Kitty Updates!

I have decided what my kitties will be for Halloween.  Kik will be a scarecrow and Echo will be a pumpkin.  Yes, I have already bought the outfits for them and yes, I am indeed dressing up my kitties for Halloween.  There is a costume contest for them if I so choose on the Salem Commons, and I think they should get to have fun and eat sweet things on Halloween.  They’ll hate it when I put the costumes on, but in the end they will love it.  I’ve already had to put the costumes away because they chew on them if I leave them on the desk.  I can’t wait.  I shall also post pictures.  It’s strange.  I’ve never really done much for Halloween as an adult.  I’ve gone to a few costume parties, I’ve carved a pumpkin or two, but mostly I’ve used Halloween as an excuse to eat chocolate and not feel guilty.  And bake with pumpkin.  But this will be the first Halloween for teh kitties, and I want it to be special.  If that means scratches and bites while I stuff their increasingly fat bottoms into a corny costume, so be it!  It’s Halloween, it’s Salem fergawdsake, and I don’t want them to miss out.  All of a sudden, with kitties, Halloween is fun again. 

But here are some pre-Halloween updates, so enjoy!

Do It Like a Man Files: On football Sunday, the kitties and I curl up on the couch and watch the games.  We all eventually fall asleep and doze through a quarter or two.  This Sunday, Kik sat up on the futon, legs splayed out in front of him, with his kitty chin on his kitty stomach and watched the game like a real man, sprawled out with his hands (paws) on his belly.  And then, in true man fashion, he fell asleep and then fell halfway over. 

Death From Above Files: Echo has a new game.  She perches on a high surface (chair, desk, bed) and when Kik goes by, she leaps on him from above.  Or she leaps in front of him in the classic “shot across the bow” maneuver, followed by wild chasing. 

Are You Kidding Me Files: 6:30am.  That’s when they wake me up.  6:30am.  Every single freaking day.  6:30am.  I hate that they do that. 

Can I Bake Too? Files: I like to bake.  Lately, I’ve been baking a lot.  I’m not a natural baker.  I’m not terribly good at it.  So I’ve been practicing.  Cookies, brownies, cakes, coffee cakes, bread.  Whatever.  Every time, the kitties want to be a part of it.  Usually, this means tipping over the bowl full of flour.  Twice.  And then running when I yell at them, trailing flour all over the house. 

Here’s a Tip Files: So, the whole flour tipping thing.  It gave Echo an idea.  Yeah, you guessed it.  She tips things over.  Water glasses mainly.  I don’t know why.  They always have plenty of water.  Also, if something is near the edge of a couch or desk, it’s going over.  Usually this happens when I’m in the other room and can’t do anything about it. 

To Think or Not to Think

The absolutely last thing I want to do is air dirty laundry at the drop of a hat but I have to say, I’ve noticed an unimaginable increase in clichés and hyperbole.  It’s hard to swallow, and I suppose I should remember that a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down, but I just don’t know how to find anything good in this endless stream of hackneyed sayings and trite expressions.  Oh well, what’s good for the goose…

Why do we think we’re saying something profound when we utter some stupid piece of dreamed up nonsense of doubtful origin?  Over and over, I see clichés parading about as though they mean something interesting.  Why do clichés get a pass on the requirements of truth and reflection?  Are we tapping into some ancestral reservoir of truth that I don’t know about?  Is there a magical alchemy of repetition at work that turns leaden phrases into intellectual gold? 

Wtf?    

I have noticed an increase in the use of these clichés over the years as I grade papers and exams.  Why? What on earth is going on?  Especially if it’s a big-ticket item like love, existence, beauty, or goodness.  I get things like “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” and “Love will set you free,” and all sorts of thoughtless nuggets of treasured and timeless wisdom.  What’s worse is that these things come at the expense of actual reflection and thought.  Throw a cliché into your essay, and instant brain freeze.  Thought stops happening since the ultimate trump card has just been played.  You can’t gainsay timeless wisdom. 

