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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 - 04:53pm Jan 5, 2003 EST (# 7375 of 7380)
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.

The arguments against missile defense in general may not apply to a particular short term N. Korean threat - but for any length of time - Postol and I are right, I believe. But I was about to post this -

Gisterme asked some fundamental questions - clearly and well, in 7345-7346 gisterme 1/5/03 6:03am , and after I've been so impolite, I'd hoped to respond clearly quickly, and gracefully. I tried to put something together - hit a problem I hadn't expected, and what I thought was almost ready to show wasn't. I'm doing it again. Part of the problem is that I got rattled, after having been so impolite. Gisterme asked a fundamental question:

How does one "calibrate" charity or mercy without changing them to something else?

That connects to questions of what calibration means, applied to anything that can be defined in a dictionary - and I'm trying to answer that well. It involves something surprising about language - how almost totally nonquantitative language is. And how important switching, with different levels of calibration is in real systems. It is hard to describe calibration, and what it means, without talking at least some about

"digital" or boolean noncalibrated switching systems

"quantitatively trimmed digital switching systems

calibration by nonstatistical and statistical matching - including by loop tests

oscillating systems

tightly trimmed oscillating systems

oscillating systems for systems that match statistical processes

oscillating systems that generate different smooth motions, and frequencies.

Engineers came up with all these things for machines and electronic systems a long time ago - and biological systems have had all these things in precise shape for 100 million years, at least. For a bird, or a baseball player - or any other human beling - a lot of the controls are very high strung, flexible, and fine.

People have many billions of such systems in our brains - many very finely tuned. Social systems have trillions - many much more complicated than any found at the individual level.

Social systems have analogous controls to the basic kinds engineers use, and animals have, for basic reasons. Different social systems have different ones - flexible in different ways, inflexible in different ways. I thought I had an elegant presentation for these matters, but when I tried it, some of it messed up - and I'd like it to be good enough to explain clearly to a very smart man who knows a lot about baseball, and a lot of other people, too.

A big point is this. Some of the best things about living systems, and social systems, are touchy. For function to be as flexible as it is, switch as variously and precisely as it does, and be as powerful as it is - some things have to be standardized. Lots of basic patterns are standardized for a particular culture or subculture. This is especially true for parts of the system that have to be able to be used interchangeably all through the system, and things that have to go on stably from generation to generation.

Different cultures standardize different things in different ways, and though there's tremendous flexibility about most things - some things aren't flexible at all in a particular system.

That, in itself, is no excuse for horror. But knowing that different cultures are different gives reasons why cultures isolate themselves in many ways - and have to interact through interfaces that avoid problems for the cultures involved in use - and also transmit what needs to be transmitted.

Perfect interfaces between one social system and another are possible I believe - most of the time that those interfaces can be defined - and in the most important ways - possible in practice, not just in theory.

But perfect interfaces, or even tolerable ones, are not likely to

rshow55 - 04:54pm Jan 5, 2003 EST (# 7376 of 7380)
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.

But perfect interfaces, or even tolerable ones, are not likely to happen by accident - or without some careful trimming.

I'm sorry I'm moving slowly. Sometimes I'm impolite on purpose. Just this time, I'm being unintentionally impolite, because I'm moving more slowly than I'd hoped.

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