3 ms·

"and if the goal is security, the harsh truth is that we should often err toward more secrets rather than fewer." I thought the ongoing debate was to determine

• glenra 13y ago
  The actual truth is that we should err towards fewer secrets rather than more, because secrets make you stupid. When the President and the people around him are acting on secret information, they have to lie about why they do things and they have to parse all response and criticism of their actions through a "if he knew what I know, would he still think that?" filter. The upshot is the President can be making boneheaded mistakes and utterly incapable of recognizing it because the relevant subject-matter experts that could TELL him this aren't part of the security apparatus - they can't tell him his "secret" info is bogus. And the secret info the president sees isn't neutral. It gets assembled for him by people who have a point of view so he's likely to see the info that supports what other people want him to think or what other people think he wants to hear. So it's easy to get stuck in an error cascade, where everybody inside the tent has a false view like "Saddam Hussein has nukes" which anybody outside the tent can see is idiotic. The solution to this problem is transparency. Get rid of the secrets and our politicians instantly get a lot smarter and more able to notice and learn from their mistakes.