The Salvation War: Pantheocide. Part Forty One Up

[Samuel]

Any chance of my name being used for someone/something?

You already have a major angel that shares your title- what more could you need?

[Darth Wong]

There's a yes and no to that. The sort of parallel-logic think tank Chewie had described is actually quite common. They tend to major contributors to what we call Red Team Reviews. I don't know if you have those in the civil engineering side of things but in the defense industry they take place once a project has been formulated and its basic parameters defined. Then, there's a meeting where any and every objection that can be thought up is thrown at said project. It doesn't matter how implausible or outrageous it seems, if it can be made, toss it into the pot. For example, one Red Team Review I was on was concerned with using lasers to shoot down ballistic missiles. An objection that was thrown against that (from Martin Aerospace by the way) was that the system could be negated by spinning the missile so that no one part of it was exposed to the laser long enough to do any damage. Now, the people from Martin knew very well that nobody has ever built a spinning ICBM (or IRBM or SRBM for that matter). But, the suggestion led to a study on why not? The answer turned out to be interesting; if the missile was solid fuel, spinning it caused the plasticizers in the fuel to migrate away from the core towards the circumfrance of the rocket motor. That made the whole assemby unstable and teh rocket motor would fragment and explode. If the missile was liquid fuelled, spinning it caused the fuel to surge against the tank walls and they needed to be strengthened to the point where the payload of the missile vanished in structural weight. Now, that's pretty much what the rocket designers already knew but it did lead to an interesting development elsewhere.

Oh yes, brainstorming and parallel think tanks are great. But they involve parallel teams of professionals, not amateurs. In your example, I don't think they would have brought in a bunch of completely unqualified novelists or TV scriptwriters to do this Red Team Review.

Now here we agree completely. This is where the above idea goes completely wrong and the whole system turns into a disaster. It happens when the drive to innovate and think of alternative solutions ceases to be a means of making existing systems better and becomes an end in itself. Rummie was a classic example of persons who think along those lines and its not surprising that every idea he came up with was a disaster. The basic concept he had was actually quite right; the way economic, demographic and technical trends were pushing meant that we have to (note present tense) come up with different ways of doing things. In that environment, the Red Team Review concept works quite well. However, Rummie and his minions treated every unconventional idea as if it was worth pushing and regarded any objection to those ideas as being examples of "outdated hide-bound thinking by reactionary old generals and admirals". So we had:

"Ggee we'll build short fat ships that have planing hulls."
"Err guys, that won't work, hydrodynamics are against us."
"Then we'll use ***new technology***."
"But we can't rewrite the laws of physics."
"Typical hidebound reactionary thinking, we must be ***transformational***." and Rummie stopped listening at that point.

It got to the point that any program based on relatively sound science was dumped as "not transformational enough". That's what happens when the idea of pulling in out-of-the-box thinkers becomes dominant rather than a servant. It cost the US eight years worth of R&D money that was effectively flushed down the toilet.

Rumsfeld sounds like a complete idiot. But in my experience, people who tout their primary expertise as "business" tend to be like that as a general rule. I've always suspected that their financial success is primarily due to their schmoozing ability and lack of a soul, more than anything else. A normal person would have trouble schmoozing like that for long, because it is hard to continue cheerfully lying and ass-kissing when your throat is filling with bile.

[Simon_Jester]

You're right, of course, but when dealing with eccentric minds its best to lay down the law in terms of absolutes. They could say 'Dead X number of years', but then there'd be hemming and hawing and hair-splitting, so its best to just disallow ALL dead physicists. Believe it or not, I was going to include an Erdos number joke, but XKCD beat me to it by about a week.

That happens a lot, doesn't it?

I understand the logic of the jar in-story, and I understand why Stuart wouldn't want to invoke dead scientists. I'm just saying that not all dead scientists would be useless, and that Wheeler is more likely to be an exception than almost any other famous physicist.
_______

Oh yes, brainstorming and parallel think tanks are great. But they involve parallel teams of professionals, not amateurs. In your example, I don't think they would have brought in a bunch of completely unqualified novelists or TV scriptwriters to do this Red Team Review.

