Understanding Human Stupidity through Strategic Intelligence Failures
Or, Understanding the Micro through the Macro
Carlo M. Cippola, in his essay The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, identifies five universal constants of idiocy:
1. Always and inevitably every one underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation
2. The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person
3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals
5. A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Cippola further illustrates stupidity through four human character types:
The Helpless: They are those who are unable to help themselves and require assistance from others. They are not capable of causing harm to others and are often the victim of the Bandit. They cause benefit to others while incurring loss to themselves.
The Bandit: They are those who cause harm to others while deriving a benefit for themselves. They are intelligent and capable of causing harm to others. Coppola notes that their villainy is at least minimally economically efficient: a gain is counterbalanced by a loss.
The Intelligent: They are those who cause benefits to others while deriving a benefit for themselves (society being a non-zero-sum game)
The Stupid: They are those who cause losses to others while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses. They are not capable of causing benefits to others.
There are crossovers and edge cases as well, like the Helpless/Intelligent and the Stupid/Bandit (possibly the worst of all). But all of this, while insightful and funny, leaves the deeper question unanswered: what is stupidity?
I propose to borrow a technique from Plato’s Republic, and investigate the micro by means of the macro. In that work, Plato sought to understand justice in the individual soul through understanding justice in a state. Likewise, I will analyze human stupidity through its macro manifestation: strategic intelligence failures.
On Strategic Intelligence Failures and Why They Are Inevitable
Strategic intelligence failures happen when a nation state or corporation is unable to understand and prepare for changes in their operating environment: a surprise attack (Pearl Harbour, the September 11, 2001 attacks), a geopolitical change (the collapse of the Soviet Union), or an innovation by a rival that upsets an entire strategic equilibrium (Blackberry and other mobile device producers failure to prepare for or counter the iPhone). They are failures, and thus culpable - in a way being killed by ingesting cyanide in your Tylenol is not - because protection of the state and its people, or the corporation and its shareholders value, is part of the very definition of a state. Nation states employ specialized civil servants, many with access to covert information, whose stated job is the prevention of strategic surprise. Indeed, the US Central Intelligence Agency's whole reason for being was, explicitly, to prevent another Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack - which it succeeded right from its founding through September 10th, 2001.
Strategic Intelligence failures have been very common throughout the history of nation states. Indeed, one of the primary ways citizens and historians learn what their governments have been doing in the shadows is when these failures happen, and the dirty laundry of the intelligence services is hauled out before the world in public inquiries.
Every failure, with loss of life, treasure, economic opportunity, and strategic influence, causes people to ask the question, how can we do better?
The Intelligence Cycle
To understand how the failures happen, you need to know how things are supposed to work. The ideal is represented by the Intelligence Cycle:
(1) Planning and Direction: leaders, political and organizational, set goals for their intelligence services, such as
When will our adversaries gain the ability to attack our homeland?
What is the extent of foreign influence operations within our democracy?
How great a threat does the growing economy of hostile Country X pose to our own national security and economic well being?
(2) Collection: with guidance from (1), specialized collectors of intelligence (a.k.a. spies) set out to find out what they can, whether through human sources (HUMINT), interception of communications (COMINT), satellite or high-altitude reconnaissance (IMINT), and a plethora or others.
(3) Processing and Exploitation: Information is collected together and filtered - removing the satellite photographs where the target was enshrouded in clouds, holding back testimony by sources judged unreliable (or flagging it as questionable), running hydrophone recordings through audio filters to remove background noise.
(4) Analysis and Production: professional analysts examine the processed intelligence, compare it to other sources and past collection efforts, and make conclusions based on it, which are put into intelligence products - reports, presentations, short films, emails, and the like. Fun fact: much of the present cognitive bias literature owes its origin to studies funded by the US Intelligence Community and Department of Defense to understand how and why intelligence analyses seemed so often failing to be failing.
