I was asked why it is worth all the time I invest in “scanning the airwaves” — meaning taking in gobs of information, for example, in the form of commentary and podcasts. Well, it’s not really raw. I only use sources whose judgment I have already vetted over time and evaluated as worthwhile. This results in highly enriched data compressed into a shorter time. This does not mean I spend less time, it means I waste less time and get more good information.
In How I Know The Earth Isn’t Flat, I wrote about my former job as Russian linguist for the Air Force, NSA, and Foreign Technology Division. The first thing that happens for linguists who work in HF communication, is that they become essentially a noise filter. These people listen to static all day, monitoring for signals that can come from 2000 miles away or more. Even the presence of a signal is actual information. You know the plane’s direction and distance. You know whose plane it is and where they came from, and you can follow where they are going. If they only speak every ten minutes, you have up to date information on where they are going and how they are doing. They are not going to discuss why they are going there but you know where the possible destinations are and what goes on at those locations. You have enriched information out of hours of static noise.
Even when there is a signal, to the untrained ear, there is nothing but static detectable. Part of what makes this possible is knowing what things pilots can say while doing their missions. Anything outside of that is highly unlikely. It is an analogy of very narrow bandwidth signals, where there is less noise and interference audible because it is filtered out.
The next level: dealing with highly complex, technical, and varied activities. When there is chatter coming from say, a space station in orbit, in the context of real operations, what they are talking about has to make sense in the context of the activity. There are many times when the sound glitches or the signal fades and there is simply no recording of what was said. Nevertheless there are fragments that have to fit together and make sense. When two or more expressions are grammatically possible but missing, or buried in noise but sound very similar, the one that stitches together the fragments to make a complete sense, is the only one. If the other choice is nonsense, it is rejected. I call this synthetic comprehension. You are not going to send a transcript off to HQ and claim that they are talking about candy bars just because that's what it sounds like.
The next level: for two years I worked in machine translation. MT at that time could only "throw a dictionary" at the words and do mostly brute force substitutions—but very quickly. In highly technical papers about, say, high energy physics, even when the topic is a new discovery or theory, it still has to make sense, but when the writer uses terminology that means different things in different contexts, one translation is correct in that context and the others are nonsense. In such cases the MT system was not allowed to make the final decision, but would flag the sentence for experienced editors to resolve. However, a person who knows nothing about high energy physics in both languages simply does not know the proper term and can't decide which choices are right. This comes with a lot of time put in.
So the payoff in investing time in the 'noise' is the development of understanding and that enables discernment and judgment.
There is one final analogy that I borrow from satellite imagery: synthetic aperture imaging or tomography.
In a nutshell, synthetic aperture imaging is the ability to collect a wide, high resolution image without a wide field lens (or radar antenna). A very narrow sensor field of view sweeps over a wide area over time and builds a wide image, taking into account extra information such as parallax and even self-interference (in the case of radar). The detail you get is finer than the wavelength of the imaging signal.
Optically, a similar application of this is for a military helicopter to see through trees and observe what's on the ground under the canopy using paralax from a moving perspective. Another is to see through low partial cloud cover. The spaces between the clouds or trees are the aperture. Movement by the aperture creates a wide angle image through the opening.
It's easy to relate to in human scale: Imagine you walk up to a privacy fence. You can hear people at a party behind it but you don't see them. You walk up close and peer through the space between the slats and see a sliver of the party but you just know it's a party and can perhaps see part of one or two people. However, if you walk rapidly alongside the fence and focus *through* the fence as you move, your vision sweeps by all the cracks and, due to persistence of vision, your brain constructs a complete and fairly clear picture of the scene through the solid fence. It's like x-ray vision. Magic.
I extend this concept to the information sphere. Honestly, I have not heard anyone speak of developing this mental discipline, but this is one thing that military intelligence does: information fusion. It is integration of slivers of data, and by synthetic deduction, the noise (lies, disinformation) disappears. Like magic. And you get synthetic perception.
Add to this emotional and nonverbal data. Do I believe these people? Do I trust them? Do they know what they are talking about? Have they fallen for nonsense and propaganda before? How many times? What’s their hit ratio? Have they even done the work to know what they are talking about? Do they have motives or associations that tell a different story than the one they say?
So clearly there are benefits that come with time and effort invested in scanning “noise” and obfuscation. The payoff, for me, is peace of mind—that the world is not ending, that the bad guys are not winning. It is important to emphasize that none of these benefits come from just believing someone or believing what you want to believe (or its opposite, believing that the worst case scenario is apparently inevitably manifesting).
Integrating other kinds of information only solidifies or dissolves a model. For example, consider the advantage of having a working understanding of probability and coincidence. Just the mathematical impossibility of a series of coincidences grants actual knowledge that some series of events cannot possibly be a meaningless coincidence.
Eliminating all supporting scaffolding of a model that you have reasoned cannot be possible, collapses the model and you can just waste no more time on it and focus on an ever diminishing set of possibilities to be tested and confirmed.
People say information is power, but no—knowledge is power, and knowledge comes from information, time, and effort.
The problem with this, is that this effort cannot be conveyed to another. I can know that I'm sailing in the right direction, but my ship's crew only see an endless horizon to possibly nowhere good. Actually, if you see horizon all around at open sea, you'd better know where you are going because every direction looks the same. The man with the map, compass, and astrolabe knows. The crew either trusts him or they don't.
I could probably estimate the hours I’ve “wasted” on my activity, but it would be at a scale that would seem preposterous to people who don't see the value in investing time in analyzing apparent noise.
To put it in perspective, a big milestone in Russian school at Defense Language Institute was making your 2000 hours. And that was only halfway through. Most of our friends at 2000 hours would not make it through to the end. Those who graduated and went to their first duty station were not even capable of any of the tasks I described above. It becomes believable only after you have achieved that level of capability.
Like I say, I'm awake 19 hours a day. My day job is 7 hours a day. I've been doing this for a long time. Eliminating the possible to arrive at the probable and the inevitable, to me is worth investing many thousands of hours over many years.
I do this only with people whose judgment I have already vetted over time and evaluated as worthwhile. This results in highly enriched data compressed into a shorter time. Without mental discipline, you cannot make the best use of limited time and peace of mind is hard to come by.
If only I could figure out how to convey this peace of mind to others.