I'm not sure that Banks isn't qualified. It's unusual to encounter someone who can learn a substantial amount of high-level physics by self study, but not impossible. He doesn't have degrees, but for all I know he might have honestly put in the time and effort to learn his subject material to the point of being useful.

Mobs of TV scriptwriters would be a terrible idea, I agree. Iain Banks might or might not be an exception.
_______

Rumsfeld sounds like a complete idiot. But in my experience, people who tout their primary expertise as "business" tend to be like that as a general rule. I've always suspected that their financial success is primarily due to their schmoozing ability and lack of a soul, more than anything else. A normal person would have trouble schmoozing like that for long, because it is hard to continue cheerfully lying and ass-kissing when your throat is filling with bile.

That... that would explain a lot.

[Darth Wong]

I'm not sure that Banks isn't qualified. It's unusual to encounter someone who can learn a substantial amount of high-level physics by self study, but not impossible. He doesn't have degrees, but for all I know he might have honestly put in the time and effort to learn his subject material to the point of being useful.

Tell me, would you consent to have heart surgery performed on you by someone who had conducted "self study" of medicine, but who had never taken a single exam, completed a single assignment, or done a single day of internship? Banks is unqualified.

[CaptainChewbacca]

My thinking was the 'Tank' has about 40-50 people in it, and perhaps two or three of them are your scifi writers or creative types, there to just come up with ideas for other people to poke holes in. Probably not the greatest way to do things, but I thought it would be fun.

I also got the idea from John Ringo's 'Posleenverse' books, where after the Galactic Federation sends earth a list of what technology they have America gets together a team to figure out how to implement it properly in a military setting, and they had a number of scifi writers/futurists on their team.

In all likelihood it is self-aggrandizement on the part of writers who want to feel important, but I don't care.

[Samuel]

I also got the idea from John Ringo's 'Posleenverse' books, where after the Galactic Federation sends earth a list of what technology they have America gets together a team to figure out how to implement it properly in a military setting, and they had a number of scifi writers/futurists on their team.

And look what they developed! They would have been better served with simply using the Military Industrial Complex.

[Simon_Jester]

Tell me, would you consent to have heart surgery performed on you by someone who had conducted "self study" of medicine, but who had never taken a single exam, completed a single assignment, or done a single day of internship? Banks is unqualified.

Heart surgery is that it can only be done once, and must be done right. Science wouldn't even be possible if having ideas was risk-averse an activity as heart surgery. No one is good enough at reliably having good ideas to get it right as often as a heart surgeon must.

So Banks gets a lot of ideas wrong, more than someone who had to publish a journal article on the subject to get out of graduate school. If he compensates by having three times as many ideas as anyone normal (and from what I've heard about the Culture novels I wouldn't be surprised by that), and if he's surrounded by other people who can weed out the ones that are crap, he might very well still be a productive member of the team.
______

Would I risk my life on the basis of Iain Banks' knowledge of general relativity? No. Would I pick him over someone with a degree to coauthor a paper with? No.

Would I assume a priori, knowing virtually nothing about him, that he would be useless in a think tank, surrounded by a large group of people who are and who can spot his mistakes? Also no.

If his knowledge of GR and high-dimensional physics comes entirely out of, say, Hawking's A Brief History of Time, then he'd be useless in this context, I freely agree. I imagine he would, too; he doesn't strike me as the type to insist that he knows everything about a subject from a cursory scan of a few semi-relevant books.

But I don't know that's true, and I don't know enough about Banks to be confident in guessing that it's true. He might be the type who sat down and decided to work his way through Gravitation* over the course of a few years as a hobby, talking to professors to help him with stuff he didn't understand and gritting his teeth to work through the problems. Some people can in fact do that. And while at the end of it I still wouldn't trust my life to such a person's knowledge, I'd be a fool to decide a priori that they are not capable of useful thought on the subject.

*The canonical textbook on GR, by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler.

[Samuel]

You are favoring Banks over expert physics individuals whose only downside is that they are behind the times because they have been dead for decades. Banks would have to be more up to date on current physics, which is doubtful because he is a writer and so is busy writing books.

