The War That Never Happened

This article examines Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), a gothic novel that augments its postmodernist credentials by preemptively imagining and representing the theoretical gaze that would otherwise have been directed on itself. The article suggests that despite the novel’s intense performance of self-reflexivity, it demonstrates a traumatic suppression of its own immediate historical conditions, particularly its temporal proximity to the events of the First Gulf War. This article thus reads the text’s telling silences and its thematization of uncanny spatial violations as indexing a minimally acknowledged guilt over the war in Iraq. The novel’s slippages in self-awareness not only point to an avoidance of its own scotomized history but also foreground the shifting boundaries and dispersed locations of textual self-consciousness.

Words or Numbers? Communicating Probability in Intelligence Analysis

Intelligence analysis is fundamentally an exercise in expert judgment made under conditions of uncertainty. These judgments are used to inform consequential decisions. Following the major intelligence failure that led to the 2003 war in Iraq, intelligence organizations implemented policies for communicating probability in their assessments. Virtually all chose to convey probability using standardized linguistic lexicons in which an ordered set of select probability terms (e.g., highly likely) is associated with numeric ranges (e.g., 80-90%). We review the benefits and drawbacks of this approach, drawing on psychological research on probability communication and studies that have examined the effectiveness of standardized lexicons. We further discuss how numeric probabilities can overcome many of the shortcomings of linguistic probabilities. Numeric probabilities are not without drawbacks (e.g., they are more difficult to elicit and may be misunderstood by receivers with poor numeracy). However, these drawbacks can be ameliorated with training and practice, whereas the pitfalls of linguistic probabilities are endemic to the approach. We propose that, on balance, the benefits of using numeric probabilities outweigh their drawbacks. Given the enormous costs associated with intelligence failure, the intelligence community should reconsider its reliance on using linguistic probabilities to convey probability in intelligence assessments. Our discussion also has implications for probability communication in other domains such as climate science.