Psychology of Intelligence Analysis (2007)

The book "Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis" by the same author is more recent and goes into details and applications.

They go over many biases and attentional phenomena, tools to prevent or mitigate, visualization techniques to address problems (timelines, etc.) with several examples.

It also goes into explaining the context that practitioners evolve in a context where information can be scarce, contradictory either by happenstance or by design by actors who want to confuse.

Here's a RAND report titled "Assessing the Value of Structured Analytic Techniques in the U.S. Intelligence Community".

- [0]: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...

In case it's not clear, the link is to one chapter in a larger book titled "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis" by Richards J. Heuer, Jr.

The table of contents is here https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

A brief look at the table of contents suggest that the whole book is worth looking at.

Thanks for submitting. Just ordered physical book on Amazon.

I’d like to share a tangential thought in case others have noticed the same. One thing I’ve found odd with the CIA and “Intelligence” community is they seem to use the terms “Information” and “Intelligence” interchangeably. Labeling their Information as Intelligence, I would think introduces cognitive bias. Perhaps Authority Bias or another.

Going with the DIKW paradigm:

- Data

- Information (The symbols and words we assign to the Data)

- Knowledge (Which I’ll define as a storage of Information with Metainformation attached to it. Kind of like a computer filesystem. The actual file is Information and has Metainfo like Source, Timestamp, filetype, and other contextual properties which is useful for processing and thinking about during decision-making.

- Wisdom (Which I’ll defined as the process of consciously running Knowledge through your Mind and Emotions and Third-party Cognitive Fallacy Checklists) and then drawing a Conclusion.

When they say “Intelligence-gathering”, really they mean “Information-gathering.”

Long story, short: if I ran the CIA, I’d change the name to “Central Information Processing Agency”

This is a great book. Highly recommended if your are making decisions based on gathered information. Not just for spies. I'm coming back to that one regularly.

> The reaction of the Intelligence Community to many problems is to collect more information, even though analysts in many cases already have more information than they can digest. What analysts need is more truly useful information--mostly reliable HUMINT from knowledgeable insiders--to help them make good decisions. Or they need a more accurate mental model and better analytical tools to help them sort through, make sense of, and get the most out of the available ambiguous and conflicting information.

That seems to fit regular people and regular news these days. Too much "information"; not enough actual information; and too many biases.

If you're interested in trying the analysis of competing hypotheses technique (ACH) from book, I maintain an open-source implementation here: https://www.opensynthesis.org/

Our wiki on GitHub also has related reading, including guides from other countries: https://github.com/twschiller/open-synthesis/wiki/Reading-Li...

That's very useful. This should be routinely taught in college, if not in high school.

This seems like it would be an advantage if other people weren't aware of this information. I wonder why they decided to publish it publicly like this.