You'd be better off setting up an internet forum where people can propose their own crazy ideas- at least you don't have to deal with favoritism and I doubt that the nature of reality is something we wish to keep classified.

[mr friendly guy]

Oh yes, brainstorming and parallel think tanks are great. But they involve parallel teams of professionals, not amateurs. In your example, I don't think they would have brought in a bunch of completely unqualified novelists or TV scriptwriters to do this Red Team Review.
.

I may be remembering things wrongly so feel free to correct me, but after 9/11 I heard that the government was asking Hollywood to come up with terrorist attack scenarios. So while it sounds weird to me using amatuers, this example could be cited as a precedent of using amatuers.

On a side note, I am pretty sure they idea of using a plane as a terrorist weapon had already been potrayed in a Steven Seagal movie, and that was when I was still in high school, several years before 9/11.

Of course if Stuart wanted a sci fi writer, what about Stephen Baxter? Wasn't he supposed to be a physicist?

[Singular Quartet]

You are favoring Banks over expert physics individuals whose only downside is that they are behind the times because they have been dead for decades. Banks would have to be more up to date on current physics, which is doubtful because he is a writer and so is busy writing books.

Actually, he isn't writing books. He only spends about six months out of the year writing books, because he is a best-selling author.

[NecronLord]

I'd agree that Baxter is a more likely candidate - he has engineering and maths degrees (and he even applied to become a Cosmonaut in the nineties, but fell out of that quite early due to language requirements) - than Banks. But honestly, it's a bit of a nit-pick really, to argue about a cameo - I rather doubt Bill Clinton is that hot with a shotgun, either.

[Darth Wong]

So Banks gets a lot of ideas wrong, more than someone who had to publish a journal article on the subject to get out of graduate school. If he compensates by having three times as many ideas as anyone normal (and from what I've heard about the Culture novels I wouldn't be surprised by that), and if he's surrounded by other people who can weed out the ones that are crap, he might very well still be a productive member of the team.

Address my previous point which was directed at PRECISELY this line of reasoning, please. Preferably, learn to fucking read, so I don't have to direct you to a previous point.

[Darth Wong]

I'd agree that Baxter is a more likely candidate - he has engineering and maths degrees (and he even applied to become a Cosmonaut in the nineties, but fell out of that quite early due to language requirements) - than Banks. But honestly, it's a bit of a nit-pick really, to argue about a cameo - I rather doubt Bill Clinton is that hot with a shotgun, either.

At least such a person would be more likely to know that an idea must be fairly well-formed before it is worth putting forward at all. The kind of vaguely expressed half-formed tripe that is likely to spew out of someone like Banks, on the other hand ...

If Banks has some formal education in the area, then by all means, someone let me know. But in the absence of such information, it seems just incomprehensibly silly to treat him as if he knows anything more about physics than your average Trekkie does.

Sorry, but this whole notion strikes me as reminiscent of the sci-fi brainbug where scientists are intelligent but hopelessly unimaginative people who need "inspiration" from some off-hand comment from a completely unqualified person. That brainbug is in turn descended from the silly old folk tale about Isaac Newton's theory of gravitation being inspired by an apple falling on his head. It's a very old and very overused sci-fi cliché.

[Stuart]

Oh yes, brainstorming and parallel think tanks are great. But they involve parallel teams of professionals, not amateurs. In your example, I don't think they would have brought in a bunch of completely unqualified novelists or TV scriptwriters to do this Red Team Review.

Good Lord no, not completely unqualified people. However, quite a lot of people who had some very odd qualifications. Nobody would be pulled into such meetings cold, they would probably have run through a gamut of being hauled on board to do limited consultancy work on a specific area, then (assuming they caught people's eye and impressed said people with their ability) progress to in-house meetings where they would be carefully watched and mentored, essentially being groomed to the point where they would actually be allowed into meetings with the client, initially as observers, then finally as participants. If they ever got to that point, everybody else could be relatively certain that what they would come out with wouldn't be embarrassing (ie would have some solid foundation). Now, science fiction authors and scriptwriters could well turn up in the final mix (Jerry Pournelle is a good example of one who did) but they'd be the end of a distillation process by which many were considered but few called.

