|

Why You Are Getting Iran Wrong: The Availability Heuristic

ByEric Garland

Game Theory Today · Short · 2:16 · Published 2026-11-07 on YouTube

Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana told Theo Von on July 1, 2026 that classified intelligence he reviewed showed Iran stockpiling ballistic and cruise missiles, with the intent of shielding a restarted nuclear weapons program and threatening its neighbors and possibly Europe. On Fox Business he put the production rate at 200 to 600 missiles a month. The clip recirculated on November 6, and the dominant reaction, organic and otherwise, was disbelief: people had either never heard the claim or did not believe it. The same week, viewers of Game Theory Today said the same about the Shield of the Americas, the 19-nation counter-cartel coalition launched at Doral on March 7, which Colombia joined in August with a $1 billion U.S. security package and Peru joined in September alongside an F-16 purchase.

Kennedy’s claim is contested; critics dispute both the missile-range figures and the weaponization timeline, and this video does not adjudicate it. The point is narrower: none of these facts were secret, and most of the audience never encountered them.

The availability heuristic

Tversky and Kahneman named the mechanism in 1973. The availability heuristic is the mind’s habit of judging how important or how frequent something is by how easily an example comes to mind. Fifty news segments on a subject make it feel enormous. Zero segments make it feel nonexistent, which is not the same as absent. The result is that a reader can be fully informed about the cost of a war and know nothing about the threat assessment behind it, or hear daily that the world has turned against the United States and never learn that nineteen governments in the hemisphere signed on to a U.S.-led security coalition. The information was public. It simply was not on the menu, and the brain orders off the menu it is handed.

Heuer’s fix

Richards Heuer’s Psychology of Intelligence Analysis offers the working correction, and it is the one intelligence analysts are trained to apply: ask what evidence you would expect to see if a claim were true, then go check whether it exists. For the Iran question, that means reading the threat assessments from Washington, Berlin, Paris, or Helsinki rather than the coverage of them. For the hemisphere, it means reading what the new presidents in Santiago, Lima, and Bogotá actually say about the United States. Fact-checking tests a sentence. Narrative-checking tests the frame, against markets, troop movements, and election results. The question for readers is not whether the Iran threat was real. It is whether they have ever looked.

Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.

Related analysis from Competitive Futures

Sources

Similar Posts