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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 - 04:19pm Jul 4, 2001 EST (#6555 of 6556)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD5073 rshowalter 6/14/01 7:44am Is an introduction to postings of NYT articles cited on this thread as of June 14th, about 1/3 of total citations on the thread up to that time.

I believe that the postings make a point about the extent of information related, in various ways, to ordinary human argument. . . . .

People "make sense" of their world in a kind of statistical way -- and it matters very much, whether the "information" they condense generalizations from is right or wrong. The only way to see is by crossmatching, and a good deal of intellectual work. This is work that all people, everywhere do, and have to do to be human. We make sense of the world, by a lot of talking, and a lot of thinking -- and bring patterns into focus. Often those patterns are wrong -- but when we look at the same information -- organized in a certain way, most of us, most of the time, make the same patterns.

Cited articles, linked to postings on this thread, are set out in MD5074-5087rshowalter 6/14/01 7:46am

A similar point is made, in a similar way, in MD5377-5383rshowalter 6/18/01 3:14pm

rshowalter - 04:19pm Jul 4, 2001 EST (#6556 of 6556)
Robert Showalter showalte@macc.wisc.edu

MD5383 rshowalter 6/18/01 3:45pm .... MD5384 rshowalter 6/18/01 3:49pm
includes this:

Matters of war and peace, and international cooperation between the US and Russia, in the world as it is, are intractably complicated, for similar reasons, and some of the interactions will take staffs to comb out and master.

When two cultures that are very different and have systematic misunderstandings have to make real peace, and learn to interact, that will take staffing, too.

We are different enough that we can't "take for granted" each other's minds -- minds that have been formed by "swimming" in very different "seas" of information.

Contact, and confident cooperation -- will take work, accomodation -- and, at a number of levels, a lot of straight talking.

MD6539 lunarchick 7/4/01 9:29am .... MD6540 rshowalter 7/4/01 9:32am

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