zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — instinct, rationality, creativity, complexity and intelligence ]
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Guy Claxton, Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind
Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

You might think, taking a quick glance at their titles, that these two books would be in substantial agreement with one another about the speeds of thought. But consider these two comments, in one of which the deliberative, logical mind is “slower” than the intuitive and emotional — while in the other, it is the rational mind that is “faster” and the intuitive mind which is “slower”. Brought together, the two quotes are amazing — it would seem that either one or the other must be wrong:

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Happily, I don’t believe either one is wrong — I think it’s more a matter of there being three speeds of thought, and the two books in question using different terminologies to emphasize different distinctions between them.

Here’s a more extended version of Guy Claxton’s position:

Roughly speaking, the mind possesses three different processing speeds. The first is faster than thought. Some situations demand an unselfconscious, instantaneous reaction. … Neither a concert pianist nor an Olympic fencer has time to figure out what to do next. There is a kind of ‘intelligence’ that works more rapidly than thinking. This mode of fast, physical intelligence could be called our ‘wits’. (The five senses were originally known as ‘the five wits’.)

Then there is thought itself — the sort of intelligence which does involve figuring matters out, weighing up the pros and cons, constructing arguments and solving problems. A mechanic working out why an engine will not fire, a family arguing over the brochures about where to go for next summer’s holiday, a scientist trying to interpret an intriguing experimental result, a student wrestling with an examination question: all are employing a way of knowing that relies on reason and logic, on deliberate conscious thinking. … Someone who is good at solving these sorts of problems we call ‘bright’ or ‘clever’.

But below this, there is another mental register that proceeds more slowly still. It is often less purposeful and clear-cut, more playful, leisurely or dreamy. In this mode we are ruminating or mulling things over, being contemplative or meditative. We may be pondering a problem, rather than earnestly trying to solve it, or just idly watching the world go by. What is going on in the mind may be quite fragmentary. What we are dunking may not make sense. We may even not be aware of much at all. As the English yokel is reported to have said: ‘sometimes I sits and thinks, but mostly I just sits’. […]

That third mode of thinking is the one Claxton identifies with “wisdom” — which is interesting enough. Just as interesting, though, is his identification of this slowest mode of thought with “wicked problems”:

Recent scientific evidence shows convincingly that the more patient, less deliberate modes of mind are particularly suited to making sense of situations that are intricate, shadowy or ill defined. Deliberate thinking, d-mode, works well when the problem it is facing is easily conceptualised. When we are trying to decide where to spend our holidays, it may well be perfectly obvious what the parameters are: how much we can afford, when we can get away, what kinds of things we enjoy doing, and so on. But when we are not sure what needs to be taken into account, or even which questions to pose — or when the issue is too subtle to be captured by the familiar categories of conscious thought — we need recourse to the tortoise mind.

I haven’t read either book, and I’d hope that Kahneman as well as Claxton actually addresses all three speeds of thought. But my immediate point is that the slowest of the three forms of thought is the one that’s best suited to understanding complex, wicked and emergent problems.

And that’s the one that can’t be hurried — the one where the Medici Effect takes effect — and the one which provides Claxton with one of his finest lines, with which he opens his book, a western koan if ever I saw one:

There is an old Polish saying, ‘Sleep faster; we need the pillows’, which reminds us that there are some activities which just will not be rushed. They take the time that they take.

More on that front shortly, insha’Allah and the creek don’t rise.

Top Billing! Dan Trombly – Syria and Irresponsible Protection 

A brutal fisking of R2P as a self-defeating intellectual sham, well worth your time to read:

….Three very prominent foreign policy scholars: Steven Cook,Anne-Marie Slaughter, and Shadi Hamid, have all penned pieces calling for Western powers to put the option of military intervention onto the table. Although in the past many proponents of Responsibility to Protect, humanitarian intervention, and intervention in Libya (three groups with significant overlap but which were and are by no means identical) insisted that consistency was not necessary for their respective foreign policy visions to be credible or coherent, it seems the utter failure of the Libyan intervention to deter other states from ruthlessly oppressing their own people has caused some reconsideration of this stance.

Slaughter argues:

“If the Arab League, the U.S., the European Union, Turkey, and the UN Secretary General spend a year wringing their hands as the death toll continues to mount, the responsibility to protect (R2P) doctrine will be exposed as a convenient fiction for power politics or oil politics, feeding precisely the cynicism and conspiracy theories in the Middle East and elsewhere that the U.S. spends its public diplomacy budget and countless diplomatic hours trying to debunk.”

