Beyond Bias Minimization: Improving Intelligence with Statistical Optimization and Human Augmentation

For the last half-century, the US and Allied intelligence community has sought to minimize the ostensibly detrimental effects of cognitive biases on intelligence practice. The dominant approach to doing so has been to develop structured analytic techniques (SATs), teach them to analysts in brief training sessions, provide the means to use SATs on the job and hope that they work. The SAT approach, however, suffers from serious conceptual problems and a paucity of support from scientific research. For example, a highly promoted SAT—the Analysis of Competing Hypotheses—was shown in several recent studies to either not improve judgment quality or to make it worse. This article recaps the key problems with the SAT approach and sketches some alternative interventions. At the core of these proposals is the idea that intelligence agencies should be focused broadly on improving intelligence and not narrowly on minimizing bias. While the latter contributes to achieving the former, over-emphasis on bias minimization could inadvertently bias agencies toward a singular form of intervention, blinding them from potentially more effective interventions. In this article, two lines of alternative intervention are sketched. The first line focuses on post-analytic statistical optimization methods such as recalibration and performance-weighted aggregation of analysts’ judgments. The second line focuses on a broad human augmentation program aimed at optimizing human cognition through better sleep, exercise, nutrition (including the use of nootropic compounds), and biometric tracking. Both lines of effort would require substantial scientific investment by the intelligence community to examine risks and efficacy.