Having said that, some of us did come from very unusual backgrounds. One person I've already mentioned had no paper qualifications at all but did have 30 years experience driving trains across North America (he also punched out a social science professor at Uni but that's another story). He had a strange talent, in a new project, he'd sit and stare at the program for a large number of minutes, then come up with a cut on it that nobody had thought of. His railway background also gave him an instinctive feel for what would be needed in the way of transport facilities to support a given program. He once told me that he never added up the weights, he just imagined the consist needed and what an engine could be expected to haul.

Rumsfeld sounds like a complete idiot. But in my experience, people who tout their primary expertise as "business" tend to be like that as a general rule. I've always suspected that their financial success is primarily due to their schmoozing ability and lack of a soul, more than anything else. A normal person would have trouble schmoozing like that for long, because it is hard to continue cheerfully lying and ass-kissing when your throat is filling with bile.

He wasn't a complete idiot, he was much more dangerous than that. He is sharp, shrewd and quite well-informed. He had an ability to absorb and retain information plus the schmoozing ability you refer to. His problem was that he would have tunnel vision to the point where he focussed on what he saw as the way forward and ignored everything else. I'd say on average about half his ideas were actually quite good, the problem was that all his positive abilities made it almost impossible to tell which of his ideas were good and which were impending disasters. He could make a quite convincing case for almost anything. It's intriguing how many opponents of his schemes would go into meetings with him, get convinced that he was right and they were wrong and it would be several days before they realized the gaping holes in the logic that they'd found so convincing. By the way, lying and ass-kissing while one's throat fills with bile is a necessary skill in any government. Having experienced both in detail, the British government is worse than the American one in this respect.

It was Rummie's tunnel vision that was his horrible flaw and it was a self-imposed one. He knew what he knew and nobody could talk him out of it. He'd have made a superb program manager where he was given one program to ram through from inception to service entry but the idea of balancing requirements and tempering the desirable with the possible were beyond him.

[Darth Wong]

Oh yes, that's a good point: I did not want to make it seem as if I consider education worthwhile to the exclusion of all else including practical experience. I have the utmost respect for technicians who have real working experience with any technology that I want to deal with. I was referring more to the "sci-fi novelist" angle, as an example of a person who has no formal training or on-the-job experience to draw from. I understand that you included Iain Banks probably more from whimsy than anything else, but I'm seeing people try to seriously defend the scheme and I have to point out what a hackneyed cliché the "ignoramus inspires the close-minded expert" idea is, especially in sci-fi.

Interesting side-notes about Rumsfeld. He didn't seem particularly persuasive on TV, but perhaps TV presentation and real-life presentation didn't match up in this case.

[tim31]

They don't always; back during the 1960 US presidential election, during the debates, people who listened in on radio gave the win to Nixon. Television viewers preferred Kennedy. The same broadcast, but one lacked a picture. The audience research suggested that the masses found Nixon's voice more trustworthy

[CaptainChewbacca]

Including Banks was my idea. I wanted a more 'respected' and well-known scifi author who's books included "hard science" and/or dimensional tomfoolery. I actually havn't read his books, but I very muched like his ideas on things like the Excession or Out of Context Problems. So, I threw him in and sent it to Stuart for review.

Sorry if it upset people, but I thought it would be fun.

[Beowulf]

Changing it to Jerry Pournelle might be a good idea then. He's already known for doing stuff like that, and I think he might be better known than Banks. Also, I wouldn't say Banks is "hard SF", unlike a very large portion of Pournelle's work.

[GrayAnderson]

You are favoring Banks over expert physics individuals whose only downside is that they are behind the times because they have been dead for decades. Banks would have to be more up to date on current physics, which is doubtful because he is a writer and so is busy writing books.

You'd be better off setting up an internet forum where people can propose their own crazy ideas- at least you don't have to deal with favoritism and I doubt that the nature of reality is something we wish to keep classified.

Actually, with a number of those physicists, there's an issue with timely access. Remember, they may well be towards the top of the pile, but that's a damn big haystack to be searching for needles in.

