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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 - 07:56pm Apr 24, 2001 EST (#2565 of 2567)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

In this thread and elsewhere, Dawn Riley and I have worked to focus patterns of human reasoning and persuasion, and problems with human reasoning and persuasion.

Our study of "paradigm conflict" is a study of reasoning gone wrong for a social group -- and how reasoning can sometimes be corrected. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7726f/0

Our study of "the golden rule" has been an effort to focus an idea that must, at some levels, be as old as homo , an idea that occurs in all cultures --- But i "the golden rule" is an idea that is either ignored, or that seems to misfire in unfortunate ways. When this happens, people are cut off from each other, complex cooperations do not occur or misfire, and people show inhumane conduct toward one another. We've worked on the problems involved, in threads involved with efforts at peacemaking, especially in "Man's Inhumanity to Man - As Natural as Human Breathing http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7b085/0

Our study of reasoning, and how people actually do it, has led us to focus, and we think refine, our definition of, the notion of "idea forming" as people seem to do it. Somehow, ideas take shape, and are judged, aesthetically-quantitatively, in terms of fit, proportion, to what is assumed and what is known. The notion of "disciplined beauty" seems to us to be involved with a set of patterns that must, at some level, also be as old as homo . But we've hoped that problems of human reasoning, and logical closure, might be better adressed if the ideal pattern could be better defined -- and we've worked on the definition, which we've taken to labeling as disciplined beauty , for that reason.

This thread, has been an effort to use the internet to build a computer-based, socially open, flexible associative memory, fit to human needs, and useful for human reasoning, human model checking, and human persuasion.

That effort has seemed necessary on this vital topic, a matter of life and death, where persuasive problems have been apparent.

We've felt, with respect to journalism and with respect to getting complex circumstances set out, understood, and "proven" within real human limits, that the internet usages we've been working out have been advances -- and will make it possible for people to handle levels of complexity, and levels of memory that they could not handle otherwise.

Human beings reason on the basis of "assumptions." They do so on the basis of assumptions with which they are "comfortable." The more important the action, the more important "comfort" has to be.

This comfort is a matter of "fit" to what people have to match to inside their minds, what they have to match to in their contacts to other minds, and what they match to that connects to physical reality.

rshowalter - 08:09pm Apr 24, 2001 EST (#2566 of 2567)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

The assumptions people learn and use are in a real sense self-organizing --- and the notion of "comfort" --"familiarity" -- and "statistical association" are closely related ideas. Some of that associative reasoning can now be done by machine, as latent sematic analysis http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?13@@.ee7b2bd/240 Latent Semantic Analysis directly adresses "Plato's problem" -- which is

" How do people know as much as they do with as little information as they get?

. 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 http://lsi.argreenhouse.com/lsi/papers/PSYCHREV96.html

People "know" and "know with confidence" information that in some sense matches other things in their heads (that they may "know" from observation, or because they've accepted a social construction).

Things that do not "fit" in this sense, though they may not be contradicted, are not "known" with enough solidity for people to act on them -- or for people to "believe" them "when it really counts."

LSA shows computationally, and experience, it seems to me, must confirm for all of us, that patterns and generalizations emerge for us from the connection of a great body of experiences. -

These emergent patterns are the assumptions that we make, and refine though thinking about them, and through further comparisons.

Many of these assumptions -- in the form of concepts and schema, are set out in words.

Most readers of this thread will know more than 100,000 words, most with multiple definitions, and will use them well -- only a few of which were ever learned by consulting a dictionary. Children, it seems, learn about 8 word a day in this fashion, without ever remembering details of how it happened, and seem to have the definition of some thousands of words "in proceess" at any given time.

People are prodigious associators -- we associate and reason from association very well -- and most of this reasoning and focusing is unconscious.

With the internet, and the crossreferencing it permits, more correllations are possible -- more connection to checkable detail is possible.

And so it is possible to build "confidence" in human terms that might not have been possible before.

It is possible to "prove" in a sense that is important in human terms, that might not have been possible before.

It is possible to persuade people who can be persuaded by evidence (given time) who might not have been persuadable before.

On the issues involved with nuclear terror, we've felt that there is good reason for us to try to do better than people have been able to do before.

rshowalter - 08:10pm Apr 24, 2001 EST (#2567 of 2567)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

We believe that controversies that could not be resolved before may be resolvable now.

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