Newsgroups: bit.listserv.csg-l
Date:         Wed, 16 Dec 1992 14:57:16 CST
From:         John Gabriel <gabriel@EID.ANL.GOV>
Subject:      Gang Warfare

[From John Gabriel 921216 13:00 CST]

>(From Bill Powers (921214.1900 MST))

>John Gabriel (921214.1135 CST) --

THIS POST IS FAR TOO LONG. Those who want to get to the thing I
REALLY want say that's new should turn to
"I dont' disagree with you. I just have....." about 25 or 30
lines before the end.

>>>A real science of human behavior is the ultimate protection
>>>against bullets.

>>Think on that. And Heinlen's remark that an armed society is
>>a polite society, also on Roy Chapman's rule "Never point a gun
>>at anything/one unless you are willing to take personal
>>responsibility for its' their destruction."

>I'm afraid that despite his enormous story-telling skills, I
>eventually came to regard Heinlein as being stuck in an  adolescent fantasy.
> What he called a polite society was simply
>one in which everyone tried not to give offense in order to
>avoid being killed: a society based on fear (mislabelled
>"respect"). I think I would rather live in Dodge City 1992 than
>in Dodge City 1872. My idea of a grown-up society is one in
>which everyone respects the will of others because that's the
>only social system that makes any sense. Not because they see a
>gun pointed at them. That basis lasts only as long as it takes
>for the other guy to turn his back.

Yes, I agree with you in lots of ways about Heinlen, and yet
he makes a not unreasonable point if you think about his
background.

>As to Roy Chapman's rule, lots of people just love it because it
>gives them the feeling that other people's lives are theirs to
>spare or waste as they will. Why is being willing to take
>responsibility a good enough excuse for shooting someone? As if
>you could avoiud the responsibility by not acknowledging it.
>Frankly, I would be afraid to suggest to someone with a private
>arsenal that guns should be taken out of private hands. I would
>be afraid he'd shoot me, and be willing to take responsibility
>for it.

Well, Col. Chapman does not want students who don't understand
that lethal force is serious business in his school either.
But if you work for the FBI, or for parts of the Army, the things Roy
teaches are statistically likely to save your life. And for
ordinary citizens like the lady in the cafeteria in Texas who
could not draw her gun from her handbag in time to shoot back
at the chap who killed the ordinary citizens, and would have
preferred to have it holstered where she could get at it, the
no open carry law condemnned her to spend the rest of her life
in a wheelchair.

But perhaps we have to stay out of the question
of how to determine who is a responsible citizen enough to be
alolowed open carry.

I have not been through Roy's
school yet, I have been through one taught by one of his
instructors who was in charge of all firearms training for the
police in a big city for 20 odd years. If I can show I am of
as good moral character as good policemen, and I am perhaps
slighly better trained, why should I be any more danger to
you than is Tom Baines or your local police, even if I do go
armed. (I don't by the way, except to shoot at paper on
approved ranges). But if open or concealed carry were
allowed in Illinois, I might well go armed if I were driving
where carjacking is common.

But we can continue this argument indefinitely, and probably
not get any further. If Roy graduates somebody out of his
school, I in fact feel safer with that person beside me armed.
He or she is just backup for the police force I think we all
agree to. Let's continue offline if you like.


>>I can't tell if you've read Peterson and the Altmans. The thing
>>that makes them interesting to me is the way the society where
>>the carnivores can do real harm to each other, but don't
>>because if they do they will be too torn up to catch the next
>>moose, moves gradually towards the chicken run where nobody has
>>claws and teeth, and it's fatal to be crowded and at the bottom
>>of the pecking order.

>I have read them, but not seriously. I eat meat, but not that of
>my own species. I'm not sure we know why lions don't enter into
>lethal contests very often. I might guess that it's because
>fighting hurts, and lower animals are too stupid to think up
>reasons to keep on doing things that hurt.

NO! THERE IS A FEEDBACK SYSTEM. Those wolves who are disabled
by internal quarrels in the pack, die of starvation, as does
the rest of the pack, and their quarrelsome genes are not
so strongly perpetuated. In fact there's an even stronger
mechanism. Most pups are fathered by the Betas, the Alphas
are too busy with the duties of pack leadership. Just as well,
If you train, keep, or breed dogs, you know that two alpha
male personalities, or even more so two alpha females in too
small a yard need very careful management by the "super alpha"
i.e. you, to prevent fratricide. Darwin always triumphs in the
long run.

