Public Intelligence Blog – Page 4042 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

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US-Oriented, Excellent Starting Point, Six Key Methods,

October 20, 2005

Robert B. Cialdini

I disagree with the complaints about this being a repeat of earlier versions. “4th Edition” is quite clear. This is an updated easy to read version of a highly-regarded seminal work whose value has been proven over time.

While intended for students of psychology and for practitioners of the black art of marketing (selling over-priced unnecessary “stuff” to the unwitting), I regard this text as a very helpful reference for the new warriors, the practitoners of Information Operations and within that larger discipline, Strategic Communication & Public Diplomacy.

The six “principles” of influence, reciprocation, consistency, social proof (e.g. canned laughter), liking, authority, and scarcity, each receive their own chapter with annedotes and study questions.

Most interesting to me would be an international variation of this book, one that discussed the nuances of influence in other cultures, inclusive of family ties and prevalent sterotypes.

This book is applicable to business, evangelism, foreign affairs, defense, homeland security, and just about any field where interaction with humans is called for, and the mission demands the elicitation of collaborative behavior from others.

Good index, notes, and illustrations. Well-presented.

2005/10/202009/12/04

Review: A Whole New Mind–Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age (Hardcover)

4 Star, Information Society

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Simplistic but Useful Guide to Global Dialog,

October 20, 2005

Daniel H. Pink

This book, like Free Agent Nation: The Future of Working for Yourself is written for people who live in an ivory tower, a gated community, or a corporate palace. It is completely out of touch with the 90% of humanity that is comprised of the Working Poor in America, or the destitute and disenfranchised everywhere else. For that it loses one star.

However, and this is high praise from me, it is a “must read” for any knowledge worker, and I am particularly recommending it to the new breed of warrior in the U.S. Government, the Information Operations specialist. A **major** part of our government's failure at foreign policy and national security–including its failure at homeland security and its mis-steps in the global war on terror, going back to the Viet-Nam era, can be traced to a combination of excessive reliance on “metrics” (remember the “body counts?”) diluted by ideological preferences absent historical or cultural contexts.

This book, while simplistic, is a superb over-view of the alternative methods of **perception**, integration, understanding, and outreach–empathy and strategic communication to others in terms they can “receive,” and for that reason I consider it a “must read.”

The six senses, design, story-telling (see Steve Dunning), symphony, Empathy (none to be found in this White House), Play (intertwing work and play, mixing it up to energize both), and Meaning, are well covered by this book, and in a way that makes sense, where the value of listening is clear to the reader.

It is a well-put-together book, with the right amount of white space, good illustrations, good notes and recommended readings, and over-all a pleasant and instructive contribution to my library and my reflections.

2005/10/202009/12/04

Review: Ambient Findability–What We Find Changes Who We Become (Paperback)

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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Wow–Core Reference for Large Scale Information Access,

October 20, 2005

Peter Morville

Wow, wow, holy cow….I am rushing to finish up a book on Information Operations: All Information, All Languages, All the Time, and I am so very pleased to have gotten to this absolute gem of a book before closing out. Compared to the other 200 or so books I have reviewed–including such gems at ATTENTION, Real-Time, Early Warning, and so on, this is clearly a “top ten” read in the literature on information art & science.

Halfway through the book I was torn by a sense of anguish (the U.S. Intelligence Community and the beltway bandits that suck money out of the taxpayers pocket through them have no idea how to implement the ideas in this book) and joy (beyond Google, through Wikis and other collective intelligence endeavors facilitated by open source software, relevant findability is possible).

This is a truly gripping book that addresses what may be the most important challenge of this century in a compelling, easy to read, yet intellectually deep and elegant manner.

The author is a true guru who understands that in the age of a mega-information-explosion (not just in quantity, but in languages, mediums, and nuances) the creation of wealth is going to depend on information being useful, usable, desireable, findable, accessible, credible, and valuable (page 109).

