As someone working in the intelligence community, Heurer’s work was mentioned this past week as something that should be mandatory for all employees to read.

I too am interested in your continued work in this area.

Thanks for the kind words. While I’ve read many of the authors Heuer cites (benefiting in part to my exposure to some of the greats of judgment and decision making at CMU), I didn’t realize until recently that they had such a following in the intelligence community.

The unfortunate paradox of researching cognitive biases is that we cannot overcome them through awareness alone. Despite all of my training, my instincts betray me unless I can recognize my own cognitive biases and overcome them through conscious rationality.

But as Heuer points out, there is hope. We’re sometime able to recognize others’ biases even though we are blinded by our own–which suggests an effective way to work in teams. We can also explore different framings of problems to overcome anchoring and other biases induced by framing.

My own hope is that software tools can help us through their own immunity to cognitive bias (which suggests that an ideal decision support agent should not to pass the Turing test). But that requires establishing enough rigor around our understanding of cognitive biases to make our tools serve effectively as rationality prostheses. Hopefully a vision that will drive the next generation of R&D in decision support systems.

Daniel

I enjoyed reading that and look forward to your continued examination of these topics. I studied Heuer in the mid 1980′s when he had a tiny following of grad students and professors at Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey (he would guest lecture from time to time). His writings had a huge impact on me, and I’ve often wondered why we humans have such a hard time learning those lessons. I wonder how Heuer would analyze the recent IndyMac meltdown for example. In hindsight the very smart leaders of that organization were making very dumb decisions and that was probably due to their biased assessment of what would happen in the future.

Anyway, this is a very important dialog and I would appreciate you continuing to examine these thoughts. And if your examination results in conclusions that make their way into the IT enterprise we will all benefit from them.

v/r,
Bob