>>Let me say one thing that may
>>bring down a firestorm. Before the railroad and the telegraph
>>and good maps (Gauss's contribution) by and large wars had a
>>not unreasonable ecological function - they closed down
>>incompetent governments.

>But it takes two incompetent governments to get into a war. The
>government that wins is more competent at only one thing:
>winning a war. That's not much guarantee of competence in
>anything else.

NO. The German decsion to march into Poland 12 months after
Munich was unilateral, and it did eventually destroy the two
governments that ignored the rule of the wolf pack. It also
brought down the UK Prime Minister who had run the war, after
the war was ended, and probably a good thing too - otherwise
India would have been an even bigger mess. And if the UK had not
declared war when they did (but not in 1938 - Watson Watt
only just got radar going in time as it was) I might have been
killing sentries with a borrowed rifle, as well as my Corsican
friend.

>>How to close down an incompetent government without
>>unacceptable cost in lives, misery, ....... Trade wars perhaps.
>>Better to be laid off than killed or badly mangled.

>That's the problem as I see it: that there always seems to be an
>acceptable cost in lives, misery, etc. "Sure, we'll get our hair
>mussed, but we'll lose maybe ten million, twenty million TOPS."
>(Prof. Buck Turgidson).

I think you missed my point. I agree the costs have clearly
been unacceptable since about 1870. There's a lot of European
history and economics back of the statement. Yes, the 100 years
war was a frightful affair, as was the Mongol invasion of China,
and so on. But it was not on the scale of even the American
Civil War. Things are not as simple as PCT would suggest. Yes,
perhaps the zero sum game arising from population pressure
might have been alleviated earlier by the scientiufic discoveries
that often came a genration after European wars. But I doubt it.
Exactly the same phenomena that annoy you so badly in trying to
get PCT published, work against other innovations too. And the
pressure of war breaks down the barricades. This is really
Tom Baines' story, and we should ask him to tell it, but
there is a great difference between a peacetime army, and army
fighting a "phoney war", and the real thing which only settles
into its stride after some 12 months and is strong on inovation,
and weak on bureacracy.

Perhaps that's just what you mean when you say "If you have to
fight a war - get on with it and do it right" But things are
different - a squad today with M16s has more fire power than
one of Wellington's regiments, and events move correspondingly
faster.

But TOTAL war (i.e. the involvement of a whole nation) only dates
to 1914, and indeed the French and British misjudgement was partly
about how many conscripts the German Army could mobilise quickly.
The railroad and the telegraph made the changes that thoughtful
military people could perhaps see from the American Civil War, and
the Franco Prussian War. We can argue about pre 1800, but we all
agree pretty much about 1914 and 1939.

I'm not saying that wars were ever "fun", but I do think that
perhaps once they served a useful purpose in human ecology.
Forest fires aren't "fun" either for the deer and other small
animals that get caught, but my friends who know the business
say you get to choose between the fairly frequent small ones
we used to have 100 years ago, and today's, which when the start
are fed by half a century of dead wood.


In 1940 or 1941 the US Army undertook the Louisiana Maneuvers
to prepare for the inevitable involvement in Europe. That
experience saved this country's young men from the bitter
lessons learned by the BEF in France, and NZEF in Crete.

If you want to crack the code for what the Gang of 5 are up to,
it is to introduce the kind of innovation that usually
requires bloodshed (you own or your allies) to persuade an
army not to fight last time's war. And until war and policemen
are no longer needed - you see we do agree with you part of
the way - that would be a good thing. I expect the gang of 5
will continue. Just as in the summer of 1938, my father spent
his time with a Brunsviga hand caculator making new Gunnery
Tables for the Navy, instead of grading School Certificate
Exam Papers in Mathematics.

Unlike the situation in 1938, we
don't actively EXPECT a major conflict. But we think it likely
that our president will find it necessary to send young Americans
into danger in places like Somalia. And we want them to have the
best possible chance of coming home unharmed.


>>Completely agreed - how do we keep people from wanting to shoot  >at each
> other? No, I don't want to say that - don't believe in
>>police/baboon state.

