ask them to clearly define what evidence will disprove their theories.  There is no excuse, since Heuer has clearly defined the procedure and made it easy for all of us to do with his magisterial Analysis of Competing Hypotheses.

Get the book and use the techniques.

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Freddy Martini