Hacker News Reader

> I believe the proper term for tbinking about thinking is meta-cognition. I find it odd that the CIA would avoid using the proper term.

A large part of "intelligence analysis" is just using domain-specific knowledge to take primary sources and translate/summarize them, such that you remove the need for others to have domain-specific knowledge in understanding that data.

As such, if you're pedantically using ten-dollar words just because they're "correct", you're not doing your job as an analyst.

High-level IA is about other things, but that doesn't mean you unlearn the skills you have ground into you as a desk worker.

Correct me if I am wrong, but the primary role of IC analysis is to connect dots that other "lay people" / "civilians" might not normally see. To cross bounds and span silos, etc. in other to add value.

That being said, if this book is afraid to venture outside its safe zone (and mention meta-congition, even in a passing reference) then this book, by defintion, has failed to do what IC analysis is supposed to do. Ironic, huh.

I think it's ssafe to say history is on the side of my analysis of this analysis ;)

> I think it's ssafe to say history is on the side of my analysis of this analysis ;)

You’ve provided no examples to support this conclusion.

Um. The a good number of the known IC mis-analysises are fairly obvious.

If you believe there was Russian election hacking, start there and work your way back. A highlight going back would be the CIA training of UBL. The IC was instrumental in escalating the Vietnam War. Etc.

If the IC's job is to think about thining the unthinkable, they have in fact come up short in a big way often enough. I sincerely didn't think stating the obvious was kosher on HN. Sorry.

The concern you voiced is expected and addressed in the preface of the book:

The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.

The result is a compromise that may not be wholly satisfactory to either research psychologists or intelligence analysts. Cognitive psychologists and decision analysts may complain of oversimplification [...]

Think about the countless examples of individuals successfully publishing papers, in a variety of different academic fields, that were intentionally nonsensical or absurd. A big part of the reason they were able to do this is because academia has turned towards excessive use of jargon and estoteric language, even when it's completely arbitrary and serves no purpose other than to try to signal 'hey look how smart I am.' But the point is that as this language seeps into papers, what is actually said becomes ever more difficult to discern and bad logic can be masked in a guise of smart sounding language. And as the fake papers illustrate, this deception works even against experts in the field, or at least related fields.

So back to metacognition. This is clearly phrased in a way everybody can understand as 'thinking about thinking.' The latter is, at worst, slightly more verbose. By contrast let's consider another fairly esoteric term such as 'cognitive dissonance.' There is really no way effectively communicate and convey the idea of cognitive dissonance, with all its nuance, in a comparably brief phrase so it makes sense to use the word. But metacognition? It's really just taking a simple concept and replacing it with a fancy sounding word.

I don't know why we do this in so many fields. It just creates artificial barriers to communication and clear conveyance of ideas.

Exactly. Every time I read this Academia mambo-jambo I get an instance Will Hunting flashback. Please, speak, as you might, to a young child. Or a Golden Retriever. Then you have me listening.

That's a quote from Margin Call - I watched it again last week.

As an analyst, using the "right term" is down at about the very bottom of my list of things to do, especially in the form of a book.

More important is communication to your audience, and in that respect "meta-cognition" is pretty awful vocabulary that strongly limits your audience in this case.

I see it differently. Meta-congition is fairly straightforward. You have meta, we know what that is. And we have cognition. Again, obvious.

Put another way, if you're in the IC or getting info from the IC and the use of the word / concept meta-cognition scares you then something is very very wrong.

The audience here isn't TMZ viewers. Is it?

You know what's even more straightforward than "metacognition"? "Thinking about thinking".

Who was the famous thinker who said less words are better?

And please see my comment up a level but still below my original comment. Long to story, the IC, by definition, shouldn't be afraid to use the word meta-cognition; it ultimately exposes its analysts to another area of study that could / would broaden then. The irony being, this is what this book is championing.

If the IC is too good for dog fooding then we're all in big trouble.

Imagine someone coming up to you with no internet available and asks you, "What is metacognition?". What would be your answer?

Isn't that easy to understand the meaning of the whole word if you just try to understand the parts? If someone is not educated, you just explain the meaning of "meta" and "cognition" and after that they can just infer the meaning by themselves. These are relatively popular words.

Not educated? Wouldn't that then be:

Not Thinking About Thinking?

IDK. Given the intended audience, as well as the general process / mindset he's championing I don't ssee how meta-cognition is a tough word. I mean, if you don't know it doesn't that literally force you to reconsider your thinking.

Meta-cognition - given the source, the target audience, the subject matter and the context is hardly a fancy word.

There are a lot of people who do not know the meaning of the word "meta" nor of the word "cognition".

Now, "cognition" is an easy enough word to define to an acceptable approximation (namely by giving the synonym "thinking").

However, "meta" is a concept less frequently encountered (or at least, explicitly described) in everyday life, and would probably require a few examples to convey. Part of the issue is that you are defining the general concept of "X relating to X" in order to describe the specific case of "Thinking relating to thinking".

If your listener already has the concept "meta", then, yes, this is fine, but if they don't then you are like the mathematician attempting to define the most abstract version of a problem to the physicist who only wants to solve a single, specific case.

> There are a lot of people who do not know the meaning of the word "meta" nor of the word "cognition"."

Yes. Of course there are. But if those people exist within the target market for the material then challenging them to look beyond their own (thinking) bounds is __exactly__ what he's prescribing, yes?

And not challenging / the status quo is exact opposite.

> "meta-cognition" is pretty awful vocabulary that strongly limits your audience

We actually use this as a strategy in my project. When talking to sponsors, funders, etc, we use very plain language: "We are going to X to Y all Z". In the real version, the average number of syllables is less than 1.5 and the longest word has 3 syllables.

But the claim is pretty outrageous so they also want to know the money is going to serious effort. To verify that, they want external validation, so we have to publish peer-reviewed papers. Those papers are loaded with jargon from multiple fields and we intentionally emphasize the lowest possible performance metrics so almost no one is really going to understand how insanely good the results are, and how impactful they are to the domain in question.

Nobody understands meta cognition. Thinking about thinking is pretty much as clear an expression as one can get.

The preference of "correct terms" that no one understands (or uses) over simple phrasing is an Academic habit, which should be avoided (and actively condemned) when possible.

His target market isn't children. It's not too much to expect him to name the proper term in passing. Even a title of:

Meta-cognition: Thinking About Thinking

would have been appropriate. Certainly better than:

Thinking About Thinking (But Don't Think Too Much)

as seems to be implied by some.

>That aside, it's difficult, if not impossible for us "on the outside" to judge the value of these concept to the IC as we only get to know what the IC wants us to know. They're playing the long game. They're playing chess.

"In a game of chess, you must never let your opponent see your pieces", as renowned military strategist Z. Brannigan said.

Thinking about thinking is a much more powerful concept than meta-cognition. Its much more open-ended and unpredictable and sets you free. Meta-cognition instantly lock you into academic semantics, the last place you want to find yourself if you have to think about a very open ended world.