I think all but the most ardent relativists would agree that human consciousness has already proved to be a very large influence on the world
Mmmm, no. First of all, do not conflate conscious action with all human action. We do a great deal from instinct, and use our conscious reasoning powers to rationalize it afterward. For example, it's unlikely any significant part of our sexual behaviour derives from conscious reflection, and our sexual instincts and drives underly a great deal of our general behaviour. Without doubt, human beings have had a huge influence on the world. But has their consciousness? Open to question.
Secondly, I was not talking about our "success" in terms of how much we modify Earth over the short term, but by whether we persist as a species for the average time, say about 10 million years. If we do not, and the reason is something arising from conscious behaviour, then consciousness, whether or not it has a strong "transient" effect on the Earth (an effect lasting a mere 10,000 years) is not a successful evolutionary strategy. Averaging over the length of time which life exists on this planet, our species could reasonably be ignored by an alien biologist as a short-lived meaningless fluctuation.
Consciously solving the equation comes with this nice extra feature of reflection, which leads to developing more advanced algebra.
I don't think so. Reflection is perfectly capable of operating on behaviour that is not conscious at all. Leonardo can reflect on the flight of birds and derive insight into aerodynamics. Freud could reflect on the unconscious behaviour of himself and of his patients and, well, come up with the idea of the unconscious. That is, the solution of problems and reflection on the solutions to problems are two different things, not necessarily connected.
when catching a ball I wouldn't say that you're solving a mathematical problem
I think your distinction is philosophical hair-splitting. By the same logic, one would argue that a computer algebra program isn't "solving" the equation either, because it's just "performing an activity" [pushing electrons around] "that can be described on a more abstract level as solving a quadratic equation," and furthermore because it isn't capable of reflecting on the result. But this seems a little specious to me. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that any "solving" that isn't, at every step, conscious, isn't solving at all. What is the role then of the intuitive guesses (or unconscious reasoning) that plays so large a role in the discoveries of the greatest of mathematicians and scientists?
But one major adaptive use of consciousness is the ability to predict
Surely not. Pretty much all animals much above the level of insects can do that, and I hope you wouldn't argue that they're all conscious. Dogs, for example, can often predict the behaviour of humans they know very well.
You might argue that consciousness gives us the ability to predict more complex and abstract phenomena than lower animals can. To some extent, this is undoubtably true: only we can predict the consequences of the equations of general relativity, and the ability to do things like that is the greatest triumph of conscious reasoning. But it is undoubtably also very slow and inefficient. It takes years of study to even be able to start.
Seems like the former turned out to be not so useless after all;)
Well, first of all -- has it? What's the evidence that conscious thought has powerful survival potential? Human beings have been successful for a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years, and eyeblink on the time scales of evolution. Cockroaches and crocodiles have every right to regard us as Johnny-come-latelies who might yet blow themselves to smithereens and disappear, proving consciousness to be the Betamax or 8-track tape of the biological world, an idea that seemed clever at the time.
Secondly, I don't actually agree that consciousness is designed as a general ability engine. It functions that way, yes, but only very, very slowly and inefficiently compared to all its other functions. Just look at how long it takes us to consciously solve a quadratic equation, compared to the speed (milliseconds) within which we can solve it unconsciously -- by putting our hand in the right place to catch a thrown baseball.
My suspicion is that general-purpose conscious reasoning is a weird accidental by-product of something (consciousness) which was designed for entirely different purposes. It's like using your feet to paint, or your teeth to open jars. It's certainly not without its uses and pleasures, but it's not at all obvious that it has been a major force in human success, and still less obvious whether it will, ultimately, prove a decisive advantage over other animals that lack it.
The evidence from living systems is that you get more success designing several specialized but simple and robust systems than one generalized but complex and fragile system.
Come to think of it, this is the lesson most people seem to have drawn about robotics, too. Maybe even for electronics, inasmuch as we're increasingly seeing people get a collection of specialized consumer electronics (MP3 player, PDA or smart phone) rather than try to program their microcomputer to do it all.
Apparently it's so dazzling a prospect constructing a system that can Do Anything that folks routinely overlook the fact that in the real world the ability to Do Anything slowly, unreliably and expensively loses routinely to a small collection of abilities to Do Something quickly, reliably, and cheaply.
Fiber-level access should be as ubiquitous as telephone. Everyone should have it.
I don't agree. And since I pay more taxes than you, almost certainly, given the very modest level of your intellectual discourse, I don't think your opinion should count.
Jeez, yeah. I mean, I should fork over another $500 a year in taxes so that Gramma Moses living 12 miles from the nearest paved road in South Dakota can have fiber laid up to the very door of her log cabin, and download recipes for grilled bear in 0.15 seconds instead of the 1.5 seconds her $10/month dial-up requires? Feh.
Dumbest and most pointless idea since Hillarycare.
These debates are often really disguised debates about the present, about what technology or practise in the present is the best. By arguing that such-and-such will dominate in the future, you are really making a statement about its quality or promise in the present, which is what matters to you. It's a form of appeal to authority argument, where the "authority" in this case is future history. (If X dominates in the future, it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.) It's a slightly different form of the argument that appeals to use by more successful organizations or countries. (If X is used by company/country Y, whom we all know to be successful, then it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.)
Well, you could be right. Although it isn't necessary for ships to outmass them by a significant margin for the latter to be properly classed as "bigger."
It would seem odd to design destroyers that are bigger than cruisers. That's a strange inversion of the normal order. What's the point? A destroyer's normal job is to protect cruisers and other capital ships. Maybe they're thinking of re-targeting this class of boat, making it a stand-alone offshore support ship, whatever.
Good grief, don't let's give the geeky profession airs. The FSB has a lot better resources than a few thousand compromised Windoze machines. They're going to spam somebody to death? Raise next year's black budget by running a few dozen phishing scams? Sheesh.