(5) Dissemination: after the analysts have done their work, senior officials at their agencies supervise the combination and distillation of the various reports, and distribute them to decision makers: heads of departments, military officials, and the nation's political leadership.
It's a cycle because the process is continuous and overlapping: different tasking-collection-analysis-distribution cycles are starting and ending. There is also backtracking, where analysts will ask questions of collectors, or collectors will communicate new capabilities to taskers, which in turn can produce new demands for intelligence.
Richard K. Betts’ “Analysis, Decision, and War: Why Intelligence Failures are Inevitable", surveys the different ways intelligence failures can happen. The most commonly reported ones, and the most publicly known, are failures within the collection-analysis-distribution section of the intelligence cycle. This is where reform efforts are almost always targeted. If only we had had sufficient (read: massively more expensive) satellite reconnaissance, if only our analysts were not blinded by preconceptions, if only the writers of the President’s Daily Brief had been more forceful in underlining the threat.
Betts describes this theory of failure as Pathologies of Communication - the bureaucratically imposed difficulties of finding out what is happening, recognizing it as significant, and reporting it clearly to those who are in a position to make a decision. And these challenges are very real and not small. When collection efforts produce too much data to be turned into knowledge, people die. When agencies guard turf and will not share information with their peers, people die. When someone in charge of distribution won't pass on an analysts hunch, even one backed by strong data that is disconfirming of the competing hypotheses, people die.
The problem, Betts says, is that this isn't the only cause of intelligence failures, nor the most consequential. The real destroyer, Betts argues at length, is with the taskers, the ultimate consumers of intelligence, those with whom “the buck stops.”
Professional, carefully considered intelligence is difficult, and honest reporting is full of caveats, exceptions, and a tangle of explicit and implicit assumptions. For political leaders, who need to produce consensus to carry out policies, this is maddening. Betts quotes Lyndon Johnson, at a dinner with his Director of Central Intelligence:
“Policy making is like milking a fat cow. You see the milk coming out, you press more and the milk bubbles and flows, and just as the bucket is full, the cow with its tail whips the bucket and all is spilled. That's what CIA does to policy making.”
Betts essay is as pessimistic as its title. There is, inherent in hierarchical organizations - probably the most effective means for accomplishing anything big in the world in a coordinated way - pressures on decision makers that make the task of advising them, while not fruitless, unavoidably difficult . Strictly blaming one part of the system, signaling it out for a dressing down and deep reform, misses the very fact the problem is systemic: decision makers never have enough time to process all the available information. When they do have time, processing is deferred or extended until the point there is no time. There is almost always plenty of ‘intelligence’ in strategic intelligence failures, just no intelligence in its application.
The problem is the natural habit of leaders, who rarely get into their positions from being bad at leading, to insist upon a clarity and directness, a blindingly obviously Go or No Go from the intelligence that honest analysis cannot provide.
On Individual Human Stupidity
What can all of this tell, or at least suggest, to us about human stupidity? The striking fact about intelligence failures, when appraised honestly, is that there is (contrary to popilar imagination and narratives) rarely some single point of failure to point to: a technical apparatus that failed to perform, an analyst to fire, or a leader to vote out of office.
I believe something similar is happening when we humans act stupidly. From Cippola, I take the idea that stupidity is best understood as causing loss to others without compensatory gain to oneself. Indeed, one might be the primary loser in the situation. The drunk driver who kills a family, the tyrant who will accept neither criticism nor even information contrary to the policy he wants to pursue, the “wait, hold my beer” of endless stupid antics: none of these persons gained by their stupidity. So that’s how we can identify cases, but its not quite specific enough.
Stupidity is not the lack of intelligence - education, information, raw processing ability, imagination, problem solving acumen - but the misuse of it. If someone simply is not capable of understanding that drinking and driving will lead, in time, to accidents, then they are disabled, not stupid. Similarly, no one is stupid who cannot do ten-digit division in their head: it's just not in the usual equipment a human being needs for successful living.
