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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 - 04:58pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3703 of 3705)

The Odds of That by LISA BELKIN

"In paranoid times like these, people see connections where there aren't any. Why the complex science of coincidence is a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare. Go to Article http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html

• Links: Web sites devoted to coincidence, including the Sept. 11 theory. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/11/magazine/11COINCIDENCE.html#links

MD3639 rshow55 8/11/02 1:29pm ... the process by which human beings "connect the dots" -- form patterns in their minds -- is the same process - - whether the particular relationship "seen" happens to be real or coincidental. You have to check.

If there is enough interest, it makes sense to cull the coincidences - and verify and focus the real patterns - patterns that can be precious.

What if the process of culling is forbidden, or not done? Just that problem occurs now.

Everybody gets ideas. Including bad ideas.

MD2348 rshow55 5/22/02 2:16pm

I wish someone could explain to decision makers, carefully and face to face, the essential points in

A Solution to Plato's Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction and Representation of Knowledge by Thomas K. Landauer and Susan Dumais . . . (Here is a draft of that paper, which was accepted with revisions, and published in Psychological Review, v104, n.2, 211-240, 1997 http://lsi.argreenhouse.com/lsi/papers/PSYCHREV96.html )

The Landauer paper, and the connection between statistics and symbolic reasoning is discussed in more detail in http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/240

MD2310 rshow55 5/19/02 2:51pm

Condemnation Without Absolutes by Stanley Fish http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/15/opinion/15FISH.html is interesting in this regard, though I have reservations about what he says. Some things become very close to absolutes -- enough for good action. Webs of logic -- decision trees, connections - can make MANY probabilities "essentially 0" or "essentially 1" - and human survival depends on it -- we DO know a lot of things, well enough to make decisions. MD669 lchic 3/18/02 11:51am ...MD672 rshow55 3/18/02 1:22pm

For very practical reasons -- we need better disciplined hearts. MD3658 rshow55 8/12/02 9:06am

And we need to learn enough about how human beings figure out their world to know when things are not likely to be coincidental -- when they are definitely worth checking.

rshow55 - 05:07pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3704 of 3705)

At the same time, we need to know that whole cultures -- including high status specialists within cultures - can be radically, ornately, gruesomely wrong. It has happened very often in the past. The history of medicine offers some wrenching examples - and Kipling explains how compelling a totally wrong set of medical views can be in Our Fathers Of Old http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee79f4e/241

People's head get full of "explanations" -- and have since history began. But are these "explanations" good ones?

An individual within a culture can have no way to tell - judging that individual by realistic human standards - unless, when enough things go wrong - checking is morally forcing.

Now, it isn't, and life is a lot more dangerous and a lot poorer than it has to be.

. . . .

Some of our current military arrangements - including the missile defense boondoggle, seem as crazy as the set of gruesome, ornate misconceptions Kipling describes in Our Fathers of Old.

Missile Defense involves enough information, in enough dimensions, with enough different ways to crosscheck so that it should be quite possible to check it to very high reliability according to the patterns cited in MD1075-76 rshow55 4/4/02 1:20pm .

I'd need a security problem dealt with - - and then the way might be clear for doing that. It would be a public service - and something very many serving officers in the US military would welcome.

rshow55 - 05:34pm Aug 13, 2002 EST (#3705 of 3705)

I posted this in Psychwar, Casablanca - - and terror , yesterday. . . . #305 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/324

Almarst and Gisterme have played a role on this thread as representatives of Russia and the Bush administration. I feel sure that they've been well aware of this since June, 2001, or before. #207 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/218

Some may be interested in tracing highlights of this thread - from my first involvement in it on Sept 25, 2000 - reading from #151 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/159 .

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