This was probably something advocates should have considered before launching an intervention that the administration insisted was not simply in the cosmopolitan interest of humanity, but the interests of the United States. If the US is launching interventions to debunk conspiracy theories, why should we be so confident a Syrian intervention would dispel them? Let me red team as a conspiratorial geopolitical commentator….

Seydlitz89– A Question of Honor? 

Seydlitz89 explores the work of Clausewitzian scholar  Dr. Andreas Herberg-Rothe entitled “The Concept of Honor in War“:

For Clausewitz, Napoleon was a “real enemy”, one that challenged the very definition of what not only Clausewitz but all Prussia thought themselves to be, but also one that brought their entire independent political existence into question (d).

Thus in Clausewitz’s original concept, wars could be bloody, but they were not questions of physical existence for one political community or the other, although individuals and even states were of course at risk, this being war. With the First World War we start to see a radicalization of this approach as the full weight of a political community using the consolidating/organizing/administrative powers of the state to mobilize its full potential to fight becomes a reality. By October 1917 the political conditions had ripened to usher in a new political concept of existence. 

An “absolute enemy”, the Leninist concept as presented by Carl Schmitt in The Theory of the Partisan I introduced in my last thread would conflate these subjective and “objective” perspectives, actually conflating a, b, c, and d, making the enemy an existential threat to the community as a whole as if it were an individual. The distinctions between individual, political community and state were lost. What makes this a totalitarian concept is that one side essentially has to exterminate the other, the other portrayed as an existential threat, but falling far short of such a reality, or in some cases constituting no actual threat at all…. 

SWJ  (Adam Elkus) – Death From Above: The West and the Rest 

This is part smackdown, part analysis:

….While there are many valid criticisms of the problems involved in using discrete force and avoiding civilian casualties, they are not specific to flying robots. Many center on larger legitimate political, strategic, and legal issues related to the global counterterrorism targeting program. However, it is impossible to ignore the fact that some drone critics have a visceral sense of repulsion over the idea that that men in warehouses in Nevada can kill targets on other side of the globe. In other words, it is not the War on Terror or the war in Afghanistan but the drone itself that triggers their ire. Their critiques center around a visceral sense of disgust at the supposedly disturbing nature of drone warfare, which they portray as the frictionless application of force against helpless victims.

….Military history, however, complicates this picture. The same logic that damns the drone operator or frowns on precision-guided military dominance also curses the more accurate firearms of the mid-19th century. As David Bell argues, the drone critic’s lament is echoed throughout history:

“Under medieval codes of chivalry, the most honorable conflicts were those where the combatants fought as equals, relying on individual strength and skill to prevail, rather than superior weapons or numbers. .. [W]e certainly have evidence of the scorn some late medieval critics reserved for the crossbow—a weapon that supposedly allowed poorly skilled archers to kill honorable knights from safe cover.”

Global Guerrillas – Drone Swarms are Here: 1 Minute to Midnight?

The algorithms that enable drone swarms is advancing EXTREMELY quickly.  In the next couple of years, the number of advances in technology, deployments, use cases, and awareness of drones will be intense.  In 5 years, they will be part of every day life.  You will see them everywhere.

Not just one or two drones.  SWARMS of drones.   Tens.  Hundreds.  Thousands.  Millions (potentially if the cost per unit is small enough)?  

Pundita –Urgent advice for State: Warn Obama to stop pushing the envelope (UPDATED 2X) 

….I told this story not to insult any government but to graphically illustrate that when sufficiently provoked and desperate, even the weakest governments can set the mighty United States back on its heels. Once this gets underway it can snowball into a trend. 

With all such situations it’s perceptions of American actions that count, or to be more precise the perceived pattern of actions. During the past year the perceived pattern is that President Barack Obama is throwing his weight around the world, everywhere he can.

I understand that Obama can cite reasons for each instance in which he’s crashed national borders in pursuit of the bad guys. Yet the perception is that Obama has gotten hold of two very efficient lethal weapons — U.S. Special Forces teams and armed drones — and is deploying them anywhere in the world he sees fit. 

But even President George W. Bush and his most aggressive predecessors in the Cold War managed to meddle in ways that didn’t make it look as if the entire planet was suddenly under surprise attack from the United States. They knew when to back off — and they were operating in a communications era when their every move in a foreign country wasn’t broadcast around the world….

