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 [F] New York Times on the Web Forums  / Science  /

    Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.


Earliest Messages Previous Messages Recent Messages Outline (11200 previous messages)

rshow55 - 08:34am Apr 8, 2003 EST (# 11201 of 11202) Delete Message
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

There are costs. We'd like to minimize them. Almarst, we've both worked hard to try to do that.

http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.eL1ja7tT6WM.1061672@.f28e622/12554

If we just asked people to check for how well their ideas fit the things they have to decently care about - that might be all the "deep philosophy" peace, prosperity, and reasonable religion would need.

I've been repeating this:

Starting this year - I made a guess (# 7177 http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?8@28.eL1ja7tT6WM.1061672@.f28e622/8700

I think this is a year where some lessons are going to have to be learned about stability and function of international systems, in terms of basic requirements of order , symmetry , and harmony - at the levels that make sense - and learned clearly and explicitly enough to produce systems that have these properties by design, not by chance.

From where we are now - it shouldn't be that hard to do.

The most basic problems have to do with the stability of our descriptions of what we are talking about and what we are feeling about.

People are all very different in many ways - yet the same in many other ways - and we need to find the wit to avoid avoidable fights, cooperate when that seems a reasonable thing to do - and sort things out so that they meet the needs of the people involved. Many, many, many times, all over the world, people find ways to do this - as they always have. A few chronic kinds of problems continue. All of them are intractable because people are being deceptive to others, and often to themselves - when that deception is ugly enough, in enough ways that matter, that it needs to be corrected.

We need descriptions that people who have to interact can understand stably, clearly - in those relatively rare cases where it matters enough. We're having trouble with such cases. Not very many. But matters of life and death.

Here are facts that it seems to me are basic - things that we all know - and have to know at some level - from about the time we learn to talk.

People say and do things

What people say and do have consequences, for themselves and for other people.

People need to deal with and understand these consequences, for all sorts of practical, down to earth reasons.

. So everybody has a stake in right answers to questions of fact that they use as assumptions when they think about what they say and what they do.

If the bolded point, just above, were more widely and deeply understood - and linked to the simple points just above it -- a great many things in the world would be better - and people, just as they are, could solve many of the most important and practical problems they face. Some technical insight might help that understanding, and lchic and I have been trying to focus such insight into place on this thread. But it doesn't seem to me that people need a lot of insight, from where they are, if they just make and effort to do things they can be reasonably proud of, that they can find reasonable ways to explain.

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?224@@2cb4d7cb@.ee7b2bd/1631

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?224@@2cb4d7cb@.ee7b2bd/1636

I'm worried, but pretty hopeful. Not that agony and horror can be avoided in the future. But that there can be a lot less.

rshow55 - 08:56am Apr 8, 2003 EST (# 11202 of 11202) Delete Message
Can we do a better job of finding truth? YES. Click "rshow55" for some things Lchic and I have done and worked for on this thread.

Just for emphasis - I think people ought to really think about this:

. Our most basic problems have to do with the stability of our descriptions of what we are talking about and what we are feeling about.

If we work for consistency - which is hard to get for anybody at all - and keep at it - checking not only what we think we said - but what people understand - and try for stability - not patterns that jump around whenever anyone tries to "pin anything down" - we can avoid misunderstandings serious enough to produce really ugly consequences - almost always.

Not always. When there are conflicts - there may have to be fights. But if we're clear - they can be small, relatively stable fights - mostly about ideas, with no need for rending of flesh.

With stable consequences.

Requirements of order, symmettry, and fit to purpose are primordial - they apply, in many, many ways - to every species that has ever lived - and to every situation that people have ever been able to handle decently.

When discourse patterns are so unstable - so full of deception, evasion, and disorder - that these basic requirements aren't possible - progress isn't possible.

We ought to have sense enough to do better than that.

If we did just this well - horrors like Saddam's Iraq simply couldn't come to exist - or continue for very long. There's a lot to fix. When people keep at it - and get descriptive focuses that fit cases - they can do that things the need to do .

We've got problems today with insanity - and need to find ways to be less crazy when it matters.

Some things are going better than they have a lot of times in the past.

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