Busy, Busy, Busy

What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

By Elton Beard
There are two kinds of people in the world, those who divide people into two kinds and those who don't. I don't.

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ARCHIVE

Friday, November 22, 2002
4:45 PM PT

Do you think the mainstream media is predominantly (a) Liberal, (b) Conservative or (c) Neutral? That is the question at the Lou Dobbs CNN Moneyline QuickVote poll today. As of this writing, 65% of the voters assert that the media is predominantly Liberal. You can let Lou Dobbs know what you think here. Dobbs will keep this poll open for voting all weekend.

Hey, it's a high-volume day, and I have lemons...

8:45 AM PT

Error!
Truth Maintenance: OOPS! No, I'm not referring to Object Oriented Programming Systems, I mean a big OOPS, as in my mistake! Darius Bacon, who knows his AI, has exposed a serious goof in my previous article - it turns out that truth maintenance is a well-known (except to me) Artificial Intelligence technique for pruning conflicting deduced or otherwise derived information from a knowledge base. So this particular sample technology from the IAO list, at least, is not as sinister as it sounds -it is legitimately a technique of information gathering, not dissemination.

I'm still a bit puzzled by the "storytelling" bit - this is an AI concept as well, but one that has to do with understanding how to generate a (necessarily) incomplete narrative that can still convey a message that is comprehensible to humans. I suppose that story telling technology could be used to expose gaps in available information - i.e. try to put what you know together as a story, and then see what's missing - so I have to give this one the benefit of the doubt too.

That's not to say that the information-gathering capability of the IAO is not seriously problematic, just that my conclusion that the IAO would be also engaging in propaganda was not well-founded. I feel like such a nimnoo. And for making this mistake in an article that's been Tom Tomorrow'd, no less - I am sorry, sorry, sorry!

Wednesday, November 20, 2002

11:45 PM PT

The Ministry of Truth. The Defense Department Information Awareness Office has been raising some eyebrows lately over its plan to collect and analyze a great deal of information about the formerly private lives of American citizens. The IAO list of proposed technologies consists mostly of things more or less related to the collection and interpretation of data, but also includes this odd item:

Story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance.

Story telling and "truth maintenance" - the latter phrase would make Orwell jealous - are not, however, techniques of information gathering. Rather, these are elements of information manufacture, a function known as propaganda when not utilized by one's own government. Call me suspicious, but somehow this makes me think that the IAO intends not only to collect information but to generate information too. That is, to fabricate and disseminate for public consumption stories that convey government-certified truth. The news media has provided this service to the administration pretty reliably for some time now, but maybe they're ready to cut out the middleman.

John Poindexter

Karl Rove
I have one question, though. The Information Awareness Office is run by Ronald Reagan's former disinformation specialist and Iran/Contra co-conspirator John Poindexter, which may explain why it has been assigned to shape the public narrative. But isn't the task of making the people love Big Brother already being handled very effectively by Karl Rove?

[Addendum: more on IAO, including details of John Poindexter's astonishing career, can be found at The Situation Room - thanks, Maude! And thanks also to Patrick Nielsen Hayden who points out (so I don't have to) that Jim Henley was way ahead on this one.]

[Addendum II: oops! Don't miss the next article, in which I eat some serious crow over this one...]

Tuesday, November 19, 2002

4:00 PM PT

Josh Marshall
Little lies as foundation for bigger lies. Joshua Micah Marshall, who's essential Talking Points Memo was the direct inspiration and model for this site, wrote an article entitled Democrats: Wrong in Iraq in Salon last week. In it he mentioned that "inspectors got kicked out" of Iraq, a false statement that has been criticized on these pages when uttered by administration officials. Salon's alert readers noticed and complained in droves, leading Josh to publish a response, the crux of which is:

There is an element of technical accuracy to the objection to the use of "kicked out." But it's a semantic argument only, relying on a meaningless distinction.

Read the full text of his defense of that technical inaccuracy. Sounds somewhat convincing, right?

But here's the thing. If I understand correctly, Josh is kind-of sort-of reluctantly in favor of war with Iraq as a last resort if we can't otherwise prevent Saddam Hussein from obtaining nuclear weapons, which would be intolerable, and so even though he doesn't really trust this administration, well, at least they're our bastards. Fair enough. Not my position, but one that seems honestly arrived at. Coming as it does from a trusted source, his argument should be at least worth hearing.

But when writing in Salon, Josh is talking to friends. Why, then, this sloppiness with facts? Some readers, not being fully aware of the details of the inspectors last exit, may be swayed by an imprecise argument. Details matter. There is at least a marginal difference in badness between kicking out the inspectors and refusing to cooperate with them, even with all else being equal.

And it gets worse, because all else is not equal. When you say that Saddam Hussein kicked out the inspectors, you are getting farther away from some little-known, inconvenient facts regarding the events that culminated in the exit of the U.N. inspectors from Iraq in 1998. And Josh's little technical inaccuracy was soon leveraged by another site in the spin-management business in order to criticize one of my favorite cartoonists.

Over to you, Tom Tommorrow.

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Busy, busy, busy.
What bokononists whisper whenever they think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is.

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