"The Narrative" Is the Enemy of Truth and Fact

Interesting piece by Richard Fernandez, which I think is a little bit hinky in some of the connections it makes, but still makes some great points.

You can read the short version at Instapundit.

Despite an abundance of suggestive information, the FBI seemed singularly unable to see Tsarnaev as a threat. Part of the reason, according to the Washington Examiner, was that blindness was engineered into the system. The agents were trained not to see it.

It is quite possible, though, the FBI agents who interviewed Tsarnaev on both occasions failed to understand what they saw and heard because that’s what they were trained to do. As The Washington Examiner’s Mark Flatten reported last year, FBI training manuals were systematically purged in 2011 of all references to Islam that were judged offensive by a specially created five-member panel. Three of the panel members were Muslim advocates from outside the FBI, which still refuses to make public their identities. Nearly 900 pages were removed from the manuals as a result of that review. Several congressmen were allowed to review the removed materials in 2012, on condition that they not disclose what they read to their staffs, the media, or the general public.

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But to really learn you have to be prepared to listen to what you don’t want to hear. The future only contains new information if it tells you something you don’t know. But bureaucracies want to make all new knowledge predictable, consistent with the existing narrative. And homogenization destroys information.

I'll direct you to the article itself to read about his likening of the preordained conclusions of corporate-like institutions, where conclusions are foreordained and all "truth" must be reached by focus-group analysis and a consensus of various heads of department, to a two-headed coin. A coin where every flip yields "heads" as a result. Making it useless as far as resolving issues.

He continues:

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What creates sameness is ideology. Ideology by definition reduces the range of responses to situations and limits the ways in which we can decode and encode messages to politically correct outcomes.

The model eventually becomes robust enough to reject information that doesn't fit the model, and ultimately there is no new information, just further reiterations of the model's one permitted outcome.

There's more there, including some kind of computer program which actually seems to be artificially intelligent, or at least possessing one of the central (if not the central) element of true intelligence, self-motivation, self-assignment of personally-chosen goals.

I think there's a lot of stuff here to chew over.

posted by Ace at 03:31 PM

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