We really don't know what other people think

I really don't like reading books of history that purport to tell me what someone thought. I agree with a comment Stuart Goldman made in discussing Nomonhan, 1939 -- that one can not look inside the scull of a historic figure.

Stuart, as I recall, was talking about Stalin. He pointed out that Stalin did not write a book on his philosophy as did Hitler in Mein Kampf. There are memos that were written to him on which he made notations. There are public statements that he made. There are even reports, sometimes diary entries, of things he said in private meetings. A good historian can report these indicators of a person's thinking, but not what they actually thought.

In the case of Stalin, one wonders how much his decisions were based on Communist ideology, as in the prediction that Capitalism would fall due to the weaknesses inherent in its structure, or that Communism would triumph and replace Capitalism? How much was based on his belief that Fascist Capitalism and Democratic Capitalism would probably result in a major European war? How much was due to a realistic perception that the Soviet Union was surrounded by countries whose leaders hated the USSR and Communism and would oppose the USSR to the point of war, and how much due to a psychology that resulted in excessive fear of such opposition? To what degree were Stalin's pogroms due to a psychology that resulted in excessive fear of internal opposition, and how much to a practical assessment of the real sources of opposition and threat from within the country? How good was the intelligence he received and how balanced was his assessment of situations based on that intelligence? How much did he take into account the views of others that actually reached him?

Clearly public figures often make public statements tailored to produce a desired effect rather than simply stating facts as they are understood or beliefs. Clearly they tell lies, even to their closest allies. Like anyone, a public figure may sometimes poorly express what he means.

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”
Robert McCloskey

It is always hard to put oneself in the mind of someone from a different time, since the culture of the past is always different than the culture of today. Moreover, as I have pointed out from time to time on this blog, we think with our brains, not our "logical minds", and are often unaware ourselves of exactly why we come to a specific decision. For some persons in history -- Hitler, Stalin -- it is suspected that they suffered from brain defects such as neurosis or psychosis, making their thinking still more opaque both to themselves and to others. Thus the decider may not be able to adequately express the reasons for a decision, and the audience may not be able to properly interpret what it is told about that decision.

It occurs to me that there are a number of decision tools that can be used such as:

• Tables of pros and cons for a decision;
• Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis;
• Logical framework analysis;
• Explicit contingency analysis (plan A, plan B); and
• Other approaches drawn from Decisions Theory.

These approaches often involve heuristics which draw conclusions from implicit weighting of factors in the decision and estimates of likelihoods. Who ever documents their decision making in sufficient detail that we can say we really understand "what they were thinking".