I wonder if there is a fear of public thinking?  It isn’t just the clichés, after all.  I think it’s a general fear of thinking, especially thinking out loud.  The hardest assignment I ever gave – bar none – was the assignment of a “Meditation book.”  We were reading Marcus Aurelius for an Intro class.  I made the broad argument that most philosophers do not begin in esoteric regions of abstract thought but instead look to the world around them (or inside them) for insight.  Socrates is faced with the immediate and pressing question of the nature of piety given his concrete situation before the Athenian court.  Hume wanted to think about the contents of our thought.  Descartes wanted to see if he could know anything with certainty.  In so many cases, I argued, philosophers begin by looking around at the most obvious of things and asking questions.  Things like being, existence, nature, beauty, etc., become important by looking around, living life, and thinking about what you are doing.  So that’s what  I wanted them to do.  I wanted them to look around, notice their every day life, reflect on it, and write down what occurred.  To write down their thoughts.  Not descriptions of their day, not a journal, not a diary.  I only wanted them to see the world around them and think about it. 

Went over like a lead balloon.  They hated it.  Said it was enormously difficult, too hard.  Too vague and ill-defined.  They didn’t know what I was looking for, and they didn’t know what my rubric was going to be as I graded it.  Look, I said.  And think.  Look and think.  That’s my rubric.  Are you looking?  Are you thinking?  Are you doing both?  Good…you pass. 

No dice. 

So I’m doing it again.  And I’m hitting the same problems.  We’ve gone over examples in class.  I’ve used contemporary and historical examples from philosophy.  I’ve offered comparisons to science, to any disciplined way of knowing.  I’ve asked them to talk about their days and we’ve drawn insights from that.  Still among the most difficult things I’ve ever asked any class to do. 

Why is thinking so hard?  Why is it hard to do, and why is it hard to inspire others to do it?  Is it our plug-and-chug culture of knowledge?  Is it the result of an increasingly anesthetic existence?  Is it just laziness?  Is it fear of public thinking?  What does it mean when the request to look around you and think about what you see fills my students with dread, anxiety and confusion? 

I just don’t know.

Kitty Updates!

Nearly all of the time, my kitties are a joy.  And they are such an important part of my daily life, I decree that there shall be kitty updates.  Even if you do not care, I know that they care.  Today, Echo meowed in a way that specifically said “Why have you not written about us on your blog?”  I could only shake my head.  She meowed in a tone that clearly said “Loser” and walked away in a distinct four-letter-word kind of way.  So, there will now be posts updating you on my kitties. 

Complete Idiot Files: Echo chased a shadow into the wall.  Best of all? It was her shadow.  Kik fell asleep on the back of the futon (his usual nesting place), got too relaxed and fell off. 

Utter Weirdness Files: Kik was unaccountably wet all down his back.  It was not from grooming. I wasn’t doing anything involving water, and I have no idea what happened.  He wandered by trailing water down his back.  I can’t find a puddle.  I can’t find a spill.  I am frightened. 

Pure Awesomeness Files: Echo sleeps by my head every night and is there when I wake up in the morning. 

Stupid Human Tricks Files: Echo came up to me, meowed once and walked away.  I followed, intrigued.  She did that purr-meow thing all down the hallway.  She led me to a blank wall, meowed again, and looked at me to do something.  I shrugged.  She meowed.  I walked away.  This isn’t the first time this has happened.  I think the kitties have hit upon a new game called “Get Foodbringer To Follow You to Random, Senseless Locations.”

Test of Wills Files: Kik wants me to pet him before he eats.  I don’t want to.  He has cuteness on his side.  I have his eventual starvation on mine.  Game on, kitty.  Game on. 

Philosophy is Subjective

From time to time, I get cranky.  I rant.  It’s nothing serious.  It’s more of a parody of seriousness.  Sometimes, I find that I need to poke fun at my own irritations and my own convictions about the importance of things.  It keeps me happy, and when it happens in class, it usually keeps my students amused.  But at the end of the day, it is a way of laughing at my own seriousness while in the midst of that seriousness.  It helps.

So accept this in the spirit of a cranky rant as I poke fun at my own serious convictions…

As a philosopher, I’m used to being marginalized.  My colleagues in the business school make about twice what I do in the humanities and their offices have windows.  And air conditioning.  Far too many people consider Philosophy a luxury and the rarest form of laziness.  My discipline isn’t concrete (whatever the hell that means), and we’re considered weird by eight-year olds (there was a Letter to the Editor in the APA proceedings a few years ago…).  

I’m also used to explaining to people precisely what it is that I do.  And I’ve adjusted to their befuddled expressions when I tell them that I think.  That’s all.  Just think.  And like many of my philosopher friends, I’m endlessly amused by the fact that what I do is not done with any frequency by the people who look down their noses at my profession.  I get back at them in small ways.  I correct their grammar in my head.  I make faces when they’re not looking.  That sort of thing…the usual. 