Besides, this kind of goofball techno stunt isn't the Russian style. They excel at the basic ancient human-centered form of espionage and security compromise. If you think they want to penetrate your bureaucracy, then don't waste your time changing your AOL password weekly or carefully not opening e-mail attachments. Instead, be cautious about that hot blonde at the gym who confessed a lifelong sexual weakness for balding guys trying to work off the desk paunch and who expresses a sweet naivete and engaging curiosity about how, precisely, you do your job.
Sounds self-contradictory. Why would the mob invest in maintaining a group of scary retaliators unless they needed them on a regular basis? Perhaps you've been suckered by their FUD? If I were they, I'm sure I would promulgate the rumor -- anonymously, of course -- that our vengeance is too terrible to contemplate. Even cheaper than a stable of button men.
It's more complicated than that. There are actually pressures that the US could bring to bear on the Russians, but they've chosen not to deploy them in this case, and have chosen to merely rely on asking for cooperation, because it isn't that big a deal to the US economy or other national interests, either.
Personally, I don't think the solution lies in national-level action. It lies either in economics -- making the business unprofitable -- or if you really want to have James Bond fantasies, in using the very lawlessness of Russia against them. I don't doubt there are hitmen in St. Petersburg who could be hired to finish these folks off in a particularly gruesome way for what by Western standards would be quite modest payment. Certainly within the means of a large community of pissed-off Internet users. It would take an unusually bold person to organize such an...er...extralegal form of negative reinforcement of the meme, but if I saw one, I'd hit his PayPal button.
Well your test is unfair, not to mention arrogant. You're using specialized jargon vocabulary and concluding from the 'duh' reaction that the person tested wouldn't have a cogent opinion if you phrased it in terms he understood. That's illogical.
Your car mechanic could do the same trick to you by making use of jargon, slang acronyms and whatnot, so that you'd respond with a 'duh' when asked (in jargonspeak) whether you think your car would get better gas mileage under hard or gentle acceleration.
Stripped of its intellectual arrogance, however, you do have a point: it's difficult for someone without substantial background to critically evaluate climatology research on its own merits. This creates a dilemma: as far as the Higgs boson is concerned, it doesn't matter whether only specialists understand the science, because there's no decision needing to be taken about the Higgs boson that affects anyone other than the specialists. With climatology, this is not so. Decisions that must be taken affect everybody. Is it reasonable to leave them entirely in the hands of the few who thoroughly understand the science? Most people say no. They insist on their democratic right to participate in the decision, since it will affect them and their descendants. Not to mention the fact that putting decisions with society-wide consequences into the hands of a small number of people with zero public oversight does not have a very good track record (thalidomide, Chernobyl).
Part of the answer will have to be the elimination of snobbish counterproductive attitudes such as yours ("trust me, I'm a doctor!"), and urgent efforts by people who do understand the science to educate those who don't.
If yours were truly an "obvious" conclusion, then there wouldn't have been all those enormous national wars in the 20th century in which "cannon fodder" footsoldiers died by the millions to secure a yard or two of muddy trench.
You have forgotten that the notion that a single human soldier's life is worth more than millions of dollars of hardware is relatively recent, and probably restricted to wealthy Western nations. Plenty of other nations don't think that way, e.g. China or Iran, or nations with a large surplus of 15-year-old boys and not much in the way of high-tech silicon.
You're also thinking of a war between equally tech-competent wealthy First World Nations, the like of which hasn't happened in 60-odd years. This doesn't seem very likely. It seems much more likely that the wars the world will see over the next half century are more likely to be "asymmetrical" wars that pit First World Nations against assorted varieties of got-nothing-to-lose transnational groups that serve as proxies to Second and Third World nations that are trying to carve out a regional sphere of influence. Whether robots are going to be effective weapons in these types of war remains to be seen, although the early signs in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they are.
First of all, do you know any aspect of life that doesn't have "economics" attached to it? This is just the nature of reality, so why complain? You might as well bitch that having to die someday is unfair.
Secondly, economics isn't about whether or not we fairly distribute the money, equipment, and skilled professional time that we can harvest easily from the medical-resources bush that grows abundantly everywhere. Economics is about the fair allocation of scare resources -- in this case the time and energy of skilled physicians and nurses, and the money required for complex equipment. If it isn't spent scoping people with unhappy esophaguses, it doesn't sit around gathering dust, it's spent detecting breast cancer or heart disease or any number of other medical issues. So it's very reasonable to ask where, exactly, do we get the most bang for the medical buck. Do we save more lives spending resources on detecting lung cancer or Barrett's esophagus? That's the philosophy behind the conclusion you've quoted. It's not inhumane -- quite the contrary, it puts the good of the many above the good of the few.
Finally, you can make an analogy with "being green" since that, currently, has a widely-accepted ethos. Why does it make sense for you to ride your bicycle to work five miles away instead of drive the Hummer, even though it poses a small chance of turning out really badly? (If you get hit by a bus on the bike, you're finished, but if you're in the Hummer with your seatbelt on, you merely have an expensive repair bill.) If you understand and accept this, then you should be able to understand and accept the fact that sometimes you should similarly economize your use of medical resources.
Well, this is hardly a debate that can be resolved in/. comments.
However, for the record, as a modest student of history, I disagree with you. I'm aware that people have set "rules of war" for millenia, but I stand by my position that there are no historical examples whatsoever in which these have had actual and serious measurable force. The fact that the behaviour of combatants has accidentally or for other, more compellingly practical reasons, sometimes conformed to the "rules" proves nothing. If, standing on the sidewalk, I wave my hand and all the traffic in the street stops -- because the stoplight has just turned red -- I would be an idiot to conclude that my waving of hands has power over traffic. Coincidence does not equal causation.
