They Know It Doesn’t Work
The head of the CIA revealed to the Senate this week that his agency does, in fact, employ waterboarding when dealing with terrorists. If you haven’t kept up with this, there’s a small degree of controversy here because the administration claimed that, A: the CIA does not waterboard terrorists and B: if they did, waterboarding isn’t torture.
I’m not super interested in what the CIA does, I presume they’re up to some heinous shit, that’s pretty much their brief. I don’t think saying “waterboarding is torture” is particularly controversial. Nor am I especially interested in or surprised by what the current administration does or denies.
Rather, what interests me is the public’s reaction to this notion. The idea that the CIA tortures people to get information. In virtually every story I’ve read about this, and through several interviews on The Charlie Rose Show, experts including former CIA mans, say “torture doesn’t work.”
It doesn’t work. Period. When this comes up in discussion, what I hear most often is “well, it must work. It must do something, otherwise why would the CIA do it?” This is a very sensible question, with an equally sensible answer.
They do it for precisely the same reason you check your purse or your pants pockets 20 times when looking for your keys. Precisely the same reason: desperation. They are desperate for the information and will do anything, including things they know won’t work.
Sidney Lumet, in his book Making Movies, includes a chapter on how moviemaking has changed since his heydey in the 70s. Specifically, he talks about the rise of corporations and the influence of focus groups in the 1980s.
In the 70s, even though the studio system had collapsed, the studios were still run by people who really wanted to make movies. Yes, their main goal was making a shitton of money, granted. But they wanted to do this by making movies. You had people like Robert Evans who, while being a rich douchebag, was also crazy in love with movies. Both the movies themselves and the culture of them.
Once the 80′s rolled around, however, most of the studios and their assets had been sold off to big corporations run by people who knew nothing about making movies, weren’t particularly interested in the product or the culture, and saw only an opportunity to maximize profits.
The problem with this is; making movies is a huge crapshoot. It’s a terrible investment. Every time a corporation buys a studio, the corporation executives come around and meet with the studio heads and do what’s called Product Reviews. We do the same thing at work with the EA mans.
During these product reviews, the Director of Product Development at the Studio stands up and says “These are the movies in development for release during the next fiscal year.” They say exactly that sentence. They then list the movies and end by saying; “Based on our experience, we predict 40 of these will lose money, 20 will break even, and 5 will be a big hit.”
End of Presentation.
The Corporate Executives all look around at each other and then one of them says, one of them always says the following;
“Why not just make those five movies?”
The answer, obviously, is that even the studio, guys who have been making movies their whole careers, or 5 years which is often the same thing, have NO IDEA which movies will be big hits. Summer blockbusters with bankable stars tank, indie movies with no name actors and no budgets break $100 million.
IF they had a formula, THEN they would make those five movies. But they do not.
There was a time in the early 70s after the success of Easy Rider, which cost about $400,000
to make and grossed over sixty million, where many studio heads seriously considered making no more movies that cost more than a million bucks, and releasing hundreds of cheap movies a year. They reasoned that if only one or two of these Easy Rider knockoffs succeeded it would more than pay for the production of all the losers. They didn’t go this route, but you can follow their logic.
When the corporations took over, the fact that moviemaking was far more of a crap shoot than, say, craps, was unacceptable. So they started trying to game the system.
They hired firms to come in, take the nearly-final film, and screen it in front of an audience. Now, studios had done stuff like this for decades. David O. Selznick drove out to Riverside and surprised an audience who thought they were going to see Beau Geste with an early edit of Gone With The Wind.
Before the 80s, the purpose of this was to just gauge audience reaction. You can see a comedic example of it in Singin’ In The Rain. There was no illusion of statistical analysis involved. This was the studio heads just watching an audience’s reaction.
These firms in the 80s however, created audience response cards and coated their efforts with a veneer of statistical analysis. They would tell the studios how likely a given movie was to be a hit among the various demographics. Demographics, remember, didn’t exist before the 1970s.
The promise of all this was, as you can see, that the Corporations would be able to use the audience feedback and statistical analysis to engineer hits. They’d edit the movies to remove things the director liked, but the audience didn’t. You can guess what the problem was.
It didn’t work. Movies with great numbers tanked, movies with bad numbers which the corporations tampered with until they had good numbers tanked, movies with bad numbers did well. Some movies with GOOD numbers did well. It was, essentially, random. UHF, the Weird Al Yankovic movie, was released by Orion Studios after extensive audience testing that showed it would be the biggest hit the studio ever had. It was a colossal flop and out of theaters one week after it opened.
