Tradecraft is the analytical edge, not human judgment or empathy

The instinct says the edge is tacit human judgment - the stuff that never made it into a dashboard. This is the weakest version of the argument. Tacit expertise is more extractable than we like to admit: model an expert's actual decisions and you'll describe them better than they describe themselves. Intuition is also least reliable exactly when it matters most. In a real paradigm shift, the people who know the most have the most to unlearn.

Tradecraft is something different. It's not production - running regressions, cleaning data, building models. AI does that now, faster. Tradecraft is the discipline of reasoning under uncertainty: making competing hypotheses fight instead of defending your first guess, identifying which evidence actually discriminates between explanations, hunting for what would disconfirm you, and putting confidence in numbers instead of words like "possible" that every reader fills in differently.

The LLM is a satisficer. It grabs the most plausible story, confirms it, ignores what's missing, and stays confident while wrong. That's the exact failure that intelligence analysis spent fifty years documenting in humans. AI didn't kill tradecraft. It industrialized the error tradecraft exists to catch. The discipline is worth more now, not less.

Source claim: The real human analytical edge isn't tacit judgment or empathy but tradecraft - the discipline of reasoning under uncertainty that catches exactly the errors AI now mass-produces at scale.