Nor is the fact that any one combatant makes rules for its own armed forces, for whatever reasons of efficiency, public opinion, et cetera, relevant to the question of whether effective international rules -- rules promulgated jointly by all combatants -- exist. If the Roman Army put strict limits on for how many days after a city was taken the soldiers were allowed to rape any woman they saw, this proves only that the Roman Army saw fit to conduct itself more civilly than the general tradition of the time. It certainly does not prove that they were forced to do so by some imaginary regime of "international law."
When conflicts are cross-cultural the tendency to dehumanize opponents increases
A popular 1970s-era multiculti notion, but easily proved wrong, or at least naive. Just consider the unusual viciousness of civil wars, e.g. the American Civil War, the Terror in post-Revolutionary France, the Thirty Years War within Germany, or the Russian Civil War. For that matter, notice that the rage and inhumanity displayed by divorcing spouses or disagreeing siblings greatly exceeds that between strangers in a deal gone bad. A decent case can be made in the other direction, that it is when people are most similar that they draw the sharpest distinctions, and feel the greatest sense of betrayal and rage, and hence act most heinously. The wound from a brother is always more painful, more like to anger. But in truth I suspect the causes of unusual hideousness in warfare are far too complex to be reduced to any simple formula.
I think you are confusing the complex effects of public opinion with "international law." If that's all you mean by the phrase -- what people will think of you -- then, sure, war, like all other human activities, is "regulated" by "international law," because the people involved in it obviously consider what other people will think of what they do, both then and later on.
But most people draw a much stronger distinction between what your neighbors think of you and whether or not you are a lawbreaker. Laws are usually considered much more definite things than mere reflections of the current opinion of the body public. You're entitled to your own definitions, of course. But I think they are confusing, rather than enlightening, and serve to muddle the discourse, rather than sharpen it.
But perhaps that's your purpose, actually. By muddling "public opinion" with "law" you are able to give "public opinion" a heavier weight than it usually has. People usually consider the breaking of laws to be much more clearly an outrage than merely defying public opinion. By saying (for example) that the President has "broken international law" when all you can really prove is that he has "defied public opinion" you imply -- falsely -- that his actions are much more obviously wrong, and less subject to principled disagreement, than the facts would warrant. Those are not the tactics of an honest debater.
It seems to be hard for naive fools to understand that diplomacy is not weakness
Of course. It's hard for naive fools to understand anything, by definition. But to address your underlying point, the difficulty here is that sometimes "diplomacy" is actually "betrayal for the sake of present convenience." Think Neville Chamberlain in 1938, and the 6 million who died in the camps, not to mention the 10-20 million on the battlefield, who suffered and died because of it. Or for a more recent example the "diplomatic" refusal of the UN peacekeepers to intervene in the Rwanda slaughter, or the "restraint" that has limited world response to the killings in Darfur to the passing of stiffly-worded resolutions in the UN General Assembly.
Reasonable men can differ on when "diplomacy" is really diplomacy and when it is merely a weaseling refusal to get involved, of course. But slapping a bogus label of "diplomacy" on nearly any substitution of talk for action is, again, not the tactic of an honest debater.
Well...first of all, when you say "not used" you mean not used by First World major powers, right? Because of course they have been used in other places, most notoriously by Saddam Hussein against both the Iranians and rebel Kurds in Iraq.
And then, what do we mean by "not used" even then? Were nuclear weapons "not used?" They were certainly built and stockpiled, and used to threaten, deter, and otherwise advance national interests. The same is true of both bio and chem weapons, which were also built and stockpiled by the major First World powers. It's true they weren't as openly brandished as nukes. Perhaps that is because they were seen as more double-edged weapons, hard to control, which could be as dangerous to the user as to the intended target. The experience of poison gas on the Western Front in 1914-1917 taught people that chemical weapons, at least, were often as dangerous to your own guys as to the enemy, and didn't really do enough damage to be worth the risk. It's also true the Soviets and Americans negotiated an end to their chem and bio weapons stockpiles, but that was part of a general negotiated reduction in strategic arms in which both sides traded away their least useful and most expensive weapons in order to purchase better public opinion, both domestically and internationally. It was more a case of agreeing to get rid of all your muskets so you could spend the money freed up on automatic rifles, I think.
In any event, I suggest the reason bio and chem weapons were never actually used by First World powers post-1945 is the same reason nukes weren't used: they were such fearsome total-warfare weapons that they would only have been used in an all-out general war -- and such a war never erupted, although there were numerous close calls.
I'm also not sure what you mean by saying the Geneva Conventions have been followed for decades. There hasn't been a general war for decades, either. Do we award nations credit for following the Conventions even when there's no war on? Seems odd. But if you look at smaller wars, then I still think you're wrong. The North Vietnamese certainly did not follow them. The Koreans did not. Grenada and the First Gulf War hardly count. The behaviour of the warlords in Somalia, or any putative guerilla insurgency in Iraq, certainly deviates very far from the Conventions.
So in what war, exactly, have the Geneva Conventions been followed??
So far as I know no one seriously suggested the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, so the question of whether it would be "legal" was never even asked. What would they have done with them, anyway? What could be bombed from the air was being very effectively bombed using conventional high explosive. It's not like the NVA was gathering in large armies that could be neatly despatched with a big explosion from the air. The problems in Vietnam had much more to do with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese infiltration, not to mention the successful PR campaign waged on the world stage and in US media -- and of course Johnson knew none of these could be dealt with by nukes. I suppose in principle he could have threatened North Vietnam's sponsor (the Soviet Union) with nukes, but by the 1960s the Soviets had achieved a very credible nuclear deterrent and such a threat would have been empty bluster.
You would be much better off citing Korea, where the use of nuclear weapons was not only considered on a number of occasions, but publically threatened (indirectly) by Truman in a news conference in November of 1950. Both MacArthur and Ridgway requested their use. However, while the reasons they were not used, ultimately, are complex, I don't think any serious historian considers "legality" one of the important reasons. Truman and the JCS debated whether their use would necessarily broaden the war to openly include China, whether European public opinion would be too negative (Truman needed to maintain the Atlantic coalition to keep a lid on the Berlin issue, which was threatening to open up war with the Soviets at any time), and whether their use would draw down the US strategic arsenal too much -- but I've never heard of them wondering whether it would be "legal" according to some "international law."
