David Eaves, in a recent blog post, talked about the importance of information filtration for political decision makers. He was speaking mainly about how increased access to real-time information could have unforseen consequences, both negative and positive on the cognitive capacity of President Obama – whom is viewed as the “online President.”
David mentions that critical to a politician’s success is the filtration capacity fulfilled by his aides and advisors – without people to intercept and cognize the fire-hose of information, picking out what is relevant, politicians would be paralyzed.
This issue of relevance realization is the central problem of artificial intelligence, and is fundamental issue for all of cognitive science.
Of note, this problem is arguably the fatal flaw in US DoD’s mostly defunct NetWar theories espoused by Nagl and other “fourth generation warfare” (4GW) theorists, especially those affiliated with the air-force and navy. Military decision makers, now flooded with unprecedented quantities of information from the sensor-net swarms, could not effectively coordinate action in the face overwhelming equivocal facts.
This need for a relevance realization capacity amongst politicans can help explain the sloganistic over-simplification of political opinions. Policy solutions need to be pigeon-holed to be comprehensible under the cognitive load typically borne by decision makers.
Access to the morass of opinion that is the web, as David observes, could have utterly devastating effects over the fragile, centralized command-and-control structures seen in contemporary political systems.
Thanks to modern technology, leaders have access to extremely detailed information about practically any aspect relevant to their responsibilities. Consequently they often micro-manage many aspects of the decision making process by the reinforcing feedback of information monopoly and performance superiority. They make better decisions faster than their reports because they have access not only to better and more information, but have control over the flow of that information and resources for its processing.
This phenomena of detail being pushed up, rather than down the chain-of-command parallels the cognitive deficiencies seen in Autistic patients. A phenomena called fixation or overshadowing takes place when severely Autistic patients attempt to solve problems. Typically they have extreme trouble putting individual problem elements into a coherent picture – a gestalt.
Intelligence, measured by IQ, amongst individuals is strongly correlated with the ability to move quickly between individual facts and wholistic gestalts, between observations and theories, between axiomata and theorems. This is called attentional scaling. It could be said that the intelligent organization must also demonstrate this capacity.
The filtration mechanisms needed by politicians, or in fact any cognizers, must be those that assist in cognitive scaling – too much theoretical thinking leads to fixation, which exhibits itself in politics as ideological dogmatism and damagogy aka “Principles before facts.”
Conversely, an over-fixation on the individual facts prevents a critical component of problem-solving, insight. That is, the moment of seeing things anew – without generating theories or endorsing them, we can’t hope to learn from experience, individual or collective.
So the answer isn’t simply less vs. more information, it’s a question of the principles for information selection, relevance realization isn’t a process, it’s a constraint on the multiple processes required to cognize. It’s a complex of rules that constrain what information is processed such that the right information gets through, limiting bias and improving insight.
The problem is not that these rules don’t exist – they do, politicans have process information as long as they’ve made decisions. The issue is that the rules for what is appropriate information, for relevance have changed. A system that could realize relevant information thirty years ago can’t cope with the existing informational environment, its fitness has been lost, to use Darwinian concepts.
What system can President Obama employ to ensure strong relevance realization?
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