on avoiding groupthink

[winterbadger]

One (of several) insightful comments in this piece that wcg pointed out in his blog. .

One way to foil groupthink is to listen to others. Really listen. Not just think up counterarguments while waiting for them to run out of breath. Listening to others does not mean we have to agree with their words. But it does mean respecting them enough to take what they say seriously, especially when we disagree with them. Honest and serious people do this. Meanwhile, there is a lot of noise on both ends of the American political spectrum that deserve our attention even if it is biased and wrong. Read the websites of the far-Right and Left-wing. These groups rarely, if ever, give a dissenting voice the chance to speak. Their sites are examples of groupthink run amok. That doesn’t mean the participants are dumb or bad. Often these sites are created by very smart people who got their brains caught in the ideological bear trap. Getting caught in a trap doesn’t make a bear dumb or deserving; traps tend to be well camouflaged. ... Some of these far-Right and far-Left websites are like bear traps, only we cannot release those people far away. We live with them, and often they are our friends and family, victims of ideology.

That's well said, and can't be emphasised enough. And I'm conscious it's advice I could take more often myself--I have ended up in any number of bear traps.

In the oft-repeated words of Aaron Sorkin, "[Leadership means that] if you're dumb, surround yourself with smart people, and if you're smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you." The latter is good advice, and not frequently enough followed...

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Michael really nailed it in that paragraph. I suspect he uses that listening skill to good advantage. It's probably gotten him a lot of interviews with people most reporters could never hope to talk with.

[winterbadger]

Having only read that one entry, I don't know what his role is, but that listening ability would be very useful to an interrogator. :-)

Which brings up the one point that I think I would be inclined to disagree with him about. At least according to any military or law enforcement interrogator I've ever heard speak, torture simply does *not* work. Yes, you can force people to talk, most people, eventually. But the circumstance where everything rest on being able to get that one piece of information out of one person that will justify that seems to exist only on 24 and in psych-class experiments.

Plus, of course, if someone talks to you, there's no way to know immediately whether they are telling you the truth, a purposeful lie, what they think you want to hear, or just whatever comes into their head because they really don't know what you want them to tell you. If you are developing a relationship with them, as effective interrogators do, you develop that ability over time.

But I agree with him: even if torture *did* work, using it betrays our honour and the whole point of our engaging in this war at this point. It creates enemies out of neutrals and friends. And I'm a little disappointed that he succumbs tot he 24 crowd enough to say "Well, the president can always pardon a torturer". What happened to "it's simply wrong"?

[wcg.livejournal.com]

I think he knows as much about interrogation as anyone who's been through Special Forces training. I don't think he's an interrogator.

Do you read pecunium? He *is* an interrogator, and he'll confirm what you're saying above. Information obtained by torture is of very little intelligence value because there's no way to know whether it's true. The only thing you can be reasonably sure of is that the person said whatever they thought would make the torture stop.

As for presidents and pardons, I think that's basically what presidential pardons are for: allowing the president to absolve someone of guilt for doing the president's will. But I also think presidents should be liable for the orders they give. The buck really does stop there.

[winterbadger]

But I also think presidents should be liable for the orders they give.

From your mouth to God's ear. I have seen a number of wrong-headed, foolish, or downright wicked men in the White House in my lifetime, and I don't think any of them has ever really been held accountable for their misdeeds.