But there is one claim about my livelihood that tickles my irksome, and I hear it all the time in various ways and various forms, and recently it led to a rant that I felt I should share with the whole world.  The claim is:

Philosophy is subjective.

It may not be phrased precisely this way, but in any of its forms, it is nearly always uttered with a casual tone as if its truth value were beyond dispute.  “Nothing to see here.  Just stating the obvious, you know how it is.”  And whether it is verbalized or not, I always hear the claim in my head like this:

Everybody just KNOWS that philosophy is subjective. Duh!

Of course, I am immediately insulted.  Clearly, I didn’t get the memo on that little mot juste since I kinda staked my livelihood on this totally subjective thing.  Oops.  I guess somewhere along the way towards my doctorate I should have realized what is immediately obvious to everyone EXCEPT those in the profession.  How foolish of me to think I could make a career out of subjective things.  In my defense, I can only say I was blinded by the money.  Wait.  They’re paying me for this?  I guess my university didn’t get that memo, either. 

Of course philosophy is subjective.  If it can’t be sold in the 7-11 or the Starbucks I should be working at, I guess it doesn’t exist.  It’s all just opinion.  I mean, it’s not like there are any answers or anything.  And I’ve pulled off the greatest magic trick since since Keanu Reeves got an acting job: I get paid money to tell people things they already know, and to make them doubt things they already know (and that no one really doubts), and then to admit – finally – that they really can’t be known…which we knew all along.  How tricksy of me.  I’m getting paid for not knowing things!

And since philosophy is subjective, it matters a whole lot less than those more “objective” disciplines like math and the “hard” sciences.  Those are really tough.  And boy, they really have a lock on the truth.  They just tell it like it is.  No partiality there.  No opinions, nothing subjective.  Just cold, hard facts.  Like phlogiston.  And Eugenics.  And that whole Earth being flat thing.  Well, you know.  Accidents happen.  Like thinking the Sun revolved around the Earth.  But hey, we had the right facts, we just didn’t have the tools to interpret them properly.  The facts didn’t change, just how we were able to understand them.  Of course, that doesn’t sound like science.  That sounds like therapy. 

So the “hard” sciences get a mulligan on the Earth being flat and stationary and WE are subjective?  Un hunh. 

Ranting aside, though, there are serious problems with the claim that philosophy is subjective, and they go deeper than a basic misunderstanding about philosophy.  As I watch what is happening to the humanities generally, I wonder about the connection between the devaluation of “soft” disciplines and the perception of the subjectivity of things like philosophy.  I also notice that genuine thinking occurs less and less frequently in our mainstream discourse.  So, it’s worth taking a careful look at the “subjectivity” of philosophy. 

I often note, when I hear this claim, that my critic is employing a valuable, utterly non-subjective distinction whose origin is found in the very discipline now under attack.  Subjective/objective is a philosophical distinction through and through, and the notion that some things are subjective and some objective (in whatever sense of the term) comes to us from philosophy.  Isn’t it interesting that such an importantly valuable and productive distinction arises from a discipline that is attacked – through that very distinction – as useless and unproductive?  It also raises one of the most important functions of philosophy: reflection. 

To someone not given to philosophical reflection, the status of a claim of subjectivity will never arise.  Is the statement “Philosophy is subjective” itself a subjective or objective claim?  This is more than navel-gazing.  The question points to our capacity to submit our distinctions to interrogation and analysis, to examine the reasoning and support for our claims beyond simple assertion.  Reflection is decisive for reason.  It means that we are able to interrogate ourselves regarding what we are doing and why.  It means we are able to look beyond the given to the sources and causes of what is given.  Reflection allows us to engage what we perceive, to evaluate, compare, assess and judge.  Unreflective claims regarding the subjectivity of philosophy point out in dramatic fashion just how greatly the peculiar talents of philosophy are needed.

