THE MCNAGOOGLE FALLACY
On the 29th February 1968, the man controlling the world’s most powerful military power broke down in tears. With hesitant words and a breaking voice, Robert Strange McNamara, (that was his actual middle name, Strange), the United States Secretary of Defense admitted the utter futility of his scientifically-managed war in South-East Asia. He openly wept as he attributed his failure to his overreliance on scientific management principles and newly devised computer spreadsheets.
Even though Robert had held the prestigious office of Secretary of Defense for the previous seven years, he could not defend his track record in managing the Vietnam conflict during that time. Robert’s approach to managing conflict was fundamentally based on the theories that he learned as he obtained an MBA from Harvard in 1939. Even back then, an MBA may not have been a particularly useful qualification. After graduating, he had worked for a year with Price Waterhouse before going on to teach business analytics to United States Army Air Force officers. One of his main duties was, by using the latest statistical methods, to analyse the effectiveness and efficiency of Boeing B-29 Superfortress bombers. After World War II ended, in part due to the influence of atomic bombs dropped from Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, Robert was hired by Henry Ford the 2nd. Robert’s role at the Ford Motor Corporation was to implement statistically-based management control systems as the basis for management planning and organisational control.
As a result of his use of ‘scientific management’ and newly devised computer spreadsheets, on November 9, 1960, McNamara was the first non-Ford family member to become president of Ford. His reign as Ford’s president was a quite brief 83 days. as the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, persuaded Robert to take on the role of the United States Secretary of Defense. In that immensely powerful role, Robert became ultimately responsible for the military involvement of the United States in the developing Vietnam conflict. His habitual reliance on scientific management procedures and business analytics led him to believe that ultimate victory could only be achieved through using precise and objective measurements. Based on this seemingly rational perspective, he tried to develop a list of metrics that would enable him to scientifically control the war. The key metric, the Key Performance Indicator that Robert used, was enemy body count based on the fundamentally mistaken belief that maximising enemy deaths while minimising American deaths would assure victory. In 1962, during a meeting with US Air Force Brigadier General Edward Lansdale, Robert stated that ’if he could not measure something, it must not be important’.
The Vietnam war didn’t end well for anyone concerned, apart perhaps from a few Hollywood film producers. It didn’t end well for Robert who, as he left his office in that leap day in 1968, spoke, with his voice breaking and tears in his eyes, of the absolute futility of his scientifically managed war and his catastrophic failure to realise that what you can’t measure is often far more important than what you can measure. Robert’s statement that ‘if he could not measure something, it must not be important’ encapsulated his beliefs about using scientific management procedures and business analytics to measure progress and achieve victory in the Vietnam war. McNamara’s method of dismissing qualitative information and only using quantitative information was described by the social scientist Daniel Yankelovich in 1972 as the McNamara Fallacy. Daniel described the McNamara Fallacy as follows. ‘The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide.’
Although fifty years on, we are more aware of the McNamara fallacy, perhaps not as aware as we could be, a similar fallacy has recently emerged in how we measure our knowledge and awareness. This is what I term the McNagoogle Fallacy, the erroneous view that if we can’t find some information about a subject by using an Internet search engine, then that information does not exist. The first step of the McNagoogle Fallacy is to retrieve whatever can be easily retrieved. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily retrieved or to replace it with an advert, a promoted post. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be retrieved easily really isn't important. This is attentional blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily retrieved really doesn't exist. This is infocide - the death of information. And because search engines like Google and Bing are rapidly evolving into chat-based applications such as ChatGPT and Bard, the available pool of retrievable information is also rapidly shrinking. The knowledge base for artificial general intelligences and artificial super intelligences will be information web scraped from social media feeds, padded out by unauthorised use of copyrighted material.
Before the USA, and its then Defense Secretary, Robert Strange McNamara became involved, Vietnam was a colony of France. In 1935, thirty-three years before McNamara’s breakdown, the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupery was attempting to claim the flying speed record between Paris and Saigon. His route between France and Vietnam took him over northern Africa, over the Sahara desert. Twenty hours into the journey, between Benghazi and Cairo, Antoine and his navigator-mechanic began descending from the clouds as they searched for their landing field at Cairo. Their intention was to let down over the sea, but due to unforecast weather conditions, the descent resulted in what pilots describe as CFIT – Controlled Flight Into Terrain. They had crash landed into the gently rising terrain of a barren desert plateau. After days spent hallucinating from thirst as they wandered in the vast featureless Sahara desert, they were found by Bedouin tribesmen who took them to safety. Saint Exupery described his wanderings in his book ‘Wind, Sand and Stars‘ and also used his experiences of wandering in the desert as the inspiration for his classic story ‘The Little Prince’, which recounts the tale of a pilot stranded in the desert and his conversation with a young prince from another planet. The narrator begins the tale by considering the nature of grown-up people and their inability to perceive ‘important things’. Grown-ups only seem to be able to talk about things that seem ‘reasonable’ to them rather than anything more imaginative. The Little Prince describes the corollary, the antidote to the McNamara fallacy, to the McNagoogle fallacy. He observes that ‘on ne voit bien qu'avec le cœur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux’ - ‘it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye’.
Ce qui embellit le désert, c'est qu'il cache un puits quelque part... "What makes the desert beautiful, is that it hides, somewhere, a well". Search engines and LLMs create an arid desert of information where we are continually searching for that hidden well, that original source that flows with deeper emotion and higher creativity. A wealth of information and a wealth of human experience that will never be able to be accessed through a search engine or through generative AI or a large language model. Many search engine results simply resemble a series of over-promoted posts. And perhaps Robert McNamara was over-promoted in his posts on the basis of his scientific efficiency drives. The Ford Edsel may have promised to be an incredible success based on his spreadsheets and computational outputs but it didn’t generate any positive and healthy emotions among its potential customers. So perhaps we can leave the last word to Robert Strange McNamara look-alike Herr Flick as he scans the latest Health and Efficiency report In the shape-shifting pantomime of Allo Allo. He is visibly moved emotionally but can only report how he felt as decidedly average. Basing your entire worldview, your umwelt, on search engine results and LLM output may well lead you to experiencing the McNagoogle Fallacy, leaving your self-awareness and situation awareness looking decidedly average. Beyond the world of averages, statistics, and scientific measurement, there is another world where what is essential is invisible to merely objective analysis.