Who cares? The important question is: which kind can't be fixed, ever. You can get over being scared. You can't get over having your eye put out with a cigarette.
Atrocities on a systematic basis occur if and when the conflict is one-sided either due to military might or sheer force of numbers.
I think I don't agree with that. It doesn't explain why the Japanese in the Pacific theater were monsters both to the Chinese (to whom they were militarily superior) and to the Americans (to whom they were military inferior). It makes it hard to explain why the Red Army did terrible things in Berlin in 1945 but the US Army did not.
There are plenty of cases when a clearly superior force has done terrible things (My Lai, the British camps during the Boer War, the Rape of Nanking) and there are plenty of other cases when a clearly inferior force has done terrible things, the most obvious being the current round of hideousness by Islamic terrorists. A better case might be made by whether one or the other combatants feels there is no chance of coexistence afterward, so there will be no conceivable "turning of the tables." Either I'll win or I'll be dead, the thinking goes, so it doesn't matter what I do to them now. Perhaps. The thinking of people in such situations -- if it can even be called "thinking" -- is hard to understand when you haven't been in a similar situation.
My biggest concern with the currect US treatment of supposed terrorists, is that we are implicitly agreeing to the same treatment of our GIs in enemy hands.
Er...but isn't it already the case that GIs (or even civilian noncombatants) in enemy hands are treated far worse? Remember Dan Pearl? The contractors in Fallujah? Nick Berg? Seems to me it would be fairly hard to sink as low as the other side at this point.
There is no doctrinal difference between the Hanoi Hilton and Guantanamo Bay
Not sure what you mean by "doctrinal" difference. You mean they are both POW camps? Of course. But if you mean there is no practical difference between being interned in the one or the other, you need to read John McCain's autobiography, or the descriptions by any other inmate of the place. They have scars. Not just psychological scars from being scared half to death, either.
It's also unclear whether the behaviour is properly labeled. "Learn from your mistakes" is a phrase that assumes your choice and its consequences are clear: do this or do that, and if "this" leads to bad consequences, why, you need to "learn from your mistake" and do "that" instead.
But real life is not nearly so simple. First, there are many cases where people don't see all the choices, or even any choice. You can't be guilty of failing to learn from your mistakes if you're not even aware of the alternate choices you could be making.
Second, it's only in fairly restricted cases that a perfectly clear connection can be drawn from choice to consequences. If you try to beat the train at the RR crossing and get creamed, well, that one's easy. But what if you take a job at X corporation and are then unhappy five years later? Is it really the job, or is it the crappy marriage that you contracted, too? More importantly, how do you really know that if you'd not taken a job at X corporation, you'd be happier? Maybe things would be even worse! Real-life choices are usually befogged by the difficulty of being sure of the connection between choice and consequences, and by the difficulty of accurately guessing what the consequences of alternate choices might have been.
Finally, there is sufficient statistical noise in many choices that sometimes the best decision is not to "learn from your mistakes." We call that "persistence" and give great credit to people who display it, when their continued "failure" to learn from their mistakes eventually pays off. The guy who starts business after business, each failing, until he finally hits on the one that pays off. The athlete who comes in 2nd and 3rd, time after time, until eventually he wins. We can go back and, with 20/20 hindsight, argue that he did "learn from his mistakes" in that he didn't do the same thing in exactly the same way again. But it's still the case that on the topmost issue, the main choice, he "failed to learn from his mistakes" by deliberately choosing to do again and again something at which he failed again and again. Until one day, he didn't.
For all these reasons, I think the definition of what it means to "learn from your mistakes" in real life (as opposed to the narrow world of the academic psych lab) is pretty problematic.
I think you are confusing "has been regulated" with "has been imagined to be regulated by lawyers and naive fools." To be "regulated" requires a bit more than the mere existence of regulations on paper. It requires that these things have actual force, that they actually do something, they restrain people in some way.
The only thing that has ever restrained the behaviour of nations in combat is plain fear of the direct consequences, e.g. retaliation by the enemy. Can you give me a counter-example? Some case where a nation committed to a war, with substantial interests at stake, eschewed methods of war because some lawyer somewhere said they were "illegal?" If not, then those "regulations" are as insubstantial as moonbeams.
Ah? Why don't you check out the history of, say, the war in the Pacific 1941-1945 and tell me if you think the Geneva Conventions have any serious force. Better yet, ask a vet. Then duck. The Geneva Conventions are one of history's endless series of pious wishes that seek to outlaw inhumanity, like the Kellogg-Briand pact, the founding charter of the League of Nations, the UN, et cetera and so forth ad infinitum.
All of these quaint efforts overlook the fact that war is, by definition, the breakdown of any shred of mutual trust and willingness to compromise. War is about killing people, and when you get to that stage of mutual rage and madness, no piece of paper full of high-minded sentiment is going to stop you from doing what you think you must to win (or not lose). I can't think of any historical exceptions. Can you?
The problem with electronic warfare (Cyberwar? e-war? wartronics?) is that you're attacking civilians
What's new about that? What do you suppose the Eighth Army Air Force was doing over Berlin in 1945? Who got snuffed in Hiroshima?
Garbage. What you're saying is that people have described "rules" for warfare. But they're not followed when inconvenient, and there's no way at all of enforcing them -- what would you threaten? More war? Those aren't "rules." They're wishes and hopes.
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I think all but the most ardent relativists would agree that human consciousness has already proved to be a very large influence on the world
Mmmm, no. First of all, do not conflate conscious action with all human action. We do a great deal from instinct, and use our conscious reasoning powers to rationalize it afterward. For example, it's unlikely any significant part of our sexual behaviour derives from conscious reflection, and our sexual instincts and drives underly a great deal of our general behaviour. Without doubt, human beings have had a huge influence on the world. But has their consciousness? Open to question.
