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![[F]](../_images/site.gif) New York Times on the Web Forums  Science
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?
    (9758 previous messages)
rshowalter
- 04:34pm Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9759
of 9764) 
Robert Showalter
showalte@macc.wisc.edu
I'm trying to explain something that is absolutely universal
human experience, but yet not quite focused. I'm finding it hard to
write it as well as I'd like - - so it would fit, intellectually and
at the level of sympathy, too, for people who don't feel comfortable
around math, most of them.
The combination of words, pictures, and quantitative information
giving a sense of proportion is crucial.
In the print paper, this
picture is bigger. One of the Pakistanis protesting
Pakistan's cooperation, with a craggy, thoughtful face, caught my
imagination in the print picture.
I wondered: what would it be like to go to the Patent Office
with this guy, and work on technical things?
We could probably understand each other perfectly, on some
things, without the need for any understanding at all, about most
other things. I could have communicated with the hijackers of
September 11 about flight manuals, as well.
We share astonishing amounts of very detailed information, at the
level of words or meanings, and communication is often amazingly
good, and largely unconscious. That can only happen because, in
very complex systems, solutions that exist, within a system of
constraints are few or unique. And often easy for people to think
about and focus on in ways where they all agree.
For example: You and I would probably agree on at
least 200,000 definitions of at least 100,000 words - - and we
could judge that, pretty well, by statistical sampling in a few
hours. We didn't learn many of these words from a dictionary.
Somehow, the definitions jell, from the sea of context we swim
in. And much more often than not, the jelling happens the same way
in the heads of many different people, and we agree about what words
mean.
This is a miracle we all take for granted.
We need to use the logic that makes that "commonplace miracle" --
and focus it a little. And deal with what happens when agreement
doesn't happen.
Because misunderstandings, when they do happen, can be so
expensive.
Sorry to be writing this up slowly.
rshowalter
- 06:14pm Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9760
of 9764)
Robert Showalter
showalte@macc.wisc.edu
While I'm searching and organizing, I'd like to set out a poem by
Rudyard Kipling, that sets out a different conceptual world from our
own.
Kipling is sympathetic in this poem, without forgetting how
lethal the mistakes of that world view were.
This poem is about medicine, as it was years before Kipling's
time -- over centuries where untold numbers of people died, or
suffered much more than they should have, because the "knowledge" of
doctors was ornately wrong. In retrospect, amazingly wrong.
The doctors Kipling refers to, rather accurately and, to me,
movingly, were able people, and their heads were full of things that
they felt sure of, that they believed confidently. Things that were
nonsense.
From place to place in the world today, different cultures DO
live in very different conceptual worlds.
As different, in some ways, as the differences in conceptual
worlds between modern doctors and their "fathers of old."
When communication between such groups is necessary for
practical reasons - for survival, or decent economic cooperation, or
for other reasons, the difficulties of communication are serious,
and the possibilities of conflict, including conflict at its most
lethal, are quite real.
Americans and other westerners have such problems of
communication and sympathy in dealing radical islamics. They have
similar problems with us.
We need to remember both that the people involved are
human beings, in many ways exactly like ourselves, and that
their conceptual worlds can be very different. I think this
poem, which is pretty good as intellectual history, helps one to
imagine how different conceptual worlds can be, and how compelling
and persuasive a different conceptual world can be, for the people
who inhabit it.
When things matter enough, sometimes there is no alternative
but to resolve differences of opinion, including differences of
opinion on which whole cultural pattern hinge, on the basis of
facts.
Today, much too often, that can't be done.
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