Month: December 2019

So, the news of the day is that reports from Afghanistan were essentially ALL lies, all biased to the upside.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” said Col. Bob Crowley. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

What is surprising about this is…nothing. Absolutely nothing. Only an idiot would have expected anything else. This is news on par with “most people like sex.”

We live in an incredibly stupid age, in which we have to prove the obvious, in tedious detail, over and over again.

For those who don’t remember, the Vietnam war reports were also all lies. All. Every enemy casualty figure, for example.

Let’s simplify this:

Letting people self-report their results when their career depends on getting good results will always lead to wrong numbers.

This is one of the reasons I don’t belong to the cult of measurement and metrics, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” and all that tripe. What you measure is always being manipulated by those you manage. If there’s a way to manipulate it, they do, and those ways are almost always destructive.

But as a very simple, basic thing, the people who measure the numbers and give qualitative feedback (often far more useful, despite our cult of data) must be completely insulated from any career impact except those based on result accuracy.

You cannot have generals in charge of the people doing the number gathering, because generals want people to think they are winning the war.

In general, if I were ever put in charge of a very large organization, including a government or major military, the first thing I would do (and I’ve spent a LOT of time thinking about this) is create an audit department which is not part of the line or staff organization.

Getting accurate feedback is hard. It’s especially hard at the top. It’s why smart leaders maintain a vertical presence: They talk to people in all parts of the organization and they cut past their senior executives. There are a lot of forms of this: Steve Jobs did it by just walking around and asking employees to explain to him what they were doing.

Coming back to the current question: Non-existential wars are hard to get accurate information about. The US is not actually at ANY significant risk if it loses in Afghanistan. Nor was it in Iraq, or Vietnam, or any war it has fought in well over a century (though losing WWII would have had nasty consequences, the US was not going to be invaded and any fantasies otherwise are delusional).

Nor, in most cases, do key decision makers or their children fight on the front lines. The last time the children of the powerful really fought in a war was during WWII. So they don’t actually care, they don’t have pipelines in for information, (because their class are worthless aristocrats who don’t fight, not nobles who do), and in fact, they’re probably making money from the war; transmuting blood into gold, without risking their blood or the blood of anyone they care about.

So who cares if a bunch of poor whites (who make up most of the combat infantry in the US) are getting killed, maimed, and fucked up psychologically for the rest of their lives? Let alone how many foreigners are getting whacked.

Thus, accurate reports generally aren’t wanted. It’s not important to win, it’s only important to look like you’re winning (and be able to claim you won, like in Iraq, even if you lost). Oh, and to keep the military-industrial gold spigot flowing.

Lying is the point. It serves the interests of everyone in power. It’s bad for enlisted folks and the few low-ranking officers who are actually on the pointy end, but otherwise, lies are what is wanted.

You don’t get “it’s ALL lies” unless everyone in power wants or tolerates that.

This is a microcosm of one of the core problems in the US and the West. The numbers are almost all massaged; all wrong. When I looked into labor force, inflation, and employment numbers in the early 2000s, I came to the conclusion they couldn’t be trusted at all (productivity numbers are particularly bullshit). The extreme poverty numbers are absolute bullshit, but even the regular poverty numbers in most countries are garbage, because they haven’t kept up: You can’t actually compare those numbers to the 50s, say, in most cases.

If the feedback you’re getting is incorrect, you will either make wrong decisions, or you want to make wrong decisions which is why you’re falsifying the numbers.

Now, the numbers usually aren’t completely false (except in Afghanistan), but they are false enough that by the time they go really red, you’ve been in trouble for a long time. By the time key numbers of middle class decline went red, for example, the middle class should have already been an operating theatre with a surgeon screaming for electric paddles.

Feedback matters. Data matters. Lying about them kills people–lots of people–and causes even more suffering. This is particularly obvious in a war zone, but it is true in everything of consequence.

So start by not letting people self-evaluate when their careers, money, or prestige depends on it. Because the issue isn’t giving generals or politicians good careers, it’s about winning wars or having an economy which is good for the vast majority of the population.

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