Secondly, I was not talking about our "success" in terms of how much we modify Earth over the short term, but by whether we persist as a species for the average time, say about 10 million years. If we do not, and the reason is something arising from conscious behaviour, then consciousness, whether or not it has a strong "transient" effect on the Earth (an effect lasting a mere 10,000 years) is not a successful evolutionary strategy. Averaging over the length of time which life exists on this planet, our species could reasonably be ignored by an alien biologist as a short-lived meaningless fluctuation.
Consciously solving the equation comes with this nice extra feature of reflection, which leads to developing more advanced algebra.
I don't think so. Reflection is perfectly capable of operating on behaviour that is not conscious at all. Leonardo can reflect on the flight of birds and derive insight into aerodynamics. Freud could reflect on the unconscious behaviour of himself and of his patients and, well, come up with the idea of the unconscious. That is, the solution of problems and reflection on the solutions to problems are two different things, not necessarily connected.
when catching a ball I wouldn't say that you're solving a mathematical problem
I think your distinction is philosophical hair-splitting. By the same logic, one would argue that a computer algebra program isn't "solving" the equation either, because it's just "performing an activity" [pushing electrons around] "that can be described on a more abstract level as solving a quadratic equation," and furthermore because it isn't capable of reflecting on the result. But this seems a little specious to me. The reductio ad absurdum of this position is that any "solving" that isn't, at every step, conscious, isn't solving at all. What is the role then of the intuitive guesses (or unconscious reasoning) that plays so large a role in the discoveries of the greatest of mathematicians and scientists?
But one major adaptive use of consciousness is the ability to predict
Surely not. Pretty much all animals much above the level of insects can do that, and I hope you wouldn't argue that they're all conscious. Dogs, for example, can often predict the behaviour of humans they know very well.
You might argue that consciousness gives us the ability to predict more complex and abstract phenomena than lower animals can. To some extent, this is undoubtably true: only we can predict the consequences of the equations of general relativity, and the ability to do things like that is the greatest triumph of conscious reasoning. But it is undoubtably also very slow and inefficient. It takes years of study to even be able to start.
Seems like the former turned out to be not so useless after all ;)
Well, first of all -- has it? What's the evidence that conscious thought has powerful survival potential? Human beings have been successful for a mere 50,000 to 100,000 years, and eyeblink on the time scales of evolution. Cockroaches and crocodiles have every right to regard us as Johnny-come-latelies who might yet blow themselves to smithereens and disappear, proving consciousness to be the Betamax or 8-track tape of the biological world, an idea that seemed clever at the time.
Secondly, I don't actually agree that consciousness is designed as a general ability engine. It functions that way, yes, but only very, very slowly and inefficiently compared to all its other functions. Just look at how long it takes us to consciously solve a quadratic equation, compared to the speed (milliseconds) within which we can solve it unconsciously -- by putting our hand in the right place to catch a thrown baseball.
My suspicion is that general-purpose conscious reasoning is a weird accidental by-product of something (consciousness) which was designed for entirely different purposes. It's like using your feet to paint, or your teeth to open jars. It's certainly not without its uses and pleasures, but it's not at all obvious that it has been a major force in human success, and still less obvious whether it will, ultimately, prove a decisive advantage over other animals that lack it.
The evidence from living systems is that you get more success designing several specialized but simple and robust systems than one generalized but complex and fragile system.
Come to think of it, this is the lesson most people seem to have drawn about robotics, too. Maybe even for electronics, inasmuch as we're increasingly seeing people get a collection of specialized consumer electronics (MP3 player, PDA or smart phone) rather than try to program their microcomputer to do it all.
Apparently it's so dazzling a prospect constructing a system that can Do Anything that folks routinely overlook the fact that in the real world the ability to Do Anything slowly, unreliably and expensively loses routinely to a small collection of abilities to Do Something quickly, reliably, and cheaply.
Fiber-level access should be as ubiquitous as telephone. Everyone should have it.
I don't agree. And since I pay more taxes than you, almost certainly, given the very modest level of your intellectual discourse, I don't think your opinion should count.
Have a nice day.
Jeez, yeah. I mean, I should fork over another $500 a year in taxes so that Gramma Moses living 12 miles from the nearest paved road in South Dakota can have fiber laid up to the very door of her log cabin, and download recipes for grilled bear in 0.15 seconds instead of the 1.5 seconds her $10/month dial-up requires? Feh.
Dumbest and most pointless idea since Hillarycare.
These debates are often really disguised debates about the present, about what technology or practise in the present is the best. By arguing that such-and-such will dominate in the future, you are really making a statement about its quality or promise in the present, which is what matters to you. It's a form of appeal to authority argument, where the "authority" in this case is future history. (If X dominates in the future, it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.) It's a slightly different form of the argument that appeals to use by more successful organizations or countries. (If X is used by company/country Y, whom we all know to be successful, then it must be that X is the superior technology or practise.)
Well, you could be right. Although it isn't necessary for ships to outmass them by a significant margin for the latter to be properly classed as "bigger."
It would seem odd to design destroyers that are bigger than cruisers. That's a strange inversion of the normal order. What's the point? A destroyer's normal job is to protect cruisers and other capital ships. Maybe they're thinking of re-targeting this class of boat, making it a stand-alone offshore support ship, whatever.
Good grief, don't let's give the geeky profession airs. The FSB has a lot better resources than a few thousand compromised Windoze machines. They're going to spam somebody to death? Raise next year's black budget by running a few dozen phishing scams? Sheesh.
