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Missile Defense

Russian military leaders have expressed concern about US plans for a national missile defense system. Will defense technology be limited by possibilities for a strategic imbalance? Is this just SDI all over again?

rshowalter - 01:05pm Jun 18, 2001 EST (#5361 of 5365)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD 1433 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?14@184.bWmWaKqepi4^1508956@.f0ce57b/1549.... MD1434 rshowalter 3/24/01 12:42pm
Md1435 rshowalter 3/24/01 12:50pm ....

Human Beings are both much more and much less than "logical beings" -- and some of the best things about us are associative and intuitive. Humanity would be unthinkable otherwise. But that also means that groups of people can convince each other of ideas that are dangerous and wrong.

In http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b2bd/240 I wrote this:

A body of work with profound philosophical and practical consequences is

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 ..... (Landauer is at the Department of Psychology, University of Colorado, Boulder, and Dumais is now at Microsoft.)

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

I'm also hotkeying a piece of my own, that was intended to be part of a thesis proposal that has not been accepted. "Statistical-Associational Correllation and Symbol Reasoning may be mutually reinforcing. The example of LSA." http://www.wisc.edu/rshowalt/lsa

It includes these passages:

"Landauer and Dumais draw this basic conclusion:

" " . . . with respect to (correlations) supposed to allow the learning of language and other large bodies of complexly structured knowledge, domains in which there are very many facts each weakly related to very many others, effective simulation may require data sets of the same size and content as those encountered by human learners. Formally, that is because weak local constraints can combine to produce strong local effects in aggregate(9).

" ". . . a particular computational arrangement is not assumed.

" " We, of course, intend no claim that the mind or brain actually computes a singular value decomposition on a perfectly remembered event-by-context matrix of its lifetime experience using the mathematical machinery of complex sparse-matrix manipulation algorithms. What we suppose is merely that the mind-brain stores and reprocessed its input in some manner that has approximately the same effect(10)."

rshowalter - 01:06pm Jun 18, 2001 EST (#5362 of 5365)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

I've been suggesting elsewhere that neural function, incorporating the corrected S-K neural conduction equation, might have that approximate effect. (The construction in this thread has been partly motivated by a desire to build an analogy, technically, to the mind as I imagine it, if it involves resonance coding -- as a system of may associations and schemas, focused in various ways, and searchable in ways analogous to resonant coding.) Whether I'm right about neural fuction or not, LSA somehow approximates capacities that people have, and is now a powerful part of computer search algorithms.

LSA makes "hiding related information" much harder than it used to be -- and gives computers something powerfully close to human "associational intuition." Other mathematical techniques, linked to LSA, may give computers more of this "associational intuition" - more ability to draw reasonable conclusions from massive amounnts of data -- more ability to suggest where people should look themselves.

LSA is the best illustration I have encountered of the potential power of correlation (that is, the potential power of complicated association) with nearly unlimited computational resources devoted to it. That power is great. That power also seems strongly complementary to inherently sequential and inherently symbolic logical processes.

. . . . If there IS much latent, inexpressible, extensive information in our brains, this is a STRONG argument for the power (but not the infallibility) of human feelings of intuition. . . . . If there IS much latent, inexpressible, extensive information in our brains, this is a STRONG argument against over-reliance on "logical rigor" and stark "simple solutions" to human problems, human feeling, and human communication.

It seems to me that this is a strong argument, or clarifying analogy, indicating that it is good to let people "construct their models and inter-relations" piece by piece, and wait to get comfortable with them -- on a step by step, incremental basis. This is not "illogical" -- but it is extra-logical --- it gives people time to get things to fit together, for them, in a mind where things are evaluating in terms of consistency in a VERY complicated world.

One consequence is that people adjust to new ideas slowly - there's a lot of adjustment, usually, before the "light bulb goes on." That means it may take time, and multiple approaches, and enough repetition, to persuade real people that something must be wrong -- when in simple logic, one counter-example should do.

almarst-2001 - 01:07pm Jun 18, 2001 EST (#5363 of 5365)

midmoon 6/18/01 12:22pm

On World Policing.

How would you like a policeman whoes role is first and formoust to protect his own interests? Unless you are the one. If you think the world consists of a dog-eats-dog nations - why do you exclude the US from the bunch?

By the way, this "policeman" and its subordinates broke the International law as recently as 2 years ago. And they incidently have a criminal record of bloodiest murderers and rapists, unmatched so far in the human's history.

Should I wish you such a police team in your neighborhood?;)

(2 following messages)

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