I could see the idea of an internet forum, but I think the tank is also one of those things that might get tossed together. It has better quality control, if you will, and you can switch people around more easily. If I was the government, I'd want to rotate people in on a short-term basis (say, a month at a time), moving people around regularly to ensure that new perspectives are brought in as much as possible. This would be something akin to how the internal ISO audits are handled at the family business; they try to have someone who hasn't done an audit before paired with someone who has, so you get both an experienced person (who knows what to look for) and a new person (who can randomly catch all sorts of things out of the corner of their eye, so to speak) working on the audit. In that vein, I'd want at least one person not from "in the system" on each audit, to pull odd ideas out of the air.

And I do agree with the comments nominating Baxter to be a good pick for the cameo (but I also like his writing style, so...go figure).

[GrayAnderson]

They don't always; back during the 1960 US presidential election, during the debates, people who listened in on radio gave the win to Nixon. Television viewers preferred Kennedy. The same broadcast, but one lacked a picture. The audience research suggested that the masses found Nixon's voice more trustworthy

Well, part of that had to do with a bias in who had a radio vs. who had a TV. The people likely still using radio apparently tended to be slightly more conservative/Republican (and likely located in rural areas out west where not many TV stations were operating), eating up a good deal of the difference in the samples. Always look for confounding factors; you never know what you'll find.

-----------------------------------------

You know, in light of Madoff's sentencing today, I would like to see a short cameo mention of a prison being built in Hell to plop certain "long-term prisoners" in when they get there. You've got a couple hundred million people Madoff could do a repeat act on when he gets there, after all.

[tim31]

But of course. The end result is that as a representation of voting opinion, it was bunk, but gives out a plethora of other data. And the quaint concept of Nixon having street cred.

[Simon_Jester]

Changing it to Jerry Pournelle might be a good idea then. He's already known for doing stuff like that, and I think he might be better known than Banks. Also, I wouldn't say Banks is "hard SF", unlike a very large portion of Pournelle's work.

Pournelle would be a good candidate; as you say he does this kind of stuff all the time. For that matter, I'd expect him to already be involved in the project, if only off screen.

I'd agree that Baxter is a more likely candidate - he has engineering and maths degrees (and he even applied to become a Cosmonaut in the nineties, but fell out of that quite early due to language requirements) - than Banks.

That would also make more sense. From what you say, Baxter would be a far better candidate than Banks.

=======

So Banks gets a lot of ideas wrong, more than someone who had to publish a journal article on the subject to get out of graduate school. If he compensates by having three times as many ideas as anyone normal (and from what I've heard about the Culture novels I wouldn't be surprised by that), and if he's surrounded by other people who can weed out the ones that are crap, he might very well still be a productive member of the team.

Address my previous point which was directed at PRECISELY this line of reasoning, please. Preferably, learn to fucking read, so I don't have to direct you to a previous point.

Your previous point being, if I follow your argument:

Oh yes, brainstorming and parallel think tanks are great. But they involve parallel teams of professionals, not amateurs. In your example, I don't think they would have brought in a bunch of completely unqualified novelists or TV scriptwriters to do this Red Team Review.

By now, Stuart has preempted my reply, but here goes:

The qualifications for a brainstorming think tank include, but are not limited to, knowledge of the field most obviously relevant (in this case, higher-dimensional physics and general relativity). It can also include expertise in related fields. For instance, knowledge of the railroad system is related to military technology through logistics, even though very few specialists in military technology know that much about the railroad system. More importantly, it can include the ability to generate informed ideas quickly.

As an example, consider the choice of Richard P. Feynman to serve on the Rogers Committee investigating the 1986 Challenger disaster. Feynman was a theoretical physicist, not an aerospace engineer. He had earned no engineering degrees, and had precious little experience in any subject related to engineering. In no sense was Feynman a professional engineer. Moreover, the areas in which he did have experience and professional qualifications (nuclear physics) were totally irrelevant to the investigation. Despite this, Feynman was a very useful contributor to the committee, to the point where replacing him with another aerospace engineer might well have weakened the final analysis.