Besides, this kind of goofball techno stunt isn't the Russian style. They excel at the basic ancient human-centered form of espionage and security compromise. If you think they want to penetrate your bureaucracy, then don't waste your time changing your AOL password weekly or carefully not opening e-mail attachments. Instead, be cautious about that hot blonde at the gym who confessed a lifelong sexual weakness for balding guys trying to work off the desk paunch and who expresses a sweet naivete and engaging curiosity about how, precisely, you do your job.
Sounds self-contradictory. Why would the mob invest in maintaining a group of scary retaliators unless they needed them on a regular basis? Perhaps you've been suckered by their FUD? If I were they, I'm sure I would promulgate the rumor -- anonymously, of course -- that our vengeance is too terrible to contemplate. Even cheaper than a stable of button men.
Say...maybe you work for them?
It's more complicated than that. There are actually pressures that the US could bring to bear on the Russians, but they've chosen not to deploy them in this case, and have chosen to merely rely on asking for cooperation, because it isn't that big a deal to the US economy or other national interests, either.
Personally, I don't think the solution lies in national-level action. It lies either in economics -- making the business unprofitable -- or if you really want to have James Bond fantasies, in using the very lawlessness of Russia against them. I don't doubt there are hitmen in St. Petersburg who could be hired to finish these folks off in a particularly gruesome way for what by Western standards would be quite modest payment. Certainly within the means of a large community of pissed-off Internet users. It would take an unusually bold person to organize such an...er...extralegal form of negative reinforcement of the meme, but if I saw one, I'd hit his PayPal button.
You're right, I forgot about the frigates. D'oh.
s/smallest/second smallest/g
The point being, of course, that it's hardly necessary to have an aircraft carrier to power a railgun, as the OP implied.
Well your test is unfair, not to mention arrogant. You're using specialized jargon vocabulary and concluding from the 'duh' reaction that the person tested wouldn't have a cogent opinion if you phrased it in terms he understood. That's illogical.
Your car mechanic could do the same trick to you by making use of jargon, slang acronyms and whatnot, so that you'd respond with a 'duh' when asked (in jargonspeak) whether you think your car would get better gas mileage under hard or gentle acceleration.
Stripped of its intellectual arrogance, however, you do have a point: it's difficult for someone without substantial background to critically evaluate climatology research on its own merits. This creates a dilemma: as far as the Higgs boson is concerned, it doesn't matter whether only specialists understand the science, because there's no decision needing to be taken about the Higgs boson that affects anyone other than the specialists. With climatology, this is not so. Decisions that must be taken affect everybody. Is it reasonable to leave them entirely in the hands of the few who thoroughly understand the science? Most people say no. They insist on their democratic right to participate in the decision, since it will affect them and their descendants. Not to mention the fact that putting decisions with society-wide consequences into the hands of a small number of people with zero public oversight does not have a very good track record (thalidomide, Chernobyl).
Part of the answer will have to be the elimination of snobbish counterproductive attitudes such as yours ("trust me, I'm a doctor!"), and urgent efforts by people who do understand the science to educate those who don't.
If yours were truly an "obvious" conclusion, then there wouldn't have been all those enormous national wars in the 20th century in which "cannon fodder" footsoldiers died by the millions to secure a yard or two of muddy trench.
You have forgotten that the notion that a single human soldier's life is worth more than millions of dollars of hardware is relatively recent, and probably restricted to wealthy Western nations. Plenty of other nations don't think that way, e.g. China or Iran, or nations with a large surplus of 15-year-old boys and not much in the way of high-tech silicon.
You're also thinking of a war between equally tech-competent wealthy First World Nations, the like of which hasn't happened in 60-odd years. This doesn't seem very likely. It seems much more likely that the wars the world will see over the next half century are more likely to be "asymmetrical" wars that pit First World Nations against assorted varieties of got-nothing-to-lose transnational groups that serve as proxies to Second and Third World nations that are trying to carve out a regional sphere of influence. Whether robots are going to be effective weapons in these types of war remains to be seen, although the early signs in Iraq and Afghanistan is that they are.
As TFA points out, the Navy is planning to put one on the DDX destroyer, the smallest serious ship the Navy floats.
First of all, do you know any aspect of life that doesn't have "economics" attached to it? This is just the nature of reality, so why complain? You might as well bitch that having to die someday is unfair.
Secondly, economics isn't about whether or not we fairly distribute the money, equipment, and skilled professional time that we can harvest easily from the medical-resources bush that grows abundantly everywhere. Economics is about the fair allocation of scare resources -- in this case the time and energy of skilled physicians and nurses, and the money required for complex equipment. If it isn't spent scoping people with unhappy esophaguses, it doesn't sit around gathering dust, it's spent detecting breast cancer or heart disease or any number of other medical issues. So it's very reasonable to ask where, exactly, do we get the most bang for the medical buck. Do we save more lives spending resources on detecting lung cancer or Barrett's esophagus? That's the philosophy behind the conclusion you've quoted. It's not inhumane -- quite the contrary, it puts the good of the many above the good of the few.
Finally, you can make an analogy with "being green" since that, currently, has a widely-accepted ethos. Why does it make sense for you to ride your bicycle to work five miles away instead of drive the Hummer, even though it poses a small chance of turning out really badly? (If you get hit by a bus on the bike, you're finished, but if you're in the Hummer with your seatbelt on, you merely have an expensive repair bill.) If you understand and accept this, then you should be able to understand and accept the fact that sometimes you should similarly economize your use of medical resources.
Well, this is hardly a debate that can be resolved in /. comments.
However, for the record, as a modest student of history, I disagree with you. I'm aware that people have set "rules of war" for millenia, but I stand by my position that there are no historical examples whatsoever in which these have had actual and serious measurable force. The fact that the behaviour of combatants has accidentally or for other, more compellingly practical reasons, sometimes conformed to the "rules" proves nothing. If, standing on the sidewalk, I wave my hand and all the traffic in the street stops -- because the stoplight has just turned red -- I would be an idiot to conclude that my waving of hands has power over traffic. Coincidence does not equal causation.