The point, Sindey Lumet’s point and my point, is not that the testing didn’t work. The point is; the studios knew it didn’t work. They know it doesn’t work, and they do it anyway. They spend the money, they get the data, they monkey with the final product, even though they know it doesn’t result in better returns. They don’t do this because they are stupid. They do it because they are desperate. There are tens of millions of dollars at stake and they feel helpless. They yearn for even the illusion of control over the final product, even though they know they have none.
This is the very essence of desperation. Repeatedly doing something you know won’t work, you KNOW it won’t work, but you do it anyway because you have no other option. We all do this! We have that moment were we fleetingly think “I’m not going to check the nightstand again, I already checked it, there’s nothing there.” Fifteen minutes later, late to work and increasingly more desperate, you say “fuck it” and you check the nightstand again. The keys are still not there. In another 10 minutes, you’ll check again. You may hate yourself for it because you consider yourself a rational person and this is a kind of madness, but you have no other option.
I have a book here on my shelf. It’s called The Mythical Man-month. If you recognize the title, you know why I’m bringing it up in this context.
The Mythical Man-month is a book about software development. It’s point, rigorously proven with charts, data, and analysis is that throwing people at a task has the opposite effect from what’s intended. Instead of taking less time to complete the task because there are more people working on it, it takes LONGER to finish the task.
The high level summary is; it takes one woman nine months to have a baby. It does not follow that nine women working together can birth a baby in one month. As you add mans to the task, the number of people who have to communicate to each other increase, the amount of time spent communicating increases, all sorts of things that form the connective tissue of any team increase and work slows down. Work slows down as you add people to the process.
Everyone in my industry knows about this. Most of them have never read the book, but like the Peter Principle, you don’t have to have read it to get the point. In spite of this, on every project I’ve worked on, management has thrown people at problems. Several problems. The result is entirely predictable. Throwing people at the problem cornfuckers it and we end up spending more time on the back end unfucking it.
Like the Studio Heads, like the CIA, management doesn’t do this because they’re dumb. They don’t do it because they haven’t fully internalized the point of the Mythical Man-month, they do it because they are desperate. Millions of dollars are at stake and they will do anything, even stuff they know does not work.
All these organizations are run by people and therefore fall prone to the same problems people fall prone to. They’re no different than you or I in this regard.
They’ll check the nightstand in 10 minutes too. Keys still won’t be there.
End of Line.
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February 9th, 2008 at 2:50 am
This article has engaged me more then your others. I like to consider myself a student of management. I agree that desperation causes people to try things that they know are not effective. I also believe that this is a generality, and that effective managers are able to avoid this situation far more often then the average “Lumburg.”
I was fortunate in my first real job after graduating from college, to work with a fellow that had managed his business in a surprisingly enlightened manner. When he would run up against a wall, he had the confidence to allow himself the the time and space to solve the problem without making it worse. You could argue that he is not making millions of dollars, but I would counter that he has been in business since 1992, lives comfortably, and manages to make some of the most amazing hot rods to be found anywhere in the world.
When facing what I like to call a “five star fuck show” if left to my own devices, I would sleep on it. This has never been a popular behavior with those to whom I report, they prefer for me to work long hours on what I refer to as “fools errands.” Often I end up running these “fools errands” for fear disappearing my primary source of income. I will, however, admit that I try to keep that fear at bay by maintaining a low cost lifestyle. I believe that I will never create and do things that I find rewarding if I let a fear of failure into my decision process for too long.
On a final note, if you or anyone you know has a lead on a 1978-1982 Fairmont Squire Wagon, hook a brother up.
February 9th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
Of course, sometimes when you know it doesn’t work, you’ll delude yourself into thinking it will anyway. Specifically, when you haven’t tried doing it yourself. I think it was Douglas Adams who said something along the lines of: Although humans are the only species on the planet capable of learning from others’ mistakes, we’re surprisingly disinclined to actually do so.
I remember something from one of the countless WWII programs I’ve seen on Discovery while hung over. The English had decided that a bomber armed with machinegun turrets could defend itself effectively from German fighters and didn’t need a fighter escort. This quickly turned out to be dead wrong. The German fighters were shooting the slow bombers down easily, machineguns or no. So they started giving them fighter escorts again. Then, when the US entered the war, the British kindly shared this intelligence with their American allies who informed them that their new, superior bombers could, in fact, do it. After all, it had been a couple of years and they’d developed much better, faster bombers that could easily outrun the German fighters. So they sent them in with no escort and the Germans, who’d also developed better fighters in the meantime, promptly shot them down and the Americans started using fighters escorts too.
I don’t know how accurate it is but it’s a good story regardless.
