I have been going back through this year’s conversations, editing as I go. In this particular entry, the guys make some points about our thinking process, and bias, and judgment.
Context in the process of learning
Monday, June 20, 2022
We can go into the process of learning, if you wish.
Go ahead, then, and we’ll see.
What is learning but associating? And what is associating but ordering things? In so doing, you create, no less than assort.
I think you mean, the act of finding patterns and relationships is more creative than passive.
Let’s say, it is receptive first, then active, then again receptive in the face of the new aspect of things that your previous selection and sorting has revealed, and on and on. The deeper you look, the more you see. Thus you have superficial books and thorough ones and penetrating ones, and philosophical ones, and even metaphysical ones, all on the same subject, all integrally connected to how much time, attention, thought, sorting, looking again, more research, etc., etc., goes into it.
I think of my friend Jim’s researching casualty rates among bomber crews in World War II. I was astonished to learn that in important ways, the casualty rates weren’t ever collected, digested, and published.
And your own life experience – which was neither military nor particularly executive – tells you why.
Certainly. No important constituency ever demanded to know, and several important constituencies probably demanded that we not know. I can’t imagine Bomber Harris or Curt LeMay welcoming a real understanding of the costs.
So that is an immediate superficial reaction. (We do not say it is right or wrong. We intend to illustrate a process.) Look at it again, changing points of view, sticking to what you know, second-hand, from your years of reading histories, memoirs, and biographies.
I don’t know if there is consensus even yet over the effectiveness of the air war in Europe. You’d have to divide it into strategic and tactical.
Do so.
There can’t be much argument that the tactical effects were not devastatingly effective. It seems clear that air attacks, along with widespread sabotage on the ground, destroyed the German ability to deliver a counter-attack after D-Day. Eisenhower ordered the systematic destruction of rail stations throughout northern France, and that sill seems clearly warranted and clearly effective. Similarly, when the skies cleared in December, 1944, the Battle of the Bulge was lost by the Germans at least in large part because they couldn’t win on the ground against Allied control of the air. Merely two examples of the critical effectiveness of air power against troops, ships, and infrastructure.
But.
But Harris and LeMay set out to destroy German cities to win the war from the air, imagining that ground troops would mostly be needed for occupation, not conquest. They had some pipe-dream of an idea that the German people would rise up against their government, once misery reached a certain level. You know, nothing much, just overthrow the Nazis one household at a time.
But.
But Albert Speer’s memoirs, written after he finished his imprisonment in Spandau after the war, pointed out that at one point our bombardment nearly crippled ball-bearing production, which might have brought industrial movement to a standstill.
But.
But there are ways and there are ways. Nobody started off the war inflicting massive random destruction on enemy cities.
No, think that through.
You’re right. Hitler did, deliberately. He destroyed Rotterdam quite cold-bloodedly, to paralyze the Dutch. (Air destruction in Poland, earlier, may have been the same thing, I just don’t know one way or the other.) Still, the West wouldn’t have deliberately set out to flatten entire cities, not in 1939, not in 1940. But after the Blitz tried to do just that to London, attitudes hardened. One thing led to another, and ultimately you had Hamburg, and Dresden, and, in the Pacific, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
So was the bombing campaign unnecessary?
There are other elements involved. With the Germans in control of the whole continent for four years, air power was about all the Allies could apply directly. Until the Allies were ready to reinvade Europe, their ground and naval forces could be used only peripherally: North Africa, Sicily, Italy. For all that time, only the air offered promise of hurting them, and besides, it was crucial that the Allies have air superiority at least over France if they were to invade. Continuous air warfare was designed to provide that superiority and keep it.
But.
But as Jim points out, the campaign of bombing was very expensive in air crews and airframes. Even so many decades later, it is not widely understood how expensive. And in the absence of the facts and of the context for the facts, how can anybody make informed judgments?
This is different from armchair quarterbacking, how?
I’d say it is mostly a difference in intent. The armchair quarterback says, “Here’s what they should have done.” The researcher says, “Here’s what the facts are.” The two can overlap, but there is a difference.
So you could look at the same facts and draw quite different conclusions, depending upon the context you saw them in – a context largely invisible to you.
That’s very interesting.
Well, are you likely to be aware of all the associations you make beneath the level of consciousness? One person’s view of the war (for example) will be very different from another’s, partly because each will have his own personal associations that amount to a bias. (We don’t use the word “bias” in a pejorative sense, merely as a fact of life. The way you see the world is not objective, because it cannot be. It is always subjective, with you in the center of the web.)
Surely some viewpoints are more informed than others.
Certainly, but informed in one area may mean ignorant in another area, so the net effect is less predictable than you might suppose. Otherwise Harris and LeMay would have had unexceptional judgment, for they surely were well-informed.
I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that is one hazard of expertise, isn’t it?
Nobody knows everything. Nobody is wise about everything. Nobody is the last word on anything. But after all, that’s a hopeful thing, is it not? Leaves room for the rest of you.