But more dangerous than the status of the claim is its substance.  It’s not entirely clear what someone means when they call philosophy subjective, and I think a variety of things are intended, some more well-meaning than others.  First, though, if the claim means something like “Philosophy is all just opinion,” then it’s a stupid claim.  Philosophers, like all thinking persons, are prone to opinions.  I have many: Cheese is awesome.  Truffles are awesomer.  Kitties are better than doggies.  But when I’m engaged in my profession, I am not in the business of opinions.  I evaluate arguments.  I assess truth claims.  I look at evidence and support, and I employ quite non-subjective rules of thought, logic, analysis, and evidentiary weight in my deliberations.  Do philosophers engage in speculation?  All the time.  Just like all of the other disciplines out there.  Remember phlogiston?  But speculation is the lynchpin of reason.  Speculation is a part of precisely what is so important and necessary about thinking: we reflect, and in that reflection we move beyond what is “simply” given, beyond what “the facts” show, and we engage our capacity for self-interrogation and evaluation. 

Just what do you think a scientific theory is if not speculation?  If you think gravity is “true,” then you profoundly misunderstand both truth and the nature of scientific claims.  Gravity is no more true than the flying spaghetti monster.  However, and this is important, as a theoretical explanation it is far better than the flying spaghetti monster.  It is able to effectively and adequately explain both past and present phenomena, and it has enormous predictive power for future phenomena.  Using its rules, we can both explain and predict with a significant degree of certainty, and what’s more, this explanatory and predictive power has been demonstrated again and again and again in a variety of familiar and novel settings.  Given all of this, it is reasonable to infer the accuracy of our understanding of gravity as an important force in the universe.  But note that what would make the above sentence “true” has nothing to do with gravity.  It has to do with the rules of inference, the weight of evidence, and the significance of repetition, prediction, and evaluation in the consideration of what we perceive.  The formulation of the theory, the weighing of the evidence, the assessment of the certainty of the theory: none of this would be possible without that peculiarly speculative enterprise of reflection that characterizes our reason.  In this way, the speculative character of science and the speculative character of philosophy are identical. 

I suspect that this is where people get concerned, and another meaning of subjectivity comes out.  “Philosophy is subjective” often means that philosophy deals with things that cannot be proven, or at least, with things that lack the kind of empirical verification and replication that science can provide.  If I want to know about the movement of physical objects, I can easily get answers of a concrete, empirical sort.  If I want to know about the movement of mental objects, empirical certainty is hard to come by.  Hume describes it best, I think.  We make great strides in the world of physical and empirical things.  However, when we devote the least attention to that which is closest to us – our own minds – we can take only a few steps and then the entire realm of the mind becomes opaque and confused.  At this point, things get really “subjective” and not at all empirical or certain. 

Welcome to my world, cupcake.  The set of philosophical questions cannot (and should not) be exhausted by the set of empirical things that can be “objectively” verified.  Have you ever found a sunset beautiful?  Would you want to quantify that empirically?  It doesn’t mean that I cannot explain its beauty.  It doesn’t mean that its beauty is purely “subjective.”  It means that the beauty of sunsets requires different practices, standards, inferences, and rules than those governing more “objective” phenomena.  But the experience and understanding of beauty is no less important than the understanding of the composition of our sun.  The most important human values are often those that lack “empirical” or “objective” confirmation: beauty, meaning, truth, goodness.  This is not a failure of philosophy any more than it is a failure of science.  It is a recognition that knowledge is not univocal, that human understanding and reason rely upon more than merely “objective” standards of proof and confirmation.  Is the sun that you measure more “accurate,” more “true,” more “real” than the sun that I eulogize, paint, worship or write about in an allegory? 

It should be clear that the status of “facts,” “objects,” and “objective truth” are all in question in this account, and in this murky, difficult, reflective space, philosophers are at home.  There is a rigor to what we do that exceeds in measure the rigor of science.  We do not take for granted an explanatory worldview that allows us to organize experience under a single principle.  Our job is much harder.  We address our interests and our questions to that reflective space that opens when familiar certainty drops away, when doubt and ignorance are genuine, when there is reflective disequilibrium among our truths.  This requires a productive and importance sense of ignorance.

When I teach the Euthyphro, I make this point often.  At the crucial moment when Euthyphro turns away from giving a definition for piety, he expresses a productive ignorance.  After all, were he to give the aim of the gods upon which the definition would rest, he would have an inhuman knowledge, an impious knowledge, a knowledge that the gods themselves did not possess.  In his recognition of his ignorance, he realizes something that was in a sense always true: he doesn’t know what piety is.  But this ignorance moves from unreflective dismissal to reflective importance when he is faced with the problem of defining piety in a way that would exceed the boundaries of all and any human knowledge.  He becomes aware, albeit briefly, that there are some answers we cannot give, and some questions we cannot ask.  “What is piety?” was never the right question.  Or rather, the question of piety is lived in the experience of the boundaries of human knowledge and the recognition of the limits of that knowledge before the gods. 