Where I used to work, we’d regularly get new managers and every time we did, they’d be like the Americans in the above story. They’d have great idea fow how we could increase productivity and we’d tell them we’d already tried it, several times, and it didn’t work. And they’d insiste we do it again. because they hadn’t tried it and surely, under their superior management, it would work. Which, of course, it never did. We’d say “That sounds good but it assumes the machines run smoothly at all times and that nothing unforeseen occurs and something unforeseen always occurs and the machines never run the way they’re supposed to for more than about a half hour at a time. We Know. We tried”. What I learned there was that it doesn’t matter what you say to someone who isn’t listening.
February 9th, 2008 at 5:16 pm
I’m a firm believer in making your own mistakes. If you always listen to what everyone tells you, you’re far less likely, in my experience, to do something extraordinary.
When Nicholas Meyers (we shall communicate entirely in anecdotes!) was directing his first movie; Time After Time (great little movie, lots of fun, check it out) he wanted to set up a certain dramatic shot. His DP told him it could not be done. It would not work. He said “trust me.” There was no REASON to trust Meyers, he was a writermans and not a moviemans of any stripe, but he was the boss and so they had to do it.
And he was right. The shot worked and his Director of Photography said “holy shit, you’re right.”
I find that your mistakes help you, they don’t really help me that much. Rather let’s say; they help a little. But in order for me to really understand what you understand, I have to have the experience you’ve had.
In your example, Marius, unless the Americans were lying, they really did have a reason to believe their sorties would be different than the Brits’. Additionally I find that two different people, going through the same process, can have very different experiences.
February 9th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
I am going to kill the whole communication through anecdote and speak from the brain of Geoff.
I think that may be part of the problem. When it is perceived that a manager is not becoming instantly effective, often the solution is to replace that manager. People need to fail a few times to get better at a task. Often the way many companies are setup, failing in an obvious and tangible way, too often will get you canned. As a teenager I broke numerous hot rods before I finally gained the skills required to actually make positive modifications. I now have the ability to build a car nearly from the ground up.
Because of the high rate of turnover at many companies, one need only to failing slowly over a number of years by avoiding potential mistakes is how you get promoted. I think this works because you outlast anyone who can both realize you are failing slowly and have the power to do anything about it.
This is depressing.
February 12th, 2008 at 7:20 am
I’ve always theorized that people refuse to take advice out of arrogance more than desperation, although I’m sure the latter is the cause for many instances of this. I wonder if desperation can breed arrogance, or if arrogance is the face people put on when they’re desperate. Maybe they’re two sides of the same coin.
February 15th, 2008 at 10:27 am
Really good piece Matt.
Initially I was going to disagree with your assessment that it doesn’t work. Waterboarding absolutely works. You will most certainly cause your "client" to break and talk. They will tell you "stuff". In fact on average based on tests conducted by the CIA on its own folks… most people lasted about 14 seconds before talking. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed a mind behind 9/11 underwent waterboarding and did reveal very important information about Al Qaeda and its infrastructure, plans, and tactics that have lead to its further dismantling by Coalition forces, Israel, and CIA operations. However, he also revealed information that the interrogators knew was patently false and mainly sensational just to stop the waterboarding. If your definition of "working" is only receiving truthful information then yes it doesn’t work. But I’d say that if the interrogators are savvy enough to filter the information then A) valuable information will be gained and B) even the bullshit that comes out will have value in deciphering bullshit in future sessions with this individual or others… Anyway, my point was (before I digressed like I said I wouldn’t) more that about half-way thru and with reading the comments this really is more about the human nature to try things over again and also some management philosophy. As a manager myself, I was particularly interested in those comments and insight… All this was just a long winded way of saying…"Hell of a good post!"
Indicdentally, just like the situation where an interrogator needs to throw out some bullshit and sift through to the important bits… I think a manager (if he is worth his salt) also does something similar… He can consider the input of others (We have tried this before and it didn’t work), pick and choose the parts he feels he can try again (presumably with the expectation and hope that the end result will be different), and skip the parts he expects will end in the same result (failure). Its really all about being savvy enough with the information you gain, your prior experiences in similar situations, and an ability to accept the results (however different from how you thought they would be) and adapt to them to achieve success.
The important part of the bomber war analogy wasn’t so much that the Americans tried to run the sorties with the bombers unaccompanied in spite of the British opinions they would fail. To me it was that they accepted the results (they got shot down) and modified the tactics to fly with escorts to achieve success.
Anyway good stuff.
June 9th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
To Jakeleg: The American interrogators from WWII found that be-friending the German prisoners, which was much more difficult, both because of the skill in doing so and the desire to be friends with a baby-murderer, was a thousand times more effective in gaining accurate information over a long period of times. Also, many of the Germans would then ‘repent’ and admit many of their crimes.
Torture in almost any form is as accurate as a Lie Detector, and torture genuinely damages people. So why are we doing this to innocent people?
Props to the Writingmans on this post.