Re: Kewel. New additions to RC's "What Now?"

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Nov 03 2001 - 19:51:17 MST


>Following up on the relativism theme that has surfaced, here are some
>new editions to Reality Club's "What Now?" feature, started in the wake
>of 9-11.
>
>http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge92.html#deutsch

The whole thing to date is at

http://www.edge.org/documents/whatnow_print.html

and I kinda like Doyne Farmer's thoughts, which begin:

========
From: J. Doyne Farmer Date: 10.1.01

          If we are to avert even worse disasters, we need to understand
what caused the events of Sept. 11. It's clear that Osama bin Laden is a
really bad guy, and these were really misguided people, and we need to do
something about disabling them in the future. But if we are to ever return
to a more lasting state of peace, we have to address the root causes of
terrorism. The best method to control something is to understand how it
works.

          Randomness and determinism are the poles that define the extremes
in any assignment of causality. Of course reality is usually somewhere in
between. Following Poincare', we say that something is random if the cause
seems to have little to do with the effect. Even though there is nothing
more deterministic than celestial mechanics, if someone gets hit in the
head by a meteor, we say this is bad luck, a random event, because their
head and the meteor had little to do with each other. Nobody threw the
meteor, and it could just as well have hit someone else. The corresponding
point of view here is that bin Laden and his associates are an anomaly, and
the fact that they are picking on us is just bad luck. We haven't done
anything wrong and there is no reason to change our behavior; if we can
just get rid of them, the problem will disappear. This is the view that we
would all rather believe because the remedy is much easier.

          The other pole is determinism: There were underlying causal
factors that led up to these events, and something like this was bound to
happen. This is a much harder view to swallow, because deterministic events
are by their very nature predictable and controllable. It leads to the
conclusion that we might have anticipated these events and done something
about it.

          With any chaotic system there are two fundamentally different
approaches to prediction and control. One is to predict the detailed
trajectory that the system will take. For simple systems like roulette
wheels, turbulent fluids, and stock markets, I have a lot of experience
with this. To predict the trajectory of something, you have to understand
all the details and keep track of every little thing. This is like solving
terrorism by surveillance and security. Put a system in place that will
detect and track every terrorist and prevent them from acting. This is a
tempting solution, because it is easy to build a political consensus for
it, and it involves technology, which is something we are good at. But if
there is one thing I have learned in my twenty five years of trying to
predict chaotic systems, it is this: It is really hard, and it is
fundamentally impossible to do it well.

==========

`The corresponding point of view here is that bin Laden and his associates
are an anomaly, and the fact that they are picking on us is just bad luck.
We haven't done anything wrong and there is no reason to change our
behavior; if we can just get rid of them, the problem will disappear.' This
appears to be John Clark's view. It's just possibly insufficiently... complex.

Damien Broderick



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