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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 - 07:43am Feb 5, 2003 EST (# 8580 of 8584)
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.

7905 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@93.ywLzaodG23X.926331@.f28e622/9430 includes this:

"This thread is largely about the most important breakthrough the internet offers - the ability to collect information, close together, so that one can say "here, look for yourself."

"If you can collect the dots then connect the dots and keep at it matching for both internal consistency and fit to external information from "the world" you can often find out the truth - if the truth actually exists in the real world.

"The reason the process works so well - and the only reason it can work at all - is that with enough dots - the odds you are seeing a pattern by accident become vanishingly small - and with work, you can find out exactly the right answer for a particular purpose.

" If there is one. _ _ _ _

The point isn't that the patterns seen are necessarily right. It is that they are not there by accident. When it matters enough, the patterns can be further tested. Some will be wrong - and that is to be expected - indeed, from human experience, the most common case. For anyone and for any group. Error, incomplete understanding, are the things to expect. They are even the things to expect in those cases where there is "complete clarity of motives" - and "complete good will" - and these cases are rare. But if patterns are tested (and this is expensive, but can be done when it matters enough) - mistakes can be ruled out - and it is human experience that people often come to agreement - and to levels of understanding that work well for what they need to do.

The process is much harder - when things are going wrong - because people notice things, and consider things, for reasons that are not disinterested - where a desire for truth may be a very subordinate value - and where neither the motivations nor the ideas involved may be clear to anyone involved. That's the human condition. When it matters enough - it remains true that people can very often get things straight.

With the stakes as they are in Iraq - we need to do it. The effort involved isn't negligible - but it is much cheaper than war - and getting the work done is important if war is to happen with stable results.

When evidence and argument are laid out at the level of "here, look for yourself" . . and different individuals and groups claim to see, or do see, different things - we need some sense of what to do.

rshow55 - 07:47am Feb 5, 2003 EST (# 8581 of 8584)
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.

Casey told me to read A Treatise on Probability - and though I've read a lot of other books on the foundations of statistics - it is still the single one that I've found most useful.

A Treatise on Probability by John Maynard Keynes Harper Torchbook, 1962 1st ed, 1921 includes an introduction by N. R. Hanson, viii-ix - Hanson selects key quotes by Keynes:

"The terms certain and probable describe the various degrees of rational belief about a proposition which different amounts of information authorize us to entertain. All propositions are true or false, but the knowledge we have of them depends on our circumstances . . .

and, of course about the assumptions we make to interpret those circumstances.

. . . . "It would be as absurd to deny that an opinion was probable, when at a later stage, certain objections have come to light, as to deny, when we have reached our destination, that it was ever three miles distant; and the opinon still is probable in relation to the old hypothesis, just as the destination is still three miles distant from our starting point.

In other words, . . for Keynes the probability relation which obtains between a conclusion and its premises are so "objective" that one can characterize it in a time-independent way at any future date. It can be said to be reasonable (or unreasonable) , in a clear sense - in terms of the specific assumptions and weights on which the conclusion was based. But only if those assumptions and weights are clear themselves.

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense