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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

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rshow55 - 09:34am Jul 9, 2003 EST (# 12910 of 12914)
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

On a thread discussing Lauren Slater's Repress Yourself http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/23/magazine/23REPRESSION.html there's a series of posts by lchic and me, organized and taken from this Missile Defense thread

114 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.j8LLboIonIO.54794@.f39a52e/114 to 126 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.j8LLboIonIO.54794@.f39a52e/126

The issues of repression and other kinds of unconscious or semiconsious processing are important when we think about the decisions that people make, the reliability of those decisions, the biases, conscious and unconscious, that may have been in play in the formation of those decisions - and practical and moral consequences. Repression is part of the puzzle. Power relations that restrain human communication and reasoning provide other parts of the puzzle.

We need logical tools, and human insights, that make closure possible, and agreements resiliant, to a degree that they haven't been before. Lchic and I have been working, long, hard, and with concentration - to provide and focus them.

9040 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@13.j8LLboIonIO.54794@.f28e622/10566 reads:

Our "logic" - is mostly a choosing between many alteratives going on or being fashioned in our heads - and in the course of that choosing - people believe what "feels right."

But what "feels right," most often, is what, in our minds "cooperates with the interests of authority - with our group." Look at Pritchard's notes on Milgram's experiment - and on Jonestown - to get a sense of how wrong it feels, for most people, to go against authority. http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html

We need to face the fact that there is more need to check - especially when "the ties that bind" are involved - than people feel comfortable with.

On this thread, again and again, there have been technical arguments - and with absolutely stunning, monotonous regularity - gisterme presents arguments that make no technical sense at all - that are perversely wrong - and feels right about them. He seems to be being advised by, and believing, organizations of people who act very much like NASA acted in the Challenger mess.

. . .

We're dealing here with nonrandom, basic patterns of human behavior that get us into messes. We need to face them. If we did - we could do better.

We ought to think about the behavior set out in http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~epritch1/social98a.html and realize that if we're "wired to be nice" - that is - to be cooperative - we're also "wired to be self deceptive and stupid" whenever the immediate thought seems to go against our cooperative needs.

. Why We're So Nice: We're Wired to Cooperate By NATALIE ANGIER http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/health/psychology/23COOP.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

We're dealing with problems that are only partly conscious - some at the level of individuals - some at the level of groups.

With logical tools coming into being - and simulation tools coming into being - we can do much better than we're doing if we keep at it, and have to wit and courage to admit that, even for the best of us - our understandings are maps rather than territories. We know what it takes to make a good map. You have to check it. And maps can be good for some thing, but not others. In specific cases - people know most of what they need to know now.

Though much too often they lie, both to themselves and others.

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