4 ms·

The Stormtrooper Problem

3 points by keepamovin 2y ago

keepamovin 2y ago
While the security clearance process tries to reduce risk, it inadvertently creates the biggest one: the people who get through lack real diversity. Misfits are filtered out. Stormtroopers are hired. YCombinator would most certainly not suffer from this type of problem.
- deleted 2y ago
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bell-cot 2y ago
> Intelligence agencies are a great petri dish for diversity because they require creative solutions to unique problems. You’d expect them to crave diversity and seek it out. You’d be wrong. > Their strict clearance process filters out the type of diversity that often results in excellent problem solvers, which inadvertently creates a monolithic workforce that thinks alike. My read is that secret/secretive intel & security agencies attract, promote, and are quite often dominated by people with very "creepy", cliquey, self-serving, and careerist mindsets. If the goal is to create lots of secure, satisfying, & all-too-powerful jobs for such people, then that's great! But if you expect those agencies to be loyal and high-functioning bulwarks of your nation's security...um, so sorry, no. Note that this is a "human nature" problem, not a modern nor first-world one. Russia's huge and "highly regarded" intel/security establishment is now famed for their comprehensive and sustained Ukraine-related failures. Plato discussed not-much-different problems at length in his Republic, ~375BC. In brief: "Diverse" personnel, by current PC standards, would not do squat to fix the problem.
- keepamovin 2y ago
  Here, here! Certainly seems that way with some of them. There’s obviously a lot of great people there, but even the good ones may have had to “fake it” or conform to fit in. It seems overall they’d be hiring “club members”, and as Major Kusanagi says: Over specialization leads to death. Probably had little to do with it in practice, but I’m wondering how much that poverty of diverse thinking, and conformity led to the much discussed 9/11 intelligence failures. I’m reminded of this scene about the Mossad's (probably fictional) "Jury of the 10th Man" in World War Z: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-McSoaxaAdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-McSoaxaAdQ Which itself is kind of ironic given the also much discussed 10/7 intelligence failures. Perhaps this is a scourge that to some degree plagues all the world’s cleared jobs…
  - bell-cot 2y ago
    > It seems overall they’d be hiring... I'd say it's an "enrichment" process - a higher % of such people apply, a higher % get hired, a higher % stick around...and move up. Some others either adopt that worldview, or learn to conform. And within closed/secret/hierarchical societies, it doesn't take a huge % of problematic priorities & worldviews to systematize a whole lot of undesirable stuff. I've seen credible online accounts of pre-9/11 CIA decisions on how they should design a new mass-surveillance/analysis system. My read of those accounts & the CIA's alternatives is that they specifically chose "maximum-data-quantity creepy gratification" over "maximum real-world national security effectiveness". They had diversity, but not the right priorities. (I've not paid attention to the 10/7 intel failures, but assume that the Mossad has "the usual" secret agency failings. OTOH, my impression is that war has been extremely convenient, politically, for Israel's current & problematic Prime Minister. So he might have been reading "Potential Jackpot" in spots where his Mossad intel briefings said "Potential Danger", and making decisions on that basis.)
    - keepamovin 2y ago
      Good point about hiring and promotion enrichment plus the amplification effects of systems, and an interesting one on Bibi’s calculus. I think he could have done more, initially to build a coalition of support, plus strategically positioned himself against Hamas, who were clearly hoping for an Israeli super-reaction that they could milk to further play the fake victim and justify their stance. Could you unpack “creepy gratification”? What does that mean a bit more?
      - bell-cot 2y ago
        > Could you unpack...? Excessive prioritization of satisfying their immediate emotional needs (for more-is-always-better data collection), with relatively minimal healthy or long-term regard for the national security utility of the resulting behavior pattern. To be fair - quantity of data collected is a stupid-but-obvious metric, which the CIA probably uses for many status/budget/promotion decisions.
bediger4000 2y ago
The CIA is famed for exactly this problem. Through the 1990s at least, the CIA recruited heavily from Ivy League colleges, and Yale especially. https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/article/The-CIA-wanted-the-best-and-the-brightest-They-17045591.php https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/ar... I think that any clearance-requiring sector would be prone to this sort of problem. Like the defense industry. Does the whole clearance process weed out people who are non-conformist in the wrong ways? Sure, some of those "wrong ways" are genuine problems, but a lot of them aren't. It's just easier to clear entirely bland, dedicated churchgoers who have not had any spark of an idea to try different things. The Secret Service is said to like to hire guys who played football in high school or college because of their presidential defense doctrines. That weeds out a lot of other sports types.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

