> The people who are really good <span style="background:#fff88f">**understand sourcing and how important it is for critical thinking**</span>. The education should be focused on helping people recognize and refute bullshit. > > Step one is the critical thinking necessary to say, “This makes no sense,” or “This is just fluff.” The people who are professionally trained to be really good at understanding the quality and history of a source, and to understand the source’s access to information or lack of, are librarians. We should probably steal shamelessly from librarians. Data journalism, same thing. There are lots of parallel professions where we could be learning more to improve our own performance. > > The folks that I’ve seen who crush it, they’re like a dog with a bone. They will not let go. They’ve got a question, they’re going to answer the question if it kills them and everybody else around them. It’s a kamikaze thing. Those people, the tenacious ones who care about sources and have critical thinking skills, or at least tools to help them think critically, seem the highest performers to me. Comment from marginalrevolution: > This is quite an accurate description. I’ve always been amazed at how regular people often just accept news headlines from their news outlet of choice at face value. > > Even not great intel analysts know to qualify every assessment they make with a likelihood and a confidence level, which is hugely helpful to everyday thinking. > > <span style="background:#fff88f">What happens is “customers” (Eg. High level government and military decision makers) develop questions, the intelligence apparatus responds by directing collection efforts (whether that’s a human collector or a satellite in the sky), and analysts use the collected intelligence to try to answer the question.</span> > Another thing killer intel analysts are good at is presenting information. In fact it may be the key part of their job. An analyst who can make a good assessment won’t be nearly as influential as one who can present his assessment clearly and efficiently. > > <span style="background:#fff88f">**When giving briefs to high-level decision makers you often have to compress months of research and potentially years of total collection/analysis effort into a 30 minute “so-what.”**</span> [What do intelligence analysts do? - Marginal REVOLUTION](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/08/what-do-intelligence-analysts-do.html#comments)