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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 - 07:42pm Aug 26, 2002 EST (# 3991 of 3994)
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.

If you say "I think something is true, widely useful, and in a practical sense, new." - - it makes sense try to be very clear about what it is you are claiming, and it makes sense to slog through a lot of examples, from a wide range of different fields, and check cases. I've done a lot of that.

It has been slow going. Partly because, 3/4 of the way through, I had to rethink something and backtrack. Glad I did, but it took time.

These basic facts still seem right to me, and they aren't new:

In some sense, when our minds form patterns, we "connect the dots." In large part we do this unconsciously.

The "dots" we collect are chosen according to associations in time, context, experience and circumstance that may be due to indirect connections, or to chance.

The patterns we somehow form from these "dots" aren't unique, and the patterns everyone in our culture agrees on may not be unique, either.

If "right" is arbitrary, we can say, with Kipling, that

There are nine and sixty ways
Of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right.

But results often matter, so we have reason to care about exact and specific technical answers. Maybe answers that occur at an unconsious and automatic level.

But answers.

rshow55 - 07:44pm Aug 26, 2002 EST (# 3992 of 3994)
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.

Since Socrates' time, at the latest, philosophers and ordinary people have discussed questions close to these questions:

How can "connecting the dots" work as well as it most often does? (This is "Plato's problem." )

We know a prodigious amount, and everybody agrees on an enormous body of common ground, about the meaning of words and many other things. How can the process work as badly as it sometimes does? When the process goes wrong, how can we know that it has gone wrong?

We don't agree on even very basic things about how human reason works when it works well. Or how it sometimes fails.

How can we know that one answer is better than another?

Landauer, Dumais, and co-workers made a big contribution - that had precedents, of course - but that made a big difference.

Landauer T.K. and Dumais, S.T. “A Solution to Plato’s Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and Representation of Knowledge” Psychological Review, v 104, n.2, 211-240, 1997 --- draft: http://lsi.argreenhouse.com/lsi/papers/PSYCHREV96.html

Even so, I'd have chosen a different title (though Psychological Review might have liked it less. Something like - "a BIG STEP toward the solution of Plato's problem . . . "

I'm trying to clarify -- and simplify - - and generalize some of their basic points - and carry them further.

What's new is a clear sense of HOW VERY BIG the payoffs with simplification usually are -- how VERY likely checked sequences are to converge on useful (if imperfect) order. And how VERY large the number of checks often are.

I'm pleased with results yesterday and today, excited with results - but getting presentable results is taking longer than I'd hoped. I'll have to wait till tomorrow morning.

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