That being said, if this book is afraid to venture outside its safe zone (and mention meta-congition, even in a passing reference) then this book, by defintion, has failed to do what IC analysis is supposed to do. Ironic, huh.
I think it's ssafe to say history is on the side of my analysis of this analysis ;)
The articles are based on reviewing cognitive psychology literature concerning how people process information to make judgments on incomplete and ambiguous information. I selected the experiments and findings that seem most relevant to intelligence analysis and most in need of communication to intelligence analysts. I then translated the technical reports into language that intelligence analysts can understand and interpreted the relevance of these findings to the problems intelligence analysts face.
The result is a compromise that may not be wholly satisfactory to either research psychologists or intelligence analysts. Cognitive psychologists and decision analysts may complain of oversimplification [...]
You’ve provided no examples to support this conclusion.
If you believe there was Russian election hacking, start there and work your way back. A highlight going back would be the CIA training of UBL. The IC was instrumental in escalating the Vietnam War. Etc.
If the IC's job is to think about thining the unthinkable, they have in fact come up short in a big way often enough. I sincerely didn't think stating the obvious was kosher on HN. Sorry.
A large part of "intelligence analysis" is just using domain-specific knowledge to take primary sources and translate/summarize them, such that you remove the need for others to have domain-specific knowledge in understanding that data.
As such, if you're pedantically using ten-dollar words just because they're "correct", you're not doing your job as an analyst.
High-level IA is about other things, but that doesn't mean you unlearn the skills you have ground into you as a desk worker.