HG’s World – West 2012-The Navy and Marines in the next decade

This past week I had the pleasure of attending the WEST 2012 Conference in San Diego, where the theme was America’s Military at the Crossroads: What’s Out and What’s In for 2012 and Beyond. I was encouraged to attend by the involvement of the event co-sponsor, the United State Naval Institute. The USNI has been in the forefront of offering a platform where those with an interest in the Navy and all the attendant aspects of strategy, history and tactics are given a forum to express and discuss their interests. The attention to the future of the sea services became all the more important in the recent changes being described as the “Strategic Pivot” to face west into the Pacific and prepare to confront what some see as a potential adversary, China, as she builds her own blue water navy. How big is this threat? Are we building the right fleet, or are we building a fleet based on the last major war WWII? What in the light of the current economic times, can we afford to build. And finally, what kind of Sailors and Marines and leaders do we need for the next two decades and beyond? Those are some of the questions that the conference’s many panels attempted to answer. 

Kings of War (Jack McDonald) – Obama, Realist to Little People. 

SWJ Blog (Mike Few) – Rethinking Revolution: Egypt in Transition and  Rethinking Revolution: Iraq 

Bruce Kesler – Haditha Was Exploited To Increase Danger To The US, US Troops, And To Noncombatants

Quesopaper – Rule of Law, Part 2 

Nuclear Diner –Nuclear Terrorism: Will the Business Plan Work?

Foreign Policy (Dan Drezner) –Is American influence really on the wane? 

American Diplomacy –Interweaving of Public Diplomacy and U.S. International Broadcasting, A Historical Analysis by Ted Lipien 

Danger Room (David Axe) –U.S.-Backed Militia Fortifies Afghanistan’s ‘Heart of Darkness’

Eide Neurolearning Blog –Pattern Learning and the Brain 

Scienceblog – FIRST PLANTS CAUSED ICE AGES 

David Armano – Trust Shifts From Institutions To Individuals

Presentation Zen – 10 great books to help you think, create, & communicate better in 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — crowdsourcing and ye olde fine line between genius and insanity revisited ]
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Surowiecki should really have titled his book Extraordinary Popular Intuitions and the Wisdom of Crowds, no?

Three articles suitable for an election year where our elite embraces a variety of oligarchic policies because they benefit themselves personally and despite evidence that these policies are inefficient, socially harmful, anti-democratic and corrupting of the body politic.

Charles Murray –The New American Divide 

America is coming apart. For most of our nation’s history, whatever the inequality in wealth between the richest and poorest citizens, we maintained a cultural equality known nowhere else in the world—for whites, anyway. “The more opulent citizens take great care not to stand aloof from the people,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, the great chronicler of American democracy, in the 1830s. “On the contrary, they constantly keep on easy terms with the lower classes: They listen to them, they speak to them every day.”

Americans love to see themselves this way. But there’s a problem: It’s not true anymore, and it has been progressively less true since the 1960s.

…..Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation’s other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation’s power elite does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.

Pete Kofd – Rise of the Praetorian Class 

….The Praetorian Class includes members of the Armed Services, federal, state and local law enforcement personnel as well as numerous militarized officials including agents from the DEA, Immigrations, Customs Enforcement, Air Marshalls, US Marshalls, and more. It also includes, although to a lesser extent, various stage actors in the expanding security theater such as TSA personnel. The main mission of the Praetorian Class is to keep the order of the day. This requires displaying an intimidating presence in their interactions with the Economic Class.

As the Praetorian Class ascends, the clear, albeit unstated, message that emerges is that actions and events in the Economic Class only occur with its tacit consent. Whether driving on roads, traveling in the air, visiting public land, walking down the street or even living in your own home, every action you take is predicated on its permission. By preconditioning the populace to enforcement of its edicts, most of which are completely arbitrary, the Praetorian Class sets itself up for a high degree of autonomy in its actions. This is confirmed by the fact that consequences for malfeasance within the Praetorian Class are almost never observed, and when it happens, it typically becomes a grotesque spectacle in which one of their own is sacrificed as an example, so as to keep appearances of effective internal controls. 

Daron Acemoglu –Why Do Nations Fail?

….That got me onto a path of research that has been trying to understand, theoretically and empirically, how institutions shape economic incentives and why institutions vary across nations. How they evolve over time. And the politics of institutions, meaning, not just economically which institutions are better than others, but why is it that certain different types of institutions stick?

