L4 · Analysis & Judgment ⭐ crown jewels
Taught once — the heart of the course. How a defensible judgment is actually made: inference, competing hypotheses, assumptions checking, source grading, and the disciplined expression of uncertainty. The fattest shelf and the hardest fusion (four civilian sources converge here).
Cards
| ID | Card |
|---|---|
| L4-01 | Inference: deduction, induction, abduction |
| L4-02 | Mental models, evidence & diagnosticity |
| L4-03 | Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) — reconciling Heuer-8 / SAT-9 |
| L4-04 | Key Assumptions Check |
| L4-05 | Quality of Information Check |
| L4-06 | The SAT toolkit — six families & technique selection |
| L4-07 | Source grading — McDowell 4×4 (house) vs Admiralty/NATO variant |
| L4-08 | Confidence vs probability & estimative language |
| L4-09 | Bias mitigation, red teaming, premortem |
| L4-10 | Critical Factors Analysis (CFA) |
Status, lead sources, and the live card table: course-architecture §3.
Notes — doctrinal conflicts taught as features
- L4-03 ACH: Heuer 8 vs SAT 9 → teach one canonical form, name the variant.
- L4-07 grading: McDowell 4×4 (house standard) vs Admiralty/NATO letter-number dual-rating (named variant).
- L4-08 is the one every analyst conflates: confidence in a judgment ≠ probability of the event — two axes (Heuer’s dot-plot; ICD 203).