There is much more that I could and probably should say, but this is a good place to end.  Maybe it’s best just to say that philosophy addresses the questions that we live, and not merely the ones that we ask.  I think that says it all. 

Is It Just About Cheating?

Some days when I read the news, I recall what Kundera said about Anna Karenina.  Noting the parallel between the opening and ending of the novel, he says that we should not view the symmetry as contrived to serve a fictional purpose.  After all, real life carries more surprising symmetries than fiction could ever produce.  They lack only a narrator to notice them. 

When I read this article about FBI agents cheating on an exam to test their knowledge of the new guidelines for gathering domestic intelligence, I simply had to laugh.  Rather emblematic of the entire situation, I think: cops cheating and cutting corners on their knowledge of guidelines that already test the limits of our civil liberties and the Constitution (yes, I’m being polite).  What must Kundera think of this?  The “lawlessness,” if you will, of our dishonest G-men shucking the exam offers an admirable and rhetorically delectable symmetry with the lawlessness of the very surveillance guidelines that govern the behavior of these very same G-men.  If it were not so upsetting, I would find it stylistically beautiful.  And funny.

But you know what, it’s the cheating element that is really bugging me.  Maybe because I am an educator, or maybe because I’ve been closely following a recent debate about cheating, I don’t know.  But it bugs the hell out of me that they cheated. 

It was entirely unnecessary.  If you read the report, it quickly becomes clear that a “normal” FBI training seminar and test could only be failed if the test-taker were unconscious or dead.  A few examples: trainers during a “normal” seminar would (a) stomp their feet loudly several times when covering material related to an exam question, (b) use “cartoon characters” on PowerPoint slides to indicate exam material, or (c) use some other attention-getting signal (raised eyebrows and finger pointing?) to tell people that this next thing would definitely be on the exam.    

And the “normal” exam? Easy mode.  You could change your answer after it was selected.  Or, if you actually managed to get one wrong, you were told immediately that it was wrong, so you wouldn’t forget on the re-test (yes…re-test).  Oh, and there was no randomizing of questions, answers, or ordering.  Right answers were always the same, and always in the same order on the test. 

Hilarious.  If I ran my classes like the FBI runs its training programs, I would be laughed out of my University and then fired.  Now, the DIOG exam they cheated on in large numbers was apparently harder than the normal exam because, as best as I can tell, it employed common sense.  Randomized questions, randomized answer selection, and you could not revisit or change answers once selected.  You also did not know which you answered right or wrong, only a total score.  Gee, sounds almost like a normal test…oh, and the last question was an acceptance of an honor pledge that you only consulted authorized material for the exam and didn’t talk to or receive support from another person.  So far, so good. 

And to make things easier than most freshmen level college courses, there was no penalty for failing except “remedial training” (which almost never happened) and a re-test.  It was an open-book test, zero time limit, and infinite re-tests upon failing.  No penalties, no fouls.  Just test till you passed. 

Oh, I um forgot to mention: it was possible to download and print all 51 questions once you opened the exam.  It seems this was a brief oversight on the part of the test makers, but well, a bunch of lawyers told employees they could print the exam, so they did.  And then passed.  But you know, they weren’t supposed to because, well, read for yourself:

If ever asked, the CPO would not have authorized the printing of

the DIOG test questions to be shared with employees prior to them

taking the DIOG test. Even though the DIOG and notes were

authorized during test taking, it was never the intent of the CPO to

have copies of the test questions available outside of actually

taking the Virtual Academy DIOG test.

Why this would not constitute common sense and the most obvious course of action to even a reasonably educated cop, much less an FBI agent, is utterly mystifying.  Have you watched Are You Smarter Than a 5^th Grader?  You can’t get the questions in advance and then come back to answer them all correctly and take the money! C’mon.  Even fifth-graders know this.  Why don’t the G-men and their lawyers? 

But alright.  Exams, even this “more rigorous” exam, are impossible to fail at the FBI.  So why cheat?  It couldn’t be easier to pass.  It’s fail-proof!  Why cheat on a test you can’t, in the end, fail?  That’s what is bugging me.  Cheating on an exam when it is entirely unnecessary and nothing – except our civil liberties – hangs in the balance. 