>But that's exactly the question. The way we approach it with
>HPCT is by studying the hierarchical goal structure.

OK. Now I think we agree. I went through all this in my reply to
Tom Bourbon of an hour or two ago. But I have some serious doubts,
set forth loc. cit. about the hierarchy, and some suggested
alternatives.
>>Why do people want to shoot at each other, and WHAT might make
>>them want to stop?

>Now you're on the same track that I'm on. Only the problem isn't
>to make them want to stop. It's what they're trying to
>accomplish at a higher level by shooting. The basic strategy is
>to find out what they want and figure out how they can get it by
>a different means. Nobody (sane) has a highest-level goal of
>propelling a bit of lead into another person's body. That's just
>a means to an end. It's basically a very inefficient means,
>because it gets other people mad and they tend to start shooting
>back at you (whether they're the Good Guys or the Bad Guys).
>Then everybody gets hung up on shooting and they forget what
>they originally wanted, and like as not destroy any possibility
>of getting it anyway. Look at Somalia. That's a polite society?

>It's a process called "going up a level." You keep doing it
>until you reach the level where something is still free enough
>to change a goal. If someone wants money or power, you ask what
>he wants it for. And then you arrange for him to get it without
>the money and the power, or at least without unreasonable
>amounts thereof. Whatever people want, they usually want it for
>a higher reason that they've lost track of or never really
>worked out. Or, on second thought, haven't really cared that
>much about since they were teenagers.

RIGHT ON, except what about the people with whom compromise is
not possible. Like the guy with the AK47 in Stockton.
See V. Clausewitz, or the courts of law or any
of the other machinery we have to resolve disputes where
individuals cannot agree without some kind of arbitrtration
if it really isn't a zero sum game. Or war, if it is, and lives
are at stake anyhow. This gets very quickly into ZPG vs the
Horn of Plenty theory of support for scientific research,
subsidy to the Steel Industry or whatever.
>----------------------------------------------------------------
>Picking up loose end from yesterday:

>>Bill, I read, and I think I understand you. Put very simply,
>>you are saying that a human being can follow a random movement
>>of a cursor with a finger, and that this is explained by
>>control theory.

>Yes. This can also be put somewhat more generally. A human being
>can control a visual (auditory, kinesthetic, etc.) perception by

.....................................

>You don't have to lay out the whole hierarchy in order to
>demonstrate how the model works for a single control process at
>any level you please. Pick any perception a person can affect
>with muscles. Get the person to pick a reference level for it.
>Get the person to control it in the presence of disturbances (in
>a constant state, please, to accomodate the experimenter). Match
>the model to it and thereby measure the parameters.
>bet a considerably chunk of my life (and have done so) that when
>you've found all the different control processes you can, there
>won't be much left over.

I don't disagree with you, I just have trouble with some of
the extrapolations. Let me put it like this. The Bohr quantum
theory of the copper atom eventually explained quantitatively
the characteristic green colour of the Cu flame spectrum (but
only as late as about 1950, and only then by including
electrostatic contributions to total energy that have no
no classical or non relativistic explanation) The properties
of copper as a metal arise only when these interactions are
more important in the physics than the Bohr atom. I feel
the same way about ECSs and straightforward control theory.
I doubt it explains the Stock Market prices, the guy in
Stockton, or even provides all the insight a CEO needs to
run a company or a General a campaign. You are the H. Bohr
of PCT, and nobody will ever be able to take that away
from you, but we still need our Schrodinger for the
theory of metals, and Dirac for the theory of electron spin.
To say nothing of Weyl, Bethe, and van der Waerden for my
favourite soap box of symmetries. But those are all
opportunities, not threats to the beauty and power of
the things you have already done. We acknowledge and celebrate
your achievements.


You know, I think we can argue a long time about the different
projections we see of the same "real" thing on the wall of
Plato's cave. But I also think we probably agree well enough
"for Govt. work" And as Bill C. remarks "There aint no such
thing as ground truth." And perhaps thoughts in the mind of God,
or "of a higher reference system."

>Of course what's left over will be very interesting.

Absolutely. There are more things I want to say, but I've said
them already in a post for Tom Bourbon, so I don't need to
clutter up the net a second time.

        John Gabriel (gabriel@eid.anl.gov)
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