Clarity comments on Open thread, Oct. 19 - Oct. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: MrMind 19 October 2015 06:59AM

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Comment author: Clarity 20 October 2015 09:55:52AM 6 points [-]

Think you have a finely callibrated and important information diet? Imagine if you had the world's strongest intelligence agency tailor the news for you. Well, you don't have to imagine, because the president's daily briefs have just been declassified. If you're interested, you can collaborate with researchers to get a better handle on it. Enjoy.

Comment author: satt 20 October 2015 09:31:45PM 5 points [-]

For convenience, here's a link to the individual briefs as separate PDF files, for anyone else who doesn't want to download all 34MB at once. (I thought the Flickr page might have a few convenient, face-on snapshots of pages from the briefs, but the CIA reckoned it was more important to take 5 photos of a woman wheeling a trolley of briefs through the CIA lobby. #thanksguys)

I suspect daily presidential briefings from the CIA are finely (as in carefully & deliberately) calibrated but not that well calibrated (as in being accurate, representative and not tendentious). The CIA doubtless has incentives to misrepresent some things to the president — and indeed a president probably has some incentives to allow/encourage being misled about certain things!

Comment author: ChristianKl 20 October 2015 10:52:53AM 4 points [-]

It's an intersting data set but I don't think it's useful as a primary source. Given that the freshest "news" in the pile is from 1977, I don't think the term "news" is appropriate. If you are interested in what happened 40 years ago it might be better to read more recently written history books than contemporary intelligence analysis.