One of the things a brain is good for is figuring out how to survive and thrive in your environment. Going around the intelligence cycle, we have the higher brain functions, Planning and Direction, which sets the goals - conscious or not - of equilibrium maintenance, pursuit of food, safety, companionship, and reproduction. The collectors are the senses, which both alert the brain to changes in the environment. They also filter the input that is commonplace or unremarkable, keeping the brain attentive to differences (at least those above a certain threshold)
The judgment is Analysis and Production, taking in information from various senses, comparing it to memory, and reporting it to the tasking intelligence. The functions of the distributors, is where the analogy starts to break down. How and wherefore thoughts, imaginings, concepts, plans, and ideas pass into and through our conscious minds is a mystery of the mind that is both the most common thing in human existence, so common as to pass basically without comment from anyone during the day.
Breakdowns can happen at many points, but I would hesitate to call any one of them stupid: Intense focus on something leading to neglect of a danger - crashing your car because you were, in terror, trying to shoo a wasp out the window - is a phobia or a cognitive malfunction, not necessarily culpable stupidity. Failure to consider all the evidence is not stupidity when there is simply too much information to process in the time available.
(I suppose it is preferable to the alternative, but I have always found it farcical when doctors, in crisis situations, feel it necessary to minutely describe what they plan to do to scared and upset family members, when the choice is often down to “should I try to save your relative’s life or not, with X percent odds of success of 1-X odds of failure?”
Failures to synthesize and distill information are again not stupidity when one lacks the training or time to do so.
Where fault becomes stupidity is when one has a brain but uses it for the wrong things. To not have enough information to make an information medical decision in an emergency is tragic. To not have enough time to study before the exam, having known the exam was coming for two months, is stupid. Much of the time, when we are being truly stupid (and note, dear reader, I do not here indulge in the audience flattering “but of course, that is only those other people…”) we are choosing - for the sake of present pleasures over future gains, in order to hurt others even when it costs us in the long term, for the conscious maintenance of illusions - and we are choosing deliberately. The buck stops with the decisive faculty, and the choice to use it or not, and that choice is ours.
On Caution When Judging Acts to Be Stupid
Along with evil, malicious, self-centered, deluded, and greedy, “stupid” is our society's go-to insult for people and policies we don't like. Sometimes we are polite and label things as “irrational” or “insane.” This is especially common in politics, and an excellent way not to engage with the issues at hand or enter into honest, truth finding debate.
The above analysis, I think, should caution us against applying the label stupid too broadly. I recall, though I am not going to bother looking it up, an anthropology essay describing present time bias among poor people in third world countries. Given a small windfall, or a cash stipend from their government or an NGO, these people, time and again, would blow the money on some small pleasure rather than save or invest it. Poor people in the First World do this as well, constantly, which makes dealing with the impoverished an often exasperating task.
Its easy to criticize such behavior as stupid, but its stupid, a blindness to future opportunity. But if one takes the point of view of poor people seriously, its not so surprising: if your life, as you have lived it, and as all of your peers live it, is governed by seemingly out of the blue catastrophes - sickness, unemployment, interpersonal violence - then long-term investing, whether of money in a bank account or time and effort in education - can seem foolish. The most controllable time is the short time, the now and pretty immediately after now. It takes actual lived experience to convince someone that the future can be regular, predictable, and offer rewards for planning and foresight.
Similarly, when we see people promoting policies we think are stupid, we have to look at the incentives they face. If there’s no penalty for being wrong, if holding the view helps you fit in with your friends and social class, then its easy to hold luxury beliefs whatever the objective evidence exists for or against them. Indeed, certain kinds of stupid beliefs can only really be held by the intelligent. As I recall it being remarked of a Communist: “You must be very smart to believe something so stupid.”
We should critique people - and for good measure ourselves - for not caring more about seeking out the truth, rather than taking the easy dopamine hit of insults and ridicule.1
Not that insults and ridicule don’t have their place. Richard Hanania makes his case for shaming and mockery as public health tools in his Fat Shaming & Free Will