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From: donn@utah-gr.UUCP (Donn Seeley)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: A Fact for Milo!
Message-ID: <1240@utah-gr.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-Nov-84 05:44:49 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-gr.1240
Posted: Mon Nov 12 05:44:49 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 14-Nov-84 02:38:50 EST
References: <574@ccice5.UUCP> <3156@ucbvax.ARPA>
Organization: CS Dept., University of Utah
Lines: 141

I re-subscribed to net.politics to see what activity has been stirred
up by the election...  'Stirred up' seems to be a lukewarm way to
describe the current furor.  Let me lob a few comments into the fray,
just for my own entertainment.  Milo's apologia for the current state
of nuclear strategy seems like a fun place to start.

I agree with Milo that the medical analogy is not particularly apt;
apart from the questionable implication that doctors suppress cures in
order to create a wider market for their services, it seems unlikely to
me that participants in the nuclear debate are misrepresenting their
knowledge of the 'truth'.  Strategic 'cures' don't exist, to my
knowledge -- it's impossible to gather a statistical sample of
'patients' and somehow show that application of the 'cure' results in
significantly less 'disease'.  In this sense strategic study is not a
science; it must rely on incomplete information derived from case
studies, and can only make very qualified predictions.  It is perfectly
possible for two individuals to take contrary positions based on their
interpretation of evidence that can't be confirmed by experiment, and
it is even possible for both individuals to be intellectually honest.
Ad hominem attacks on opponents are never justified, and calling
honesty or intelligence into question on an issue like this shows an
insensitivity to the complexity of human affairs (sorry, Milo -- of
course you're hardly alone in this).

Intelligent people can be sincerely wrong.  One example of this which
is close to home is the creationism-evolution debate that is roaring
away in net.origins.  A careful reading of the submissions by both
sides shows that most of the contenders are both intelligent and
sincere in their beliefs, but clearly only one side is correct.  I
believe that creationism is wrong, just as Milo appears to believe that
appeasement is wrong (correct me if I'm misrepresenting you, Milo), but
I don't think the creationists are either stupid or the beneficiaries
of lobotomy surgery.  In fact I would say that the ability to
rationalize even in the face of insurmountable arguments can be a sign
of intelligence...  It's worth a thought, anyway.

Now that I'm through with my usual appeal for civilized behavior, I'll
try to take on some of the specific points in the recent discussion...

It seems to me that the biggest issue here is whether laymen can
identify experts, and secondarily, whether experts can be trusted.  Let
me try to put the problem in another context.  I'm sure many readers
know about the place of behaviorism in the history of psychology, and I
don't want to advance myself as an expert (:-), so you should treat
this as the sort of informed confusion which mere graduate students
spout.  For a certain period of time before WW2, the theory of
psychology known as behaviorism dominated the field.  People like
Watson and (later) Skinner were considered to be experts, and your
paper was more likely to be published if you worked within a
behaviorist framework than if you did not.  Recently the theory of
'cognitive psychology' has become dominant (perhaps less than
behaviorism was earlier, it's true).  Its experts disagree with many of
the precepts which are the foundation of behaviorism, even though a
substantial part of its community started their careers as
behaviorists.

If you asked a theoretical question of an expert in psychology when
behaviorism was dominant, you would likely get a very different answer
than if you asked the same question of a cognitive psychologist.  These
differences are not just a matter of opinion -- the two frameworks can
make contrary experimental predictions.  Behaviorism still exists and
has a sizable number of adherents; the reason why it has not died out
entirely is probably because the kinds of experiments which the two
schools of psychology engage in are disjoint.  Since the practitioners
of the theories rarely examine the same data (or read the same
journals!), the inconsistencies between the theories are rarely on
display.

Laymen can be careful about their reading and try to find out whether a
particular 'expert' believes in a discredited theory, but it really is
difficult to determine whether the currently dominating theory will
eventually be discredited.  I used psychology as an example rather than
physics because I think the current level of the paradigm of strategic
studies is on a par with psychology rather than a hard science,
although physics has certainly undergone many revolutions of its own.
Both psychology and strategic studies are immature fields and are prone
to rapid successions of paradigms.  The interpretation of experts in
the current paradigm requires some judgment on the part of the layman
even though the layman can't possibly appreciate all the data at the
hands of the experts.  The field just isn't well developed enough that
a layman can take the expert's word for granted.  (Milo's brain tumor
analogy is particularly ugly in my experience -- a friend of mine whose
mother had cancer suffered a great deal when the mother listened to an
'expert' and decided to undergo Laetrile 'therapy'.  Experts can be
dangerous.)

So who am I to believe?  Milo or 'frontal lobotomy' Sagan?  It's a
particularly difficult situation when Milo makes completely irrational
attacks on Sagan's purported irrationality.  I've met Teller, although
I've never met Sagan -- but it strikes me that neither would be proud
of a protege who rants on like Milo does in his article.  (I doubt
they would accept a paper with Milo's peculiar spelling, punctuation
and grammar, either; and I always used to think that I could tell a
crank from a scientist by their attention to details.)

I'm NOT proclaiming myself to be an expert in strategic studies, but I
have to admit that the only example of competing strategic thinking
which I have been exposed to personally didn't bode well for the
American school.  My father worked on a study of the land reform
project in South Vietnam in the middle 60's, and from discussions with
him and readings of his papers and supporting documentation, I have
come to the conclusion that the Viet Cong were decidedly superior to
the Americans in their planning and organization.  The VC had a
complete strategy for the infiltration, overthrow and control of native
organizations starting as low as the hamlet, and perhaps as low as the
individual family.  Although land reform came under the heading of
'psychological warfare' at Rand and SRI, I've seen no evidence to
suggest that our military strategic apparatus came even remotely close
to countering the VC; the VC undermined and destroyed the land reform
effort with appalling ease.  (I think that part of the problem was in
regarding the land reform program as mere 'psychological warfare' in
the first place...)  Our current experience in Central America does
not make me confident that we have learned any lessons from this.
It's true that our nuclear strategists are not in the same group as
our Vietnam military strategists, but if they are of the same caliber
('the best and the brightest', sigh) then we should all be nervous.

Notice that I carefully haven't said anything concrete about nuclear
strategy yet, and I have done so specifically because I have been
trying to show that the ability to talk learnedly about throw weight or
the advantages of MARVs does not implicitly guarantee that the speaker
can be trusted to produce a successful nuclear strategy.  It IS useful
for laymen to discuss these issues.  It's perhaps ironic that experts
in international strategic studies don't seem to have a practical
strategy for handling domestic debate...  To rectify this it would be
interesting if the more informed readers (hello, Milo?) justified some
of their reactions to the speculation here, instead of simply
contradicting.  For example, why is it that MAD cannot be guaranteed if
the Soviets develop more land-based ICBMs without a similar increase on
our part?  Or, why is it more useful to spend money to keep parity in
nuclear forces than to keep parity in conventional forces?  Or, why do
we want to continue develop chemical and biological deterrents when we
have promised not to use them, when we could instead use the funds to
to improve our preparedness for their use by the bad guys?  All these
questions perhaps sound naive, but they need to be answered if the
public is to stay informed.  Every little bit helps...

Verbosely yours,

Donn Seeley    University of Utah CS Dept    donn@utah-cs.arpa
40 46' 6"N 111 50' 34"W    (801) 581-5668    decvax!utah-cs!donn