Nor is the fact that any one combatant makes rules for its own armed forces, for whatever reasons of efficiency, public opinion, et cetera, relevant to the question of whether effective international rules -- rules promulgated jointly by all combatants -- exist. If the Roman Army put strict limits on for how many days after a city was taken the soldiers were allowed to rape any woman they saw, this proves only that the Roman Army saw fit to conduct itself more civilly than the general tradition of the time. It certainly does not prove that they were forced to do so by some imaginary regime of "international law."
When conflicts are cross-cultural the tendency to dehumanize opponents increases
A popular 1970s-era multiculti notion, but easily proved wrong, or at least naive. Just consider the unusual viciousness of civil wars, e.g. the American Civil War, the Terror in post-Revolutionary France, the Thirty Years War within Germany, or the Russian Civil War. For that matter, notice that the rage and inhumanity displayed by divorcing spouses or disagreeing siblings greatly exceeds that between strangers in a deal gone bad. A decent case can be made in the other direction, that it is when people are most similar that they draw the sharpest distinctions, and feel the greatest sense of betrayal and rage, and hence act most heinously. The wound from a brother is always more painful, more like to anger. But in truth I suspect the causes of unusual hideousness in warfare are far too complex to be reduced to any simple formula.
I think you are confusing the complex effects of public opinion with "international law." If that's all you mean by the phrase -- what people will think of you -- then, sure, war, like all other human activities, is "regulated" by "international law," because the people involved in it obviously consider what other people will think of what they do, both then and later on.
But most people draw a much stronger distinction between what your neighbors think of you and whether or not you are a lawbreaker. Laws are usually considered much more definite things than mere reflections of the current opinion of the body public. You're entitled to your own definitions, of course. But I think they are confusing, rather than enlightening, and serve to muddle the discourse, rather than sharpen it.
But perhaps that's your purpose, actually. By muddling "public opinion" with "law" you are able to give "public opinion" a heavier weight than it usually has. People usually consider the breaking of laws to be much more clearly an outrage than merely defying public opinion. By saying (for example) that the President has "broken international law" when all you can really prove is that he has "defied public opinion" you imply -- falsely -- that his actions are much more obviously wrong, and less subject to principled disagreement, than the facts would warrant. Those are not the tactics of an honest debater.
It seems to be hard for naive fools to understand that diplomacy is not weakness
Of course. It's hard for naive fools to understand anything, by definition. But to address your underlying point, the difficulty here is that sometimes "diplomacy" is actually "betrayal for the sake of present convenience." Think Neville Chamberlain in 1938, and the 6 million who died in the camps, not to mention the 10-20 million on the battlefield, who suffered and died because of it. Or for a more recent example the "diplomatic" refusal of the UN peacekeepers to intervene in the Rwanda slaughter, or the "restraint" that has limited world response to the killings in Darfur to the passing of stiffly-worded resolutions in the UN General Assembly.
Reasonable men can differ on when "diplomacy" is really diplomacy and when it is merely a weaseling refusal to get involved, of course. But slapping a bogus label of "diplomacy" on nearly any substitution of talk for action is, again, not the tactic of an honest debater.
Well...first of all, when you say "not used" you mean not used by First World major powers, right? Because of course they have been used in other places, most notoriously by Saddam Hussein against both the Iranians and rebel Kurds in Iraq.
And then, what do we mean by "not used" even then? Were nuclear weapons "not used?" They were certainly built and stockpiled, and used to threaten, deter, and otherwise advance national interests. The same is true of both bio and chem weapons, which were also built and stockpiled by the major First World powers. It's true they weren't as openly brandished as nukes. Perhaps that is because they were seen as more double-edged weapons, hard to control, which could be as dangerous to the user as to the intended target. The experience of poison gas on the Western Front in 1914-1917 taught people that chemical weapons, at least, were often as dangerous to your own guys as to the enemy, and didn't really do enough damage to be worth the risk. It's also true the Soviets and Americans negotiated an end to their chem and bio weapons stockpiles, but that was part of a general negotiated reduction in strategic arms in which both sides traded away their least useful and most expensive weapons in order to purchase better public opinion, both domestically and internationally. It was more a case of agreeing to get rid of all your muskets so you could spend the money freed up on automatic rifles, I think.
In any event, I suggest the reason bio and chem weapons were never actually used by First World powers post-1945 is the same reason nukes weren't used: they were such fearsome total-warfare weapons that they would only have been used in an all-out general war -- and such a war never erupted, although there were numerous close calls.
I'm also not sure what you mean by saying the Geneva Conventions have been followed for decades. There hasn't been a general war for decades, either. Do we award nations credit for following the Conventions even when there's no war on? Seems odd. But if you look at smaller wars, then I still think you're wrong. The North Vietnamese certainly did not follow them. The Koreans did not. Grenada and the First Gulf War hardly count. The behaviour of the warlords in Somalia, or any putative guerilla insurgency in Iraq, certainly deviates very far from the Conventions.
So in what war, exactly, have the Geneva Conventions been followed??
So far as I know no one seriously suggested the use of nuclear weapons in Vietnam, so the question of whether it would be "legal" was never even asked. What would they have done with them, anyway? What could be bombed from the air was being very effectively bombed using conventional high explosive. It's not like the NVA was gathering in large armies that could be neatly despatched with a big explosion from the air. The problems in Vietnam had much more to do with the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese infiltration, not to mention the successful PR campaign waged on the world stage and in US media -- and of course Johnson knew none of these could be dealt with by nukes. I suppose in principle he could have threatened North Vietnam's sponsor (the Soviet Union) with nukes, but by the 1960s the Soviets had achieved a very credible nuclear deterrent and such a threat would have been empty bluster.