When I have a student that cheats, both the reaction and the reasons are the same.  It is always sad.  Sometimes, they were overworked, waited till the last minute, or had too many exams that day/week/month.  Other times, they thought they had a full-proof method, they didn’t realize the severity of what they were doing, or they didn’t know what they were doing.  In the end, the reasons amount to the same thing.  It didn’t matter. 

I suspect that is why they always expected, wrongly, that I would just let them re-take the assignment with a slight penalty…give them a do-over, a mulligan.  Ok, they were caught, it was a mistake and a bad thing to do, but in the end, it didn’t matter.  Let’s look to the future, not the past.  Let’s recognize that people are human and offer a second chance.  I am deeply sympathetic to second chances and renewed hope and spirit.  I have been given many second chances, and I doubt that I deserved even a fraction of them.  I am convinced that generosity is a powerful motivator, and I am absolutely convinced that cheating hurts those who engage in it far more, in the end, than the punishments that I might inflict.  Attentive to these recognitions, I have given many second chances.  I have tried constructive approaches, and I have done everything I can to teach the value of honesty rather than the punishment for dishonesty. 

But I have always been concerned by the perspective that the exam, assignment, or test just didn’t matter.  In the larger context, education is no longer its own value, and it is not prized as a good in itself.  Students need jobs, and graduates need jobs that will help them pay off the investment of college.  As much as education might be about other things, it is also about functional, practical ends.  Chief among those ends is a good, well-paying job.  Exams are simply hurdles in the way of that final end, grades, and that ultimate end, jobs.  They don’t matter.  So why not cheat?  It’s not a cost benefit analysis, it’s just a recognition that an exam is merely an insignificant means to an end that is disconnected from both the exam and the material it covers.  Exams relate to narrow ranges of information that will not, in the grand scheme, impact a life beyond the course grade which in the end contributes to a job.  In the midst of this indifference and insignificance, cheating is very nearly mandated. 

No, this is not cynicism.  No, I am not speaking about all students.  Not even about most students.  I am instead attempting to locate the range of interests that would lead one to view exams and tests as so insignificant and irrelevant that it is worth cheating even on an exam that you cannot fail.  In my experience with students that are less than honest, I have at times suspected the presence of this indifference and insignificance.  It troubles me.  And when I look at the lengths to which these agents went in order to cheat on a fail-proof exam, I see a powerful indifference to the exam and its necessity.  They cheated, as I imagine it, because the exam and the accompanying training just didn’t matter.  It was irrelevant to the ends and aims of their jobs (keeping us safe, stopping terrorists, and all of the other things that involve domestic intelligence).  It would neither help nor hinder their effective ability to do what they were already doing, and in this context, they viewed cheating as practically mandated. 

This frightens me.  Not only because of what it says about the mentality of cheating, but because of the impetus for this specific test.  The DIOG (Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide) was implemented as “an outgrowth of the FBI’s post-September 11, 2001, transformation from primarily a law enforcement agency to a domestic intelligence agency that focuses on its national security and law enforcement missions.”  The FBI is now a domestic intelligence agency.  Got that?  And as such, the DIOG was created to “ensure that the FBI’s operating rules are consistent with the Bureau’s mission and current operational needs while at the same time protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.”  Of course, this led Congress and a few advocacy groups to wonder whether or not the FBI would actually follow these guidelines, and whether they actually cared about protecting privacy and civil liberties.  So, the tests were designed to prove that the FBI cared about privacy and all that weepy, liberal constitution stuff, and to provide transparent assurance that the FBI complied with these guidelines instead of, you know, breaking the law.

And it is this test on which all of those G-men cheated…the test designed to ensure compliance with guidelines to safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.  If my argument has merit, that cheating on a fail-proof test indicates the insignificance of the test for actual goals and ends, then this outcome is more than troubling.  It’s downright scary.  What would have to be the institutional climate of a domestic intelligence agency such that it would be so utterly indifferent to training and compliance with guidelines that protect civil liberties? 

The educational form of the argument states that deep indifference (of the kind that would nearly mandate cheating) occurs when the actual goal of the institutional setting (getting a job) is radically divorced from the intended goal (getting an education).  Apply this to our current case, and the implication is that the actual goal of the FBI is radically divorced from the intended goal.  And moreover, this is true to such an extent that training and testing for the sake of compliance with the protection of civil liberties is insignificant to the point of meaninglessness. I find that scary.