intelligence

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What They Want to Hear: The Politicization of U.S. Intelligence
2 months ago
- Intelligence must serve policymakers' needs, not their desires, requiring objectivity and independence.
- The Trump administration politicized intelligence by firing officers, revoking clearances, and denouncing assessments that contradicted its narrative.
- Two case studies illustrate pressure on analysts: the author's capitulation in 2005 and a senior analyst in 2025 who lost his career for holding the line.
- Politicization takes forms including direct manipulation, indirect pressure, cherry-picking, and retaliation against the workforce.
- The administration declassified raw intelligence to support political claims, bypassing finished analysis and undermining tradecraft standards.
- Reforms are needed: codify analytic standards in law, insulate the ombudsman, protect the analysis-policy firewall, hold declassification accountable, and limit clearance revocations.
- Restoring trust requires apolitical leadership and a public reckoning akin to the Church Committee.
Useful Spy Books - Bert Hubert's writings
2 months ago
- The author recommends spy books to gain broader understanding of intelligence agencies, especially from inside and outside perspectives.
- Fictional works by John le Carré are praised for exposing deeper truths about espionage better than factual accounts.
- Some factual books may be incomplete due to agency vetting; defector accounts may be biased to paint themselves favorably.
- Tower of Secrets by Victor Sheymov details KGB security practices and defection; useful for understanding Russian surveillance methods.
- The Billion Dollar Spy by David E. Hoffman covers CIA handling of a Russian radar engineer informant, including suspicion of dangles.
- Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre offers a unique perspective of a Russian female spy working in the West during WWII.
- The Widow Spy by Martha Peterson provides insight into the first trained female CIA case officer in Moscow and her operations.
- Spycatcher by Peter Wright reveals technical espionage operations and dilemmas; highlights the communication triangle in surveillance.
- The Spy and the Traitor by Ben Macintyre details Oleg Gordievsky’s top-tier MI6 espionage; corroborated by extensive interviews.
- The Spy in Moscow Station describes NSA efforts to counter KGB eavesdropping on the US embassy, focusing on technical leaks and agency infighting.
- Le Carré’s novels explore themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the conflict between spying and democratic values.
- Outlier books like The Company and Cryptonomicon provide historical context for espionage and codebreaking.
- Satirical works like Victor in the Rubble highlight absurdities in modern intelligence work.
Is It Worth Being Wise?
2 months ago
- Wisdom is defined as knowing what to do in most situations, reflecting a high average outcome across various scenarios.
- Intelligence is characterized by exceptionally high performance in specific situations, akin to peaks on a graph.
- The relationship between wisdom and intelligence is that they represent the average and maximum of the same performance curve.
- Conventional explanations for the difference, such as problem types (human vs abstract) or origin (experience vs innate), are insufficient.
- As knowledge becomes more specialized, wisdom and intelligence diverge, leading to a societal preference for intelligence over wisdom.
- The path to wisdom involves discipline and removing childish biases, while intelligence is cultivated through curiosity and working on hard problems.
- Wisdom tends to produce calmness and contentment, whereas intelligence often leads to discontentment due to unbounded performance expectations.
- Educational traditions often aim at wisdom, but may be ineffective for fostering intelligence because they rely on discipline rather than curiosity.
The mistake of conflating intelligence and power
2 months ago
- Defining intelligence as 'ability to achieve goals across domains' conflates it with power, as seen with Stalin and Trump.
- Power in the real world derives from authority and trust, not purely strategic reasoning like in games.
- Individual IQ correlates modestly with income, but national IQ strongly correlates with national outcomes due to spillover effects.
- AI collectives that can copy and share information may outcompete humans, posing risks beyond individual superintelligence.
- The real AI concern is high intelligence combined with agency, resources, and weak moral constraints, not just technical ability.
Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings
2 months ago
- Intelligence is a highly heritable trait, with heritability increasing from about 20% in infancy to as much as 80% in later adulthood.
- Intelligence captures genetic effects common to diverse cognitive and learning abilities, with genetic correlations around 0.60 or higher.
- Assortative mating for intelligence is high (spouse correlations ~0.40), which increases additive genetic variance in the population.
- The genetics of high intelligence are continuous with normal variation; high intelligence is just as heritable as the rest of the distribution.
- Intelligence shares genetic causes with education and social class, linking genetics to social mobility and health outcomes.
Intelligence from Learnable Novelty
2 months ago
- Intelligence appears in different fields as data compression, universal computation, or adaptive behavior, each with its own objective.
- Two influential drives—novelty search (seeking surprise) and the free-energy principle (avoiding surprise)—fail in mirror image ways, such as being transfixed by a noisy television or content in a dark room.
- Both failures stem from treating the surprise a learner can convert into knowledge and the surprise it cannot as the same quantity.
- The learnable part of information, called learnable novelty, yields the disparate projections of intelligence, and a closed-form estimator is built on a cheap, differentiable reservoir computer.
- As a measure with no supervision, the estimator recovers decades of complexity classification, ranking Turing-complete rule 110 highest among elementary cellular automata.
- As an objective, its gradient guides a neural cellular automaton from simple dynamics into soliton regimes, organizing image encoder representations around MNIST digit classes fully unsupervised.
- As an intrinsic reward for reinforcement learning, it supplies exploration missing from task rewards, improving on baselines in nine of ten environments without collapsing.
- Complexity generation, abstraction, and exploration emerge from ascent on one differentiable quantity, unifying the projections of intelligence on a common quantitative footing.
What Makes Humans Stupid
2 months ago
- Stupidity is not the absence of intelligence but a sophisticated, active process that uses intelligence to make easy problems harder, often through elaborate theories or systems.
- Intelligence and stupidity scale together; more intelligent systems can achieve greater feats of stupidity, as seen in human institutions, technology, and ideology.
- Stupidity involves elaborating and defending errors, turning them into foundations for further action, which paradoxically requires prior intelligence.
- Examples include misapplying theories like quantum mechanics to consciousness or cybernetics to economies, worsening problems instead of solving them.
- Novelists and philosophers, such as Musil, Swift, and Pynchon, have explored intelligent stupidity, where intellect serves error, leading to collective or institutional failure.
- Stupidity persists due to environmental changes or overextension of heuristics, as seen in moths drawn to artificial light or specialized systems hacked by external agents.
- AI poses a risk of super-stupidity, where errors become undetectable as humans outsource cognitive capacities, potentially creating sophisticated stupidity indistinguishable from intelligence.
- A science of stupidity is proposed to study its mechanisms, evolutionary dynamics, and design principles to prevent tools from replacing rather than enhancing cognition.

intelligence

What They Want to Hear: The Politicization of U.S. Intelligence

Useful Spy Books - Bert Hubert's writings

Is It Worth Being Wise?

The mistake of conflating intelligence and power

Genetics and intelligence differences: five special findings

Intelligence from Learnable Novelty

What Makes Humans Stupid