We Are All Cognitive Misers

Many experts jumped to early conclusions in Oslo, claiming that the attacks carried the “fingerprints” of al-Qaeda and “global jihad”. Photo: flickr/jcoterhals

In a blog I wrote for OSINTblog.org the other week I discussed the intelligence community’s preoccupation with Islamist political extremism. This preoccupation, I argued, is a manifestation of an obsession with global Jihad in academic discourse and open source intelligence (OSINT) gathering. I argued that, in the former case, this hampers academic progress and, in the latter, undermines security.

When intelligentsia and intelligence services speak of “terrorism,” it often carries the connotation of Islamist political extremism. However, as a couple of scholars with NUPI, an ISN partner, concluded in a report: although figures of speech contribute to the cognitive dimension of meaning by helping us to recognize the equivalence to which we are committed, cognitive shortcuts or ‘heuristics’, raise problems and do little to increase our understanding of terrorism as a phenomenon. In fact, cognitive shortcuts are counterproductive of why we study terrorism, namely, to enhance security.

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The ‘Wikipedia Dispute Index’: A Collaborative Seismometer?

Exploiting online networks in order to map and predict cross-linked social phenomena such as the commonality in consumption (Amazon), electoral behavior (Google), the spread of civil unrest (Twitter) or even the outbreak of diseases (Google and EMM) continues to be both an intricate and promising field of research.

Thus, it comes as little surprise that Gordana Apic, Matthew J. Betts and Robert B. Russell from the University of Heidelberg recently suggested an indicator for measuring geopolitical instability by applying the principle of association fallacy, primarily used in life sciences, to online encyclopedia Wikipedia’s entries whose impartiality is contested. In their brief research paper titled ‘Content Disputed in Wikipedia Reflect Geopolitical Instability‘, the authors accordingly argue that “quantifying the degree to which pages linked to a country are disputed by contributors” correlates with a country’s political stability. In other words: since instability is best represented by its underlying conflicts, the multitude and diversity of user-generated associations, namely: disputes, is believed to reveal some form of qualitative pattern that can be arranged as a stability ranking.

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This Week at the ISN…

It's week 31 on our 2011 editorial calendar, Photo: mag3737/flickr

This truncated week of ISN coverage starts today, following Monday’s Swiss National Holiday:

  • On Tuesday, the growing private-public partnership to enhance virtual cyber-range techniques is under the ISN Insights’ microscope.
  • Wednesday’s ISN Insights‘ article — by Dr Rupak Borah of the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations at Manipal University, India — addresses the question: Is a China-India thaw in the offing?
  • ISN Insights examines the gender-specific roles and challenges faced by female child soldiers with help from Cassandra Clifford, founder and executive director of the Bridge to Freedom Foundation in Washington, DC.
  • And Friday’s podcast discusses Bolivia’s growing economic woes.

And in case you missed any of last week’s coverage, you can catch up here on: America’s economic decline; humanitarian interventionism; global drug policy reform; the rise of Bitcoin; and terrorism as a political instrument.

War of All against All?

Portrait of Thomas Hobbes, Photo: lisby1/flickr

New interpretations of the foundational texts of a movement or ideology may be the most passive-aggressive form of intellectual combat.  Done well, however, it can also be one of the most satisfying.   A case in point: Arash Abizadeh’s article, “Hobbes on the Causes of War: A Disagreement Theory” in the May 2011 issue of the American Political Science Review.

Academic schools always seem to have their prophets and sacred texts, but textual infallibility is rare.  For the embattled Realist tribe, however, Hobbes’ Leviathan once came pretty close.   Chapter XIII contains perhaps the most famous of all descriptions of human nature and its consequences for political life, that “without a common power to keep [us] all in awe … the life of man [is], solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”  Everyone once knew (or thought they knew) what this meant.   Indeed, the eloquence of this famous sentence once left many with little doubt: at least for Hobbes if not always for us, coercive power is the primary good.  In its absence (as in international politics), ‘force and fraud’ are the two primary virtues.

But as Abizadeh points out, the ground has begun to shift beneath Realists’ feet.  It has already been demonstrated, he tells us, that the chief function of Hobbes’ sovereign is to provide an “authoritative mechanism for governing” not conflicting wants, desires and interests, but “moral language,” — which would locate the source of war even for Hobbes at the level of “ideology, culture and socialization,” rather than systemic-structural incentives or depraved human nature.

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Bitcoin: Cryptography and the Crowd

Direct democracy from a geek’s perspective. Image: TraderTim/flickr

Bitcoin is the world’s first decentralized, digital currency. Its extraordinary performance over the last half year has caused quite some stir, not only among ‘cyber geeks’. Users and supporters see Bitcoin as a technological breakthrough and expect its spending possibilities to increase as exponentially as its price. Meanwhile, critics point to many of these same characteristics as flaws. They are waiting for the bubble to burst, calling it a structurally flawed experiment.

How it works: This video – made possible with donations from the Bitcoin community– explains the basic idea behind the new currency:


To acquire Bitcoins, users can buy them on a trading platform or become ‘miners.’ The latter requires hardware and electricity – both usually purchased with conventional money.

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