Journal: “Expert Judgement” vs. Public Intelligence

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When one is brought up, professionally trained, in “systems thinking” and the importance of feedback loops, diversity, and integrity, everything else becomes pedestrian. Today we highlight two books re-inventing the wheel so as to feature an extraordinarily useful but slighting incomplete oration on “expert judgement by our much-admired colleague at NIGHTWATCH, concluding with a list of books on Collective Intelligence as the engine for Epoch B Human Scale Integral Consciousness and Conscious Evolution….i.e. the antithesis of Washington, D.C. politics.

We are beginning to see the emergence of a very earnest and most promising form of historical revisionis, a series of books testing “what if” hypotheses that revolve around “what if” our leaders had acted with integrity; “what if” our leaders had sought out all the facts, been transparent, not been selfish, not been corrupt?

Below is an excerpt from NIGHTWATCH (find the rest halfway down the page for 23 July 2009) at NIGHTWATCH 20090723 in a “Special Note on Porfessionalism in Analysis–worth a complete read!

NightWatch evaluates four kinds of judgments in its work. They are:

-analytical in the sense of breaking down a phenomenon into its causes and key drivers;

-synthetic in the sense of matching and merging as derivatives of reasoning by analogy;

-diagnostic in the sense of defining the phenomenon and phenomenology of the issue under analysis;

-prognostic in the sense of predicting the way ahead.

What NIGHTWATCH does not mention is integrity in both the delivery and the follow-up. In our view, intelligence professionals who achieve the acme of skill and provide policy makers with accurate actionable intelligence that is ignored, are complicit in treason if they permit the policymakers to turn around and lie to Congress and the public about the facts of the matter at hand. While we concur with our esteemed colleague Sherman Kent on the importance of maintaining a separation between policy and intelligence from a functional purpose, THERE CAN BE NO MORAL SEPARATION. We all serve the Republic and the sovereign public.

We are in a transition period now, as we enter the third era of national intelligence, the era of the Smart Nation in which we restore the remarkably prescient visions of the Founding Fathers and reassert the vital role to be played by an educated citizenry armed with the power that knowledge gives: the power to self-govern with integrity. Below are some–a tiny selection from the many visible via Reviews–of the books at the base of the pyramid.

A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity

An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential

Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House

Cracking the Code: How to Win Hearts, Change Minds, and Restore America’s Original Vision

Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People-Powered Politics

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Digital Natives & Digital Immigrants

Dignity for All: How to Create a World Without Rankism