Walter Watts
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virus: Confusing the unfamiliar with the improbable
« on: 2003-02-05 10:05:17 » |
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Excerpted from this month's New Yorker:
Read the whole article online at:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030210fa_fact
Walter
THE UNKNOWN
by JEFFREY GOLDBERG
The C.I.A. and the Pentagon take another look at Al Qaeda and Iraq.
Issue of 2003-02-10
Posted 2003-02-03
<snip>
In the foreword to Roberta Wohlstetter's classic 1962 study, "Pearl
Harbor: Warning and Decision," the national-security expert Thomas
Schelling wrote that America's ability to be surprised by the actions of
its enemies is the result of a "poverty of expectations." He went on,
"There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the
improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks
strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable
need not be considered seriously."
Wohlstetter's work revealed that Pearl Harbor was not much of a surprise
at all. It showed that the American government's fatal mistake was not a
failure to pick up signals-overheard conversations, decoded cables,
unusual ship movements-but a failure to separate out signals from noise,
to understand which signals were meaningful, and to imagine that the
Japanese might do something as irrational as attacking the headquarters
of the U.S. Pacific fleet. In other words, the Americans heard the
signals but didn't listen to them.
<snip>
--
Walter Watts
Tulsa Network Solutions, Inc.
"No one gets to see the Wizard! Not nobody! Not no how!"
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