Especially important in the first half of the book are the author's focus on Mooers (not to be confused with Moores) who said in 1959 that users will make do with what information they have when it becomes too inconvenient to go after better information. This is key. At the same time, he focuses on the difference between precision and recall, and provides devasting documentation of the failure of recall (1 in 5 at best) when systems scale up, as well as the diminuition of precision. Bottom line: all these beltway bandits planning exobyte and petabyte databases have absolutely no idea how to actually help the end-user find the needle in the haystack. This author does.

The book is without question “Ref A” for the content side of Information Operations. On page 61 I am just ripped out of my chair and on to my feet by the author's discussion of Marcia Bates and her focus on an integrated model of information seeking that integrates aesthetic, biological, historical, psychological, social, and “even” spiritual layers of understanding. This is bleeding edge good stuff, with nuances that secret intelligence world is not going to understand for years.

There is a solid discussion of geocoding and locationally aware devices, and I am very pleased to see the author recognize the work of four of my personal heroes, Stewart Brand, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, and Howard Rheingold.

Halfway through the book he discusses the capture of life experiences, and the real possibility that beyond today's information explosion might lie an exo-explosion of digital data coming from wired individuals feeding what they see and hear and feel into “the web”. The opportunities for psycho-social diagnosis and remediation, and cross-cultural communication, are just astounding.

The book wraps up with a great review of findability hacks, semantic tricks, and the trends to come in inspired and informed decisions. Like Tom Atlee, the author sees the day of collective intelligence enabled by the web, but I have to say, I thought I knew a lot, after reading this book I have the strongest feeling that my education has just begun.

This is one of those books that could help define an era. It is about as thoughtful, useful, and inspiring a book as I have read in the past several years. DECENT!

2005/10/202009/12/04

Review: Influence–Science and Practice (4th Edition) (Paperback)

5 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Misinformation & Propaganda

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US-Oriented, Excellent Starting Point, Six Key Methods,

October 20, 2005

Robert B. Cialdini

Most interesting to me would be an international variation of this book, one that discussed the nuances of influence in other cultures, inclusive of family ties and prevalent sterotypes.

Good index, notes, and illustrations. Well-presented.

2005/10/192009/12/04

Review: The Republican War on Science

5 Star, Science & Politics of Science

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Best Snapshot of the Ugly Baby–3 Others Needed,

October 19, 2005

Chris Mooney

This is the best snap-shot of the ugly baby called US Science, a baby that is on the one hand coddled and spoiled by a politicized program, and on the other straight-jacketed and abused by those same political hand-cuffs.

Of the four books I have reviewed on this important topic, this is the one that is the most compelling on the perversions of the extremist Republicans (I am a moderate Republican). It does not, however, provide a complete picture. Three other books are helpful:

Science, Money, and Politics: Political Triumph and Ethical Erosion by Daniel Greenberg is the best over-all review, has a strong ethical component, and shows how the competition for money, rather than scientific progress, is diverting scarce resources and frustrating needed advances.

Frontiers of Illusion: Science, Technology, and the Politics of Progress by Daniel Sarewitz is a very useful antidote to the many books (Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, comes to mind) that claim science will solve all problems and provide authoritative cost-effective solutions to century-old human problems.

Finally, Investing in Innovation: Creating a Research and Innovation Policy That Works, edited by Lewis Bramscomb and James Keller, brings together a range of views crossing the environment within which scientific research takes place, evaluationg specific programs and policy tools, and making recommendations (all of which have been ignored by the current Bush Administration).

I take four bottom lines from these four books together:

1) We are spending too much on military science & research.

2) Neither Congress nor the Executive have a serious strategy for prioritizing problems, finding private sector partners, and providing seed money for innovative solutions.

3) Both Congress and the Executive, as well as the public and the media, are incredibly ignorant about what science can and cannot do, and where all the money is going to generally poor effect.

4) This is all so important that Science, like Intelligence, needs its own Supreme Court. I am persuaded we need a new form of hybid public agency that is fully independent of the Executive, receiving a percentage of the total disposable budget (say 3%) and hence not subject to Congressional pork-barreling and lobbying-financed pressures.

