INTRODUCTION
Structured responses to the limited capacity of both organisations and individuals to deal with ambiguity that is inherent to intelligence analysis are necessary to strengthen the ‘chains of inference’ or maximise the rigor of judgements. This essay will focus on overcoming cognitive and to a lesser extent, personal and organisational bias and limitations. Organisational issues that affect the quality of analysis such as analyst training are outside the scope of this short essay. Moreover, many of the high profile intelligence failures are attributable less to organisational obstacles than political or psychological barriers , . The human mind is necessarily vulnerable to cognitive bias in order to distil complexity for comprehension , but this results in several well-documented challenges to accurate intelligence analysis. The numerous challenges to the analytical process require structured methods to mitigate the vulnerabilities, thereby strengthening the chains of inference.
WHY THE CHAINS OF INFERENCE REQUIRE STRENGTHENING
“The circumstances under which accurate perception is most difficult are exactly the circumstances under which intelligence analysis is generally conducted – dealing with highly ambiguous situations on the basis of information that is processed incrementally under pressure for early judgment” .
An analyst must manage the personal and organisational barriers to critical thinking, surmounting a range of biases and limitations. There are three primary categories of bias and limitation to acknowledge and address – cognitive, personal and organisational . Inherent human infallibility persists in spite of acute awareness of the vulnerabilities and without structured methods to counter this, cr...
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Human intelligence is an eel-like subject: slippery, difficult to grasp, and almost impossible to get straight [3]. Many scientist and psychologist have made numerous attempts to come up with an explanation for the development of human intelligence. For many years, there has been much controversy over what intelligence is and whether it is hereditary or nurtured by the environment. Webster's dictionary defines intelligence as "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge; which includes a sensing an environment and reaching conclusions about the state of that environment [7]. In this paper I am going to examine the factors, which make up ones intelligence. I will be investigating whether or not intelligence is fostered by genetic heritance or nurtured by ones environment.
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In order to see how artificial intelligence plays a role on today’s society, I believe it is important to dispel any misconceptions about what artificial intelligence is. Artificial intelligence has been defined many different ways, but the commonality between all of them is that artificial intelligence theory and development of computer systems that are able to perform tasks that would normally require a human intelligence such as decision making, visual recognition, or speech recognition. However, human intelligence is a very ambiguous term. I believe there are three main attributes an artificial intelligence system has that makes it representative of human intelligence (Source 1). The first is problem solving, the ability to look ahead several steps in the decision making process and being able to choose the best solution (Source 1). The second is the representation of knowledge (Source 1). While knowledge is usually gained through experience or education, intelligent agents could very well possibly have a different form of knowledge. Access to the internet, the la...
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