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What gets me is the ideology, same sort of thing that showed up with the KGB level of Robodebt, now the crank fantasies emanating from a "cracked" opposition re the Voice. Lates example was the right wing crank just caught by the Americans. We need to know just how much cyber breaches have thrown out the paradigm anyway,

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What Drezner actually says is "one of the central premises of the academic study of intelligence-gathering is that policymakers tend to overrate the value of human intelligence and underrate the value of open-source intel." He doesn't say anything about closed-source non-HUMINT; I suppose that implies he thinks that policymakers rate it accurately.

This conflation of intelligence sources sometimes results in overreach by critics. For example, the American assessment, in real-time, of Russia's intentions toward Ukraine was unnervingly accurate. We've come a long way from Pearl Harbor. But more than that, the preemptive information offensive undertaken by America was shockingly effective; far more effective than would have been possible without accurate intelligence and directly counter to the stereotypes about the American intelligence services. America had substantial intelligence that was accurate, not available to open source analysts, and was used to profitably direct policy actions.

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Apr 14, 2023·edited Apr 14, 2023

a very late minor quibble: the risk from motorists is not only to the motorists, and in fact they're the least affected by their disastrous decisions. Even counting only direct kills there's a lot of non-motorist casualties. But if you include pollution damage the equation doesn't so much tilt as collapse.

As usual I appreciate the article as a whole and was just hit by that one side note towards the end. Sorry.

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