Gee, what you seem to be giving good evidence for is high paid professional 'quasi-scientific' consulting that is disasterously incompetent. Now, I'm sure to object less to messed up plans and research from people who share my personal prejudices. But isn't what's been happening amount to a lot of people planning and acting boldly on seriously misinformed models? I mean really, when you look at those duplicate completely fake and irrational charts you so nicely identified, how could any kind of measure to be made of them at all? How do you model brains full of made up nonsense??
I think modeling is out of reach, but story telling may not be. Telling the stories of how complex events can be read or misread would be a real service. Then again, what if we just decided to spend an equal amount of money figuring out how to get along with people as on destroying them. That would be novel. The last time I checked killing people pisses their friends off, especially when they are seen as defending the religious honor of a whole people, though I haven't seen any official studies. Who knows, perhaps "an eye for an eye" is just incorrect. We should study this. Maybe the requirement for being a descent neighbor is to unilaterally NOT return insults... or some thing like that. Sorry for the sarcasm, but that RAND poop just plain pisses me off. Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ 680 Ft. Washington Ave NY NY 10040 tel: 212-795-4844 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] explorations: www.synapse9.com > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels > Sent: Sunday, August 06, 2006 3:13 PM > To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group > Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Friam Digest, Vol 38, Issue 3 > > > Phil Henshaw wrote: > > It seems to have been an error to trust our gut feelings > about that, but > > we got worked up and did it anyway. Potentially complex > system theory > > could design measures to give people an outside view of > these things > > we get swept up in. > Here are a couple of documents describing counter terrorism > strategy of > the White House: > > http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots_3.htm > http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terror > ism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdf > > Compare page 13 in the latter (as labeled in pages of the > document, or > 15 in the page selector) with this RAND project, e.g. page 11 > (page 19 > in the page selector). > > http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF212.pdf > > Five pages later, some "marker issues" are listed that > "locate Islamic > groups ideologically", namely democracy, human rights, > Shari'a law vs. > civil law, rights of minorities, status of women, legal > rights, public > participation, segregation, and "lifestyle" issues. The next > page goes > on to describe examples of different groups on this spectrum and then > gives suggestions on how to use it in a divide and conquer propaganda > battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic moderates. > > These sorts of ideas could be extended into agent models to > think about > the rates at which such aid and propaganda efforts might progress or > backfire. Searching some newspapers or blogs could give some > ideas on > how such efforts are likely to be resented, e.g. > http://zeitgeistgirl.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_zeitgeistgirl_arc hive.html. In contrast, in today's New York Times, the front page has an article on Hezbollah, _Holding a Gun, Lending a Hand_, which describes the loyalty of Hezbollah fighters due to the support given to them and their families by the organization. Seems like US aid could undermine terrorist organizations by doing better at the same job. All these forces could be considered in an agent model. It probably wouldn't matter if such a simulation had 1e4 or 1e7 agents of different persuasions, but rather the mixing ratios of just enough agents so that the dynamics would be the smooth and similar in a larger simulation of similar demographics for the same relative configuration. Personally, I'd rather have political scientists and technical people developing crude models of various international stability situations than flushing billions of tax dollars down the drain on a gut feeling Maybe provide real time updates to one of those CNN ticker lines showing odds of success, cumulative cost, and expected value. :-) Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
