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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?


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rshowalter - 04:34pm Sep 23, 2001 EST (#9759 of 9764) Delete Message
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) Delete Message
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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