You would be much better off citing Korea, where the use of nuclear weapons was not only considered on a number of occasions, but publically threatened (indirectly) by Truman in a news conference in November of 1950. Both MacArthur and Ridgway requested their use. However, while the reasons they were not used, ultimately, are complex, I don't think any serious historian considers "legality" one of the important reasons. Truman and the JCS debated whether their use would necessarily broaden the war to openly include China, whether European public opinion would be too negative (Truman needed to maintain the Atlantic coalition to keep a lid on the Berlin issue, which was threatening to open up war with the Soviets at any time), and whether their use would draw down the US strategic arsenal too much -- but I've never heard of them wondering whether it would be "legal" according to some "international law."
Who cares? The important question is: which kind can't be fixed, ever. You can get over being scared. You can't get over having your eye put out with a cigarette.
Atrocities on a systematic basis occur if and when the conflict is one-sided either due to military might or sheer force of numbers.
I think I don't agree with that. It doesn't explain why the Japanese in the Pacific theater were monsters both to the Chinese (to whom they were militarily superior) and to the Americans (to whom they were military inferior). It makes it hard to explain why the Red Army did terrible things in Berlin in 1945 but the US Army did not.
There are plenty of cases when a clearly superior force has done terrible things (My Lai, the British camps during the Boer War, the Rape of Nanking) and there are plenty of other cases when a clearly inferior force has done terrible things, the most obvious being the current round of hideousness by Islamic terrorists. A better case might be made by whether one or the other combatants feels there is no chance of coexistence afterward, so there will be no conceivable "turning of the tables." Either I'll win or I'll be dead, the thinking goes, so it doesn't matter what I do to them now. Perhaps. The thinking of people in such situations -- if it can even be called "thinking" -- is hard to understand when you haven't been in a similar situation.
My biggest concern with the currect US treatment of supposed terrorists, is that we are implicitly agreeing to the same treatment of our GIs in enemy hands.
Er...but isn't it already the case that GIs (or even civilian noncombatants) in enemy hands are treated far worse? Remember Dan Pearl? The contractors in Fallujah? Nick Berg? Seems to me it would be fairly hard to sink as low as the other side at this point.
There is no doctrinal difference between the Hanoi Hilton and Guantanamo Bay
Not sure what you mean by "doctrinal" difference. You mean they are both POW camps? Of course. But if you mean there is no practical difference between being interned in the one or the other, you need to read John McCain's autobiography, or the descriptions by any other inmate of the place. They have scars. Not just psychological scars from being scared half to death, either.
It's also unclear whether the behaviour is properly labeled. "Learn from your mistakes" is a phrase that assumes your choice and its consequences are clear: do this or do that, and if "this" leads to bad consequences, why, you need to "learn from your mistake" and do "that" instead.
But real life is not nearly so simple. First, there are many cases where people don't see all the choices, or even any choice. You can't be guilty of failing to learn from your mistakes if you're not even aware of the alternate choices you could be making.
Second, it's only in fairly restricted cases that a perfectly clear connection can be drawn from choice to consequences. If you try to beat the train at the RR crossing and get creamed, well, that one's easy. But what if you take a job at X corporation and are then unhappy five years later? Is it really the job, or is it the crappy marriage that you contracted, too? More importantly, how do you really know that if you'd not taken a job at X corporation, you'd be happier? Maybe things would be even worse! Real-life choices are usually befogged by the difficulty of being sure of the connection between choice and consequences, and by the difficulty of accurately guessing what the consequences of alternate choices might have been.
Finally, there is sufficient statistical noise in many choices that sometimes the best decision is not to "learn from your mistakes." We call that "persistence" and give great credit to people who display it, when their continued "failure" to learn from their mistakes eventually pays off. The guy who starts business after business, each failing, until he finally hits on the one that pays off. The athlete who comes in 2nd and 3rd, time after time, until eventually he wins. We can go back and, with 20/20 hindsight, argue that he did "learn from his mistakes" in that he didn't do the same thing in exactly the same way again. But it's still the case that on the topmost issue, the main choice, he "failed to learn from his mistakes" by deliberately choosing to do again and again something at which he failed again and again. Until one day, he didn't.
For all these reasons, I think the definition of what it means to "learn from your mistakes" in real life (as opposed to the narrow world of the academic psych lab) is pretty problematic.
I think you are confusing "has been regulated" with "has been imagined to be regulated by lawyers and naive fools." To be "regulated" requires a bit more than the mere existence of regulations on paper. It requires that these things have actual force, that they actually do something, they restrain people in some way.
The only thing that has ever restrained the behaviour of nations in combat is plain fear of the direct consequences, e.g. retaliation by the enemy. Can you give me a counter-example? Some case where a nation committed to a war, with substantial interests at stake, eschewed methods of war because some lawyer somewhere said they were "illegal?" If not, then those "regulations" are as insubstantial as moonbeams.
Ah? Why don't you check out the history of, say, the war in the Pacific 1941-1945 and tell me if you think the Geneva Conventions have any serious force. Better yet, ask a vet. Then duck. The Geneva Conventions are one of history's endless series of pious wishes that seek to outlaw inhumanity, like the Kellogg-Briand pact, the founding charter of the League of Nations, the UN, et cetera and so forth ad infinitum.
All of these quaint efforts overlook the fact that war is, by definition, the breakdown of any shred of mutual trust and willingness to compromise. War is about killing people, and when you get to that stage of mutual rage and madness, no piece of paper full of high-minded sentiment is going to stop you from doing what you think you must to win (or not lose). I can't think of any historical exceptions. Can you?
The problem with electronic warfare (Cyberwar? e-war? wartronics?) is that you're attacking civilians
What's new about that? What do you suppose the Eighth Army Air Force was doing over Berlin in 1945? Who got snuffed in Hiroshima?
Garbage. What you're saying is that people have described "rules" for warfare. But they're not followed when inconvenient, and there's no way at all of enforcing them -- what would you threaten? More war? Those aren't "rules." They're wishes and hopes.