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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 - 10:30am Oct 12, 2002 EST (# 4823 of 4826)
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 is much to be said against Casey - and Kissinger, too - but they were among the most brilliant, hard working and successful men of their time - and they dominated, both for good and (considerable ill) the American conduct of the cold war, the Reagan administration - and much before and since. 4814 rshow55 10/11/02 3:40pm

And these men were intellectuals - Casey, most days, was surely as smart as I've been on my very best days - - and more widely read. Perhaps less careful - less anxious - and less intense than I sometimes am. But no less fallible.

The New York Times has an important place in our culture - - there was a good reason why my instructions were to "come in through the New York Times." There were stark technical reasons - I had a message that required a lot of brainpower - hard to find concentrated in a single institution. But there was more. The human concerns that Casey worried about - and taught me to worry about - are central human concerns. He wanted to know how real human beings could come to make peace. There's been a lot about that on this thread.

Key issues - especially if you are ever to come to stable, desireable equilibria in human arrangements - - concern logic - right back to Plato's problem. It is dangerous when people get very different "answers" to identical problems when they are framed differently. And this is a clear, present, and pervasive danger built into the human condition - with our current levels of denial and ignorance about what it is to be a human being.

I've been doing my duty, as best I could, according to promises that I gave Bill Casey - and so far, it seems to me that things have been working at least reasonably well - with the world as messed up as it is - and my powers as limited as they are.

Nobel Achievements: The Human Element in Economics http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/12/opinion/12SAT2.html

"It turns out that money would behave logically, just the way theory predicts, if humans weren't the ones responsible for handling it."

rshow55 - 10:32am Oct 12, 2002 EST (# 4824 of 4826)
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.

Technical problems (handled by real people, in real socio-technical systems) have human limitations, too. I've now taken steps where one can argue that I ought to be jailed (though I think Casey would argue otherwise) Psychwarfare #330-338 http://talk.guardian.co.uk/WebX?14@@.ee7a163/352 - - and those steps seem to have been noticed. It feels to me like a good time to set out reasons - intellectual reasons - why I had a hard time meeting Casey's "try-this-first" set of instructions - that I should make a purely technical case in the academic community - and communicate other matters standing from there.

I couldn't make that case, in part, because of inflexibilities built into my system, and weaknesses of my own. But in large part, the problem was one of paradigm conflict and many of the problems involved there have been clarified - with help from the TIMES - and especially Dawn Riley.

The statement of a technical point here -- 1566 rshow55 4/20/02 4:07pm - - is much sharper than anything Steve Kline and I had - because we hadn't had contact with Dawn Riley's distinguished mind.

Some of the reasons for the paradigm conflict on the connection between the concrete world and abstract math have been basic ones. Here is part of a draft that I was preparing for my thesis advisor - before an unbelievably disastrous trip to Washington DC in September 2000 derailed a great deal.

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