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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?

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rshow55 - 06:46pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (# 3972 of 3975)
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.

Reading instruction matters in itself. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/23/opinion/23FRI4.html

But the discussion I'm trying to make clear matters for more general reasons, as well. Some of them reasons that philosophers have been thinking about, and concerned about, for 2500 years. Plato's problem -- which is, in essence, the question of how we "know" so much by "connecting the dots" - - how the Socratic method works so well - is partly explained by the statistical insight that when things become known, and the number of remaining variables gets smaller, finding answers is hugely easier. I don't feel that people have appreciated how much easier - and how compelling the implications of that are. I'm working to focus the imporant work of Landaur, Dumais, and others on latent semantic analysis.

The discussion is directly related to missile defense - where the odds of success are vanishingly small -- and to the essential certainty that a key assumption about the logical and geometrical structure of radio wave ranging and positioning arrangements, now more than fifty years old, can easily be changed. When that assumption is changed - it becomes clear that the US is making a trillion dollar mistake - betting on airplanes that are going to be easy to shoot down. 1317 rshow55 4/12/02 6:59pm I don't feel that I'm guessing at all about that. I just made the sort of statement that a PE doesn't make in public lightly.

I want to take time to carefully set out the reading example first - to clarify some of the key issues involved - before I set that out.

I'm taking some time to be careful. I want to make things clear to professionals who seriously look at this thread - because I believe that there are some. http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@180.9Yb1ao4drSi.0@.ee7b085/337

3946 rshow55 8/23/02 6:59pm 3947 rshow55 8/23/02 7:00pm

Under a lot of circumstances, the odds of getting orderly answers, and discarding mistakes - is much better than people have understood. Enough better to give reasons for disciplined hope.

And enough to show how important it can be to shoot certain kinds of boondoggles right between the eyes when they are muddled and hopeless beyond redemption.

rshow55 - 07:27pm Aug 24, 2002 EST (# 3973 of 3975)
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.

http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/313

Playing Know and Tell by John Schwartz http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/09/weekinreview/09BOXA.html .

Schwartz's piece ends:

" Listen."

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