3 points by keepamovin 2y ago

While the security clearance process tries to reduce risk, it inadvertently creates the biggest one: the people who get through lack real diversity. Misfits are filtered out. Stormtroopers are hired. YCombinator would most certainly not suffer from this type of problem.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

bell-cot 2y ago

> Intelligence agencies are a great petri dish for diversity because they require creative solutions to unique problems. You’d expect them to crave diversity and seek it out. You’d be wrong. > Their strict clearance process filters out the type of diversity that often results in excellent problem solvers, which inadvertently creates a monolithic workforce that thinks alike. My read is that secret/secretive intel & security agencies attract, promote, and are quite often dominated by people with very "creepy", cliquey, self-serving, and careerist mindsets. If the goal is to create lots of secure, satisfying, & all-too-powerful jobs for such people, then that's great! But if you expect those agencies to be loyal and high-functioning bulwarks of your nation's security...um, so sorry, no. Note that this is a "human nature" problem, not a modern nor first-world one. Russia's huge and "highly regarded" intel/security establishment is now famed for their comprehensive and sustained Ukraine-related failures. Plato discussed not-much-different problems at length in his Republic, ~375BC. In brief: "Diverse" personnel, by current PC standards, would not do squat to fix the problem.

keepamovin 2y ago
Here, here! Certainly seems that way with some of them. There’s obviously a lot of great people there, but even the good ones may have had to “fake it” or conform to fit in. It seems overall they’d be hiring “club members”, and as Major Kusanagi says: Over specialization leads to death. Probably had little to do with it in practice, but I’m wondering how much that poverty of diverse thinking, and conformity led to the much discussed 9/11 intelligence failures. I’m reminded of this scene about the Mossad's (probably fictional) "Jury of the 10th Man" in World War Z: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-McSoaxaAdQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-McSoaxaAdQ Which itself is kind of ironic given the also much discussed 10/7 intelligence failures. Perhaps this is a scourge that to some degree plagues all the world’s cleared jobs…
- bell-cot 2y ago
  > It seems overall they’d be hiring... I'd say it's an "enrichment" process - a higher % of such people apply, a higher % get hired, a higher % stick around...and move up. Some others either adopt that worldview, or learn to conform. And within closed/secret/hierarchical societies, it doesn't take a huge % of problematic priorities & worldviews to systematize a whole lot of undesirable stuff. I've seen credible online accounts of pre-9/11 CIA decisions on how they should design a new mass-surveillance/analysis system. My read of those accounts & the CIA's alternatives is that they specifically chose "maximum-data-quantity creepy gratification" over "maximum real-world national security effectiveness". They had diversity, but not the right priorities. (I've not paid attention to the 10/7 intel failures, but assume that the Mossad has "the usual" secret agency failings. OTOH, my impression is that war has been extremely convenient, politically, for Israel's current & problematic Prime Minister. So he might have been reading "Potential Jackpot" in spots where his Mossad intel briefings said "Potential Danger", and making decisions on that basis.)
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    Good point about hiring and promotion enrichment plus the amplification effects of systems, and an interesting one on Bibi’s calculus. I think he could have done more, initially to build a coalition of support, plus strategically positioned himself against Hamas, who were clearly hoping for an Israeli super-reaction that they could milk to further play the fake victim and justify their stance. Could you unpack “creepy gratification”? What does that mean a bit more?
    - bell-cot 2y ago
      > Could you unpack...? Excessive prioritization of satisfying their immediate emotional needs (for more-is-always-better data collection), with relatively minimal healthy or long-term regard for the national security utility of the resulting behavior pattern. To be fair - quantity of data collected is a stupid-but-obvious metric, which the CIA probably uses for many status/budget/promotion decisions.

bediger4000 2y ago

The CIA is famed for exactly this problem. Through the 1990s at least, the CIA recruited heavily from Ivy League colleges, and Yale especially. https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/article/The-CIA-wanted-the-best-and-the-brightest-They-17045591.php https://www.ctinsider.com/connecticutmagazine/news-people/ar... I think that any clearance-requiring sector would be prone to this sort of problem. Like the defense industry. Does the whole clearance process weed out people who are non-conformist in the wrong ways? Sure, some of those "wrong ways" are genuine problems, but a lot of them aren't. It's just easier to clear entirely bland, dedicated churchgoers who have not had any spark of an idea to try different things. The Secret Service is said to like to hire guys who played football in high school or college because of their presidential defense doctrines. That weeds out a lot of other sports types.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]