Blinking in the headlights

I went to see a retired general named Paul Van Riper speak last week. He led the "enemy" in a war simulation conducted in 2002 to test the military's new theories about information awareness in achieving victory in war. He beat the "good" team pretty spectacularly by using their expectations against them. I remember reading about this in the papers when it happened. Then, the orders came down from above that the game was being reset so that the "good" team could win and the Pentagon could announce the success of its new theories and apply them to Iraq. If this sounds like a load of crap to you, welcome to the neocons' America.

There's a chapter on Van Riper in the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. It's about "rapid cognition", and the ability we all seem to have to make snap judgments that are as accurate as reasoned positions in some circumstances. Some people appear to be better at this than others, but it's Gladwell's position that this can be used to improve behavior as long as there are constraints applied that are designed to mitigate unconscious prejudices that color our responses. It's a fascinating book, and very well-written.

But one of the most interesting things about it is the author's tackling of the limits of rapid cognition. Instead of brushing them aside, or trying to reduce their significance, he really delves into the evidence that our snap judgments are often wrong when they are made unconstrained, so to speak. Since he's advocating more use of them in the decision-making processes we engage in as a society, this carries a real risk of undermining his argument. I have to applaud him for being intellectually honest and not shirking his duty to the audience.

By the way, I collared the general after his speech to ask him if he saw any coordination between the political and military arms in the U.S. government's response to Islamist militarism, to which he responded "No, not at all." This is hugely discouraging, coming from someone in such a position to know the facts of the situation.