Why was Feynman useful? He was good at generating novel ideas of his own. He did not accept reports delivered to the committee at face value, instead choosing to investigate them on his own. His skepticism about NASA's overconfident analysis of the Shuttle's safety is well documented, and proved to be well warranted by events. All these are things that a good scientist (or any rational thinker) does, of course. But some are better at it than others, and not everyone is good at dealing with them in all situations. Feynman was one of the twentieth century's most effective critical thinkers and idea generators, and these abilities made him a valuable member of a committee whose sole purpose was to investigate an aerospace engineering problem and make recommendations.

Once again, I'd like to underline that this had nothing to do with Feynman's engineering qualifications. The board had several members with doctoral degrees in engineering and years of experience in working with rockets. They were capable people, with plenty of professional experience in both the theory and practice of rocket design. Nothing prevented any of them from doing everything Feynman did. The only reason Feynman was useful to the committee was because he had useful personal qualities combined with enough background knowledge to avoid making an ass of himself. Because of his personal qualities, that minimum background was enough.

The background knowledge was, of course, required. And Feynman had spent years building it up. I would never suggest that some random person spending a few hours reading about physics on the Internet could learn enough to have done the same, even if they were as smart and good a critical thinker as Feynman. Someone who had spent all those years studying how to write TV scripts instead of how to do physics would not have been helpful.

But for this kind of job, having the right personal qualities makes a big difference. The difference is enough to offset a lot of formal education, though not enough to offset complete ignorance.
______

As you suggest, I'll learn to fucking read, but that will take a while.

=====

Oh yes, that's a good point: I did not want to make it seem as if I consider education worthwhile to the exclusion of all else including practical experience. I have the utmost respect for technicians who have real working experience with any technology that I want to deal with. I was referring more to the "sci-fi novelist" angle, as an example of a person who has no formal training or on-the-job experience to draw from.

Half the problem DIMON has is that in this case, no one in the world has practical experience doing the kind of "dimensional engineering"* that they suddenly need to do. They have no idea what conceptual framework to apply to their new discoveries yet. Professional scientists are used to that problem, of course, but if you're trying to generate the ideas you need as fast as possible for the war effort, where do you go?

Answering the question with "hire a few science fiction authors, because they earn a living by creating weird ideas that hold some water" isn't necessarily the right answer, but I don't think it's as thoroughly idiotic as you believe.

*For lack of a better term

[CaptainChewbacca]

I've actually been to a few lectures by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, who spoke about how at a certain point when you're dealing with string theory and ten or twelve or TWENTY dimensional math, the most important things are talking out the possibilities and keeping an open mind. Experiments that can prove or disprove the ideas are so infrequent and expensive that you have to think of everything that can happen ahead of time and 'prepare on paper' because you won't get a second shot.

[Darth Wong]

<snip pointlessly long Feynman story>

That's not the fucking point I was talking about. I was talking about the fact that a completely unqualified person would be so unfamiliar with the existing body of scientific knowledge that he would waste everyones' time with ideas that are doomed before they start. And he would be unaccustomed to providing explanations in the manner which is expected by scientists and engineers, ie- it would actually be well-defined. Instead, he would provide vague touchy-feely nonsense, none of which is couched by a familiarity with the underlying principles. I pointed this out quite clearly earlier.

Your Feynman example doesn't address my point at all. Feynman may not have been an aerospace engineer but he was certainly not the type of person who would throw out half-baked bullshit and waste other team members' time trying to get them to flesh it out for him, nor was he the kind of person who didn't know jack shit about the existing body of information.

Half the problem DIMON has is that in this case, no one in the world has practical experience doing the kind of "dimensional engineering"* that they suddenly need to do.

The "practical experience" here would be experience in the job they're expected to do, which in this particular case involves making scientific theories about spacetime. The "tools" in this case are mathematics. There is no such thing as a greasy technician, but the analogy has to be twisted somewhat. The underlying point doesn't change; there are certain requirements before you can be a useful contributor, in large part because the book has not been thrown out; it has only been added to.

[bobnik]

If you're looking for a sci-fi author with formal qualifications that are applicable to this situation, Greg Egan springs to mind. I highly recommend his work.