Geodog

McNamara and data distortion

I recently saw The Fog of War, as one of my annual quota of about four movies that I will get to see at a movie theatre. An amazing film. I went into the movie prepared to be sympathetic to McNamara, and was impressed both by his thoughtfulness and by his arrogance. By the end of it, I was loathing McNamara all over again for his duplicity, with some of the same intensity as I felt during the Vietnam War.

Remembering his obsession with numbers and with data, it also struck me that if, like him, you advertise your reliance on data gathered (or created) by other people for making your decisions, you are inviting people who have a stake in your decision to game it and muck with the data. That's how we got the inflated body counts. Not necessarily the smartest move on the part of a decision maker, especially one who so obviously thinks so highly of his own intelligence.