I was perusing the archives of the CIA’s in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, as I do periodically when I convince myself I might discern some secrets about today’s goings on from some accidentally-unredacted article. As usual the answer was no, but also as usual I delved into the archives for juicier, if more outdated, tidbits. I came across a piece released in 2014 under the Freedom of Information Act, recounting the heyday of the CIA’s canoe pool – that is, a number of CIA employees who canoed to work when Langley had just become the new headquarters but the Washington beltway made traffic from Maryland a nightmare. The story itself is grin-inducing, but the final section contained honest self-reflection that was not only quite charming but startlingly relevant for today. The author, Robert Sinclair, wrote in spring of 1984:
“Aside from the obvious benefits – the chance to see wildflowers and pileated woodpeckers, the exercise, the insights into the workings of nature – what do I get out of all this? Part of the answer is that regular contact with the earth is as important for me as it was for Antaeus. Another part (and it may be saying the same thing in a less metaphorical way) is that for a moment I get to evade modern man’s almost complete dependence on secondhand information. People now are very largely containerized, physically and even mentally, and without really noticing it we have come to rely on what others tell us about the world beyond our narrow boxes. I suppose this has always been true, but the ratio between the great mass of secondhand data and the small amount we pick up on our own can never have been greater than it is now. It is all too easy to ignore the distinction – to forget that nearly everything has been through a process of selection, organization, and interpretation before we get it. This is a particularly serious danger for professional information-processors like me, but I think the proposition holds for most people. At an rate, the canoe commute does give me a firsthand glimpse of what is going on beyond the various manmade containers I inhabit; I benefit from regular access to information that is clearly unmediated.”
This in 1984, years before the web would even begin to make a dent on the collective conscience. I loved his point about the ratio of secondhand data to what we truly pick up ourselves, yet I find myself strangely at a loss regarding what to do about it. My first thought was that I need to canoe to work, but challenging the shipping channel in the Delaware seem likelier to acquaint me with death rather than an appreciation of nature. The more serious follow-on was about something more topical of late, the Mueller report. I’ve read a laundry list of summaries and reactions to the report, some of which were themselves clearly based on summaries, but have not picked it up myself. And yet even that is, in its way, a secondary source – a ponderous, comprehensive one, but nonetheless not primary for my purposes. My mind then turned towards my work, or at least the work I want to have. I tout my experience as a primary and secondary researcher, but really the bias is strongly towards secondary. So few people are doing (are qualified to do?) real primary research, but it’s so powerful when the results come through. To be fair, that dismisses the enormous amount of work that is done but not published because only results get published. Nonetheless, it makes me want to delve further into primary research, although I wonder at once if I’m qualified to do so and, more importantly, just what I want to research!
Food for thought to be sure, and it turns out Sinclair also publishes a monograph at around the same time about cognitive science in the intelligence field. He describes it as having sunk without a trace at time of publishing, but a Center for the Study of Intelligence republishing in 2010 appears to have garnered it more attention. I hope to read his “Thinking and Writing: Cognitive Science and Intelligence Analysis” in more depth in the near future.
smq.world 