This book by Chris Mooney is the place to start if you want to be angry, or the place to end if you want to see the other three books end on the ugliest note possible–the destruction of reasonable science by unreasonable ideologues.

2005/10/192009/12/04

Review: Dogs of God–Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors (Hardcover)

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Religion & Politics of Religion

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Historical Evaluation of Money, Religion, State Power, and Evil,

October 19, 2005

James Reston Jr.

There are no doubt many histories that will enlighten us as to the relationship between the rise of the State, its need for money, its use of the Inquisition to rob Jews and raise money, the role of religious intolerance of heresy, and the manner in which evil accompanies conquest. For myself, this book is more than enough, and it provides an elegant easy to read overview of the larger context in which Columbus discovered America.

I am reminded by this book of the arrogance of Spain (where my roots go to Catalan in the 17th century on my mother's side), as Columbus was sent with edicts in Spanish, and it was assumed that any natives that could not understand the Spanish edicts, read in Spanish, were consequently heathen and fair game for enslavement. So did Columbus bring to America not just slavery, but genocide as well.

The author excels at showing the human side of history, the manner in which craven banal human weaknesses wreak havoc on civilizations, tribes, and nations. There is one point in which I am reminded of the power of courtiers, and another in which the same courtier uses homosexuality as a means of subduing a king–both are all too close to reality today. In short, this book has lessons for us today, both in seeing how dangerous our fundamentalist religious extremists are in waging armed crusades lacking in contextual balance, how dangerous courtiers with too much power can be; how vulnerable nominally powerful rulers can be when they suffer from deep and unresolved inner conflicts (e.g alcoholism and nascient homosexuality), and how deeply the historical antipathies might lie within Islam against the West.

The relationship between evil, intolerant religion, weak kings and powerful courtiers, and suffering peoples of all faiths, is compelling depicted in this book–history is brought forward in a truly excellent manner. We learn, or we repeat.

Can anyone justify the Inquisition or the Crusades? Is it possible to denounce individual terrorists while embracing 44 dictators, many of them practicing genocide, others supporting the looting of their entire commonwealths? Could we not have spent the last trillion of our common wealth more wisely?

I put this book down thinking to myself, like Old Man River in Porgey and Bess, life and history move on, while the powerful continue to hold sway over the fortunes of their peoples. It is somewhat depressing to realize how little humanity has learned about relations among peoples since the 1500's.

2005/10/192009/09/25

Review: Rage of the Random Actor

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secession & Nullification, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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5.0 out of 5 stars Extraordinary, Compelling, Urgently Applicable to All

October 19, 2005

Dan Korem

I am utterly astonished to not see this book at the top of the charts and being absorbed by every school principal, every small town mayor, every police chief, and every counter-terrorism expert. This book is extraordinary, it is compelling, and it is utterly and urgently applicable to every single person who wishes to “defuse” potentially deadly “random actors.”

Although it is a thick book packed with details, you do not have the read the whole thing to extract value. Suffice to say that armed with this book, communities and organizations will have all they need to know to achieve early warning of potentially threatening “random actors.”

This is not a book full of psycho-babble. If anything, it is solidly grounded in practical case studies going back twenty years, and I for one, as a 30-year veteran intelligence professional, including clandestine service with constant exposure to bad boys and girls, find the book credible, useful, and easy to understand.

The bottom line, without seeking to simplify the book, is avoid de-personalization, prevent bullying, open up to individuals and empower them, and above all, be alert for any sense that they see teachers or other authority figures as “CONTROLLING” and rules as “INAPPLICABLE.”

The author's finding that terrorism is a rich kid's game, and that most US-based random actors will come from upper middle class families in small towns, are consistent with my own research and practical experience with revolutionaries.

Sadly, the underlying theme across the book is that of societal collapse. The major institutions, from school to church to sports to social clubs are all degenerating and failing to provide the inclusiveness and alternatives to boredom and alienation that they once represented. The threat of “random actors” imposing catastrophic fatal acts on their communities is very real.

This book is an important reference work, and one that I would recommend be bought in bulk, and discussed in a structured manner by every school staff and every local police department…and of course by parents!