Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Backing Up Belief

It's time we start demanding people back up their beliefs with some evidence. I'm not talking about religious beliefs, which are impossible to prove, but statements about actual events and predictions for the future. It is easy to say you believe something will happen. But for all I know, you're just making something up unless you can back it up with some rationale.

There are two instances that come to mind in this. First, is an episode of "The Apprentice" that I saw a few weeks ago. The two teams were holding competing marking events for Sam's Club where the objective was to sign up more new Sam's Club members in one day than the other team. After it was all over and Trump had them all in the board room, he asked the each of the team leaders if they thought they won. Both said something to the effect of "I believe we won because we put in incredible effort and worked really hard. I'll be absolutely shocked if we lost." That rationale was absurd. You don't win by putting in effort, you win by signing up more members than the other team. It doesn't matter how hard you worked, but you damn well better know how many members you signed up. I realize that it's all scripted and edited to be dramatic on television, but it was still just stupid hearing these people puff themselves up about their beliefs when they should just come straight out with the relevant number and why they predict that the other team got fewer new members.

The second instance is a little more serious. In his press conference today, President Bush says this:
I am confident -- or I believe; I'm optimistic -- we'll succeed. If not, I'd pull our troops out. If I didn't believe we had a plan for victory, I wouldn't leave our people in harm's way....I can understand how Americans are worried about whether or not we can win. I think most Americans understand we need to win. But they're concerned about whether or not we can win. So one of the reasons I go around the country to Cleveland is to explain why I think we can win. And so I would say: Yes, I'm optimistic about being able to achieve a victory.
All we need to do is believe we have a plan for victory, not actually have one. We have to be confident, and optimistic. But the only way to build confidence and optimism is to see evidence that we can actually achieve the goals of "victory", which are never really defined anyway. Certainly there is the fog of war to account for and of course no prediction will be completely accurate, but shouldn't we base war decisions on a little stronger rationales than simply being optimistic?

If you went into a real business meeting to propose a plan, you'd get laughed out of the room if you didn't provide a convincing explanation of your goals, resource needs, schedule, risks, and rewards. Simply saying you're confident you can do it because you believe you have a plan just doesn't cut it. Shouldn't we demand the same kind of thoughtfulness on issues of war and peace?

2 Comments:

At 5:11 PM, Blogger Dan Craig said...

Buddy, glad to see you jump in the fray. It's always a good time.

The quotes come from an exchange when the reporter was asking about Bush trying to rally support at a speech given in Cleveland. The reporter had been interviewing people there who had voted for the president but were losing trust, and asked the president what he would say to people like them.

Obviously, he should not be giving away any tactical information or detailed strategy because that would endanger our troops and our goals. But explaining from a high level why we will win is much more effective than just saying over and over that I believe we will win. Avidyne and Garmin don't discuss details with each other, but if you read all the aviation magazines, you'll get a pretty good idea where each company is going, what strengths it's playing to, and what kinds of products it intends to release in the near future. Likewise, FDR didn't say that we would defeat the Germans because we were going to invade Normandy on the morning of June 6, but he could build confidence by saying that we would win beacuse we could outproduce and outgun them. At least you have something to point to other than solely the president's optimism.

Obviously, big campaigns like this don't happen without some planning, but the question of whether Bush has a winning plan is very much in question and has been since before the war. Far-left anti-* people aside, there were serious questions raised by generals about the required size of the invasion force and by State Department planners about the internal social and political implications of removing Saddam suddenly. A lot of good thought went into how all these issues would be addressed after an invasion, but it was all blown off by the administration. In particular, the looting of government infrastructure and the failure to secure the weapons depots that now provide the insurgents a seemingly endless supply of IEDs to kill and maim our troops is particularly shameful.

As you say, we are not on the inside, either in Washington or on the ground in Iraq. I think you overplay the myth of the liberal media and also underplay how much synthesis of information people do themselves. The president and the conservative media have no shortage of airtime or pundits to tell the optimistic stories. Even the Washington Post has hired a vitrolic conservative blogger to write for them daily. If anything, the press failed in their job to ask tough questions before the war started. As for boots on the ground, I personally only know a couple people who have served in Iraq and I try to soak up what they have to say about it. Add to that all the solider's blogs, some of which are even published on NYTimes, and I think it's easier than ever to get a full spectrum view of the world that is not opressivly filtered by the government or the media.

But that causes a problem for governments, because you have to earn trust from people. A lot of people trusted the president about the war, including myself. To maintain that trust, you have to make sure that the story you're trying to convince people of is not contradicted by things they see elsewhere. Preferably, you tell the truth and try to explain things realistically and people will trust you. When you start to diverge from the reality that people are seeing out their window, it's much harder to maintain their trust. People need evidence, they need something to rationlize and explain why they should have faith in something. The president is not giving them that, and he is suffering in public opinion of both himself and his handling of the war.

 
At 11:07 PM, Blogger Dan Craig said...

I've read the strategy document. I wasn't impressed as it reads like a collection of bullet points from a marketing pitch. I wrote about it back in December.

I hope you don't lump me in with the critically thinking mind of Charlie Sheen. A lot of people with no qualifications get on television. A lot of them even have their own shows. That's one of the main reasons I don't watch news on TV. From either side of the political spectrum, it's all short attention span hype.

To address your points, I would agree completely that the Iraqi people are better off without Saddam. We should have finished the job in '91, but that Bush administration was worried about exactly what is happening now and instead chose to play the balance of power game. There are plenty of cruel dictators running countries around the world sadistically oppressing their people. We deal with the ones that are in our interest to do so. I don't see anything wrong with declaring the Middle East to be a region of national interest to the U.S., in fact that's been stated policy since the days of FDR.

I'm not one of the far left peaceniks who tend to protest whatever action the government happens to be taking. What really bothers me about this war is that I don't think Bush and his administration took it as seriously as they should have. They deluded themselves into thinking it could be done on the cheap, that they'd greet us with flowers and there would be a pro-American bastion of demoncracy in place by the 2004 election. I still don't think they are taking it seriously. It's been three years now, and reconstruction money is still just trickling in.

If we wanted to do this right, we should have listened to the Gen. Shinseki and the State Department and gone in with 300,000+ troops and planned ahead for dealing with a lot of the problems that should have been dealt with at the beginning. If we wanted to do this as a country, we should be selling Iraq Bonds to helf finance the construction. The president should have activly asked for America's best young people to join the military effort. But I don't think they had the confidence in the American people to ask that of us, which is sad.

None of this has anything to do with the party affiliation of the president. I'd feel just the same if Bill Clinton or Al Gore or John Kerry were running the war the same way. Bush took what should have been a good cause and botched it through poor planning and execution. I don't think we should suddenly withdrawl, maybe we should increase our presence, I don't konw. There's a great article by Robert Kaplan(it's subsciption only, but I'll still link to it) in the Atlantic Monthly about the ground level efforts put in by the troops. Specifically, he follows a Stryker brigade that's done an incredible job bringing stability to Mosul. The commitment from the troops on the ground is there. They need their government and country to really commit to rebuilding Iraq, not just getting by on the cheap.

 

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