It is interesting (in the light of your comment) that one reason for CS people to be interested in discovery of rare events was the realization (primarily by Japanese researchers around 1998-9) that standard data mining techniques begin by eliminating noise, yet the really interesting phenomena are usually found in the noise, not in the signal.

Q: When is a plane not a plane?
A: When it’s a bomb, owned and operated by the victim, full of unwittingvictims, and pointed straight at thousands of unlucky everyday people,not to mention hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate, and even better than that a irrefutable symbol. ceci n’est pas un avion indeed.

My book is “Chance Discovery”, co-edited with Yukio Ohsawa (Springer, 2003). Here’s the amazon.com page:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/3540005498/qid=1126644026/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-8844951-7195020?v=glance&s=books

The book is part of a larger effort to find processes for automated discovery of rare events in computer decision support systems, and I think will be of most interest to computer science/artificial intelligence people. Not much marketing or anthropology in it, I’m afraid.

One of my papers in the book is an attempt (with Simon Parsons) to develop a protocol for computer dialogues which can lead to identification of rare events. There may be connections with the ideas in your post about processes for skunk works.

Tom, wow, splendid, thank you, I knew our field had something in common and now I know what, which is to say, I guess, that we both fall into the cultivated skeptism camp that the West has made pay so richly. This is one of the things the enemy cannot do…not until, as I was laboring to suggest, that actually to learn to swap assumption jamming strategies on the fly. That will be very, very scary. Thanks, Grant

Dilys, brilliant line about dispute over destinations! Thanks, Grant

Peter, could we have the name of that, your book, please. That’s interestng to think about, that surprise might be the new condition. I think Drucker says something about this. Or maybe it’s Peter Schwartz of GBN. Thanks, Grant

I see your point about the assumptions question perhaps being knowns not unknowns. Anthropologically, I think they are the latter. You could interview someone forever and they likely would not report the value in question here. If they did, it would sound fatuous and we would be inclined to dismiss it as a truism. It wouldn’t actually have any value as a corrective against invisible assumptions. Thanks! Grant

Donald Rumsfeld’s profound statement (12 Feb 2002) about “unknown unknowns” overlooked one category of knowledge: the “unknown knowns”: the things we don’t know that we know. So, for example, lots of information was known about the individual 9/11 terrorists before the attacks, which, if collated, analyzed and used quickly, may have prevented some or all of the attacks. We just did not know that we knew this information.

Cultural assumptions we forget about are perhaps in this category.

The first time was in response to Pearl Harbour and the Cold War, when the enemy could launch a surprise attack which would annihilate us all. During the 1950s, western governments sponsored considerable research and even held conferences on the topic of “Surprise”. One, in 1958, included both Soviet and US representatives and sought unsuccessfully to find mutually-agreed ways to eliminate the possibility of surprise nuclear attacks by either side. Economists reading this may know the name of George Shackle, who developed at the same time a model of uncertainty built on the degree of surprise an event would cause a decision-maker.

An historian of the 20th century may wonder why we were pre-occupied with the issue in the 1950s and again 40 years later, but apparently hardly at all in between. Was it that we became smug, thinking that we’d solved the problem of surprise nuclear attack? There may have been some of that feeling because of the various arms limitation treaties signed between the USA and the USSR. Or, was it that we found nuclear devastation too painful an idea to entertain for long periods, and so put it out of our mind? (Personally, I think this was the reason for the mostly-negative reactions to Herman Kahn’s books on nuclear war.) Whatever the reason, I think there important consequences for our ability, as a society, to ensure that we continue to focus on this issue.

And, any concerted effort using rigorous methods, such as the ones you describe so well, Grant, to predict these events now, should be looking at the methods and experiences of our nuclear strategists and cold-war-warriors in the 1950s and 1960s to do similar. Different enemy, and different mind, but same task.

I’m also reminded of the creativity-class cliche — take an ordinary object and ask “how many ways can this object be used?” Our inner imagery was entirely identified with airplanes as tools of our safety, strategy, and effectiveness. Our earlier fear, hijacking to Cuba etc., was merely competition between travelers over a destination.

And so, instead of saying, “I walked into a supermarket and headed to the daily case,” one would say, “I entered a large building through a set of doors that opened before me and found myself in a huge space filled with aisle after aisle of shelves stocked full with goods; they stretched far to my left…” and so on. Of course, as this little demonstration of phenomenological description makes evident, one can never ENTIRELY bracket one’s assumptions (what’s a “door,” or an “aisle,” or “goods”?) as long as one uses language. But with practice, as you surely know, empirical description improves.

And, using the phenomenological method known as “imaginative variation” one can begin to adopt a perspective, what we’re likely today to call a “mindset,” that *resembles* that of “the enemy,” or, more generally, “the other.” But, like the reduction described above, this is always an approximation of the other’s mind. It’s a far cry from the kind of “presuppositionless knowing” that Husserl envisioned when he wrote about conducting a phenomenology *of* consciousness. The existential phenomenologists, like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, were less interested in studying consciousness as consciousness, and more in studying human experience as lived. Those studies produced great insights into the constituents of human experience and provided the foundation for a qualitative, empirical approach. If you or your readers are interested in further reading on these issues, I’d recommend the book, Psychology as a Human Science, by A. Giorgi.

I guess that’s a long-winded way of saying that the problem our government is currently grappling with is one that philosophers and psychologists have spent centuries studying.

My methodological question is this: How do you know when you’ve learned to “think like the enemy?” By definition, implicit assumptions you have yet to root out are still there, undetected. I suppose you could try to run predictive tests, but given the small samples of enemy action we have to work with, I wouldn’t place a great deal of confidence in them.