What I mean by that is, it wouldn’t make sense, in terms of economic growth, to have a set of institutions that ban private property or create private property that is highly insecure, where I can encroach on your rights. But politically, it might make a lot of sense.

If I have the political power, and I’m afraid of you becoming rich and challenging me politically, then it makes a lot of sense for me to create a set of institutions that don’t give you secure property rights. If I’m afraid of you starting new businesses and attracting my workers away from me, it makes a lot of sense for me to regulate you in such a way that it totally kills your ability to grow or undertake innovations.

So, if I am really afraid of losing political power to you, that really brings me to the politics of institutions, where the logic is not so much the economic consequences, but the political consequences. This means that, say, when considering some reform, what most politicians and powerful elites in society really care about is not whether this reform will make the population at large better off, but whether it will make it easier or harder for them to cling to power.

Walter Russell Meade – Establishment Blues 

….The American people aren’t perfect yet and never will be — but by the standards that matter to the Establishment, this is the best prepared, most open minded and most socially liberal generation in history.  Unsatisfactory as the American people may be from the standpoints of Georgetown and Manhattan, this is as good as it gets.  Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry Truman could only dream of the kind of sophisticated and cosmopolitan understanding that folks in Peoria have now compared to the old days.

The American people are less prejudiced, more globally aware and more willing to meet other cultures and societies halfway than ever before.  Minorities today are better protected in law and more fairly treated by the public than ever in our history.  No previous generation has been as determined to give women a fair chance in life, or to attack the foul legacy of racism.  The American people have never been as religiously tolerant as they are today, as concerned about the environment, or more willing to make sacrifices around the world to promote the peace and well being of humanity as a whole.

By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead.  It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job.

Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors.  It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations.  Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed. 

Adam Elkus –There Is No Substitute For Victory & There Is No Substitute, Part 2.

Mixed results in Iraq and Afghanistan are not proof that victory itself should not be a goal of American military efforts. They are only proof that the policies and strategies that animated American forces were faulty. If Slaughter and Bacevich are arguing that we should adopt more realistic and limited policies and strategies in war, I wholeheartedly agree. Nearly a decade of state-building later, we have ultimately little to show for our efforts. But that is not what is what is being said. Rather, there is a straightforward argument that we cannot “win” wars anymore….

Adam wages battle against unclear and poorly reasoned thinking in national security affairs.

Fabius Maximus – About the escalating conflict with Iran (not *yet* open war),  Have Iran’s leaders vowed to destroy Israel? , What do we know about Iran’s nuclear ambitions? and What does the IAEA know about Iran’s nuclear program?

FM is running a series on the political lobbying for war with Iran, or at least US sanction for an Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities and research sites.

Summary:  What do we know about Iran’s program to build atomic weapons?  For decades Americans have been subjected to saturation bombing by misinformation and outright lies about Iran.  The information from our intelligence agencies has painted a more accurate picture, if we choose to see it.  Sixth in a series; at the end are links to the other chapters.

Steven Pressfield-Work Over Your Head 

Writers of fiction learn early that they can write characters who are smarter than they are…..

KC Johnson – Groupthink & Political Analysis

A central component of the groupthink academy is the law of group polarization–that in environments (such as most humanities and social sciences departments) in which people basically think alike, more extreme versions of the common assumption will emerge. Within the academy, that condition has had the effect of producing more extreme new faculty hires and less pedagogical diversity. Outside the academy, the prevalence of groupthink has had the unintended consequence of making the views of “mainstream” academics of little use even for their seeming political allies.

Hat tip to Bruce Kesler.

Slouching Toward Columbia –Drone panic: New weapon, old anxieties

Poor drones and drone-operators: as the latest generation of weaponry on the battlefield, it’s now their turn to be subject to that great generational scrutiny of moral and ethical suspicion. Poor thinking public: we get treated to these arguments as if they were all original or unique to drones.

This piece from the Atlantic, addresses (among many other things) many of these themes. Unfortunately, it perpetuates a number of very tired tropes about military technology and tactics.

The first overused and under-scrutinized argument is the fear that drones make war “easier to wage” because “we can safely strike from longer distances.” Well, we’ve had that ability since the birth of air power and missile power, it just makes it a lot easier to hit certain kinds of targets at acertain tempo. After all, it’s only the pilots who are “far away,” the drones themselves still operate from bases with real, flesh-and-blood people who are potentially exposed to retaliation, and those bases are not necessarily any further away than bases for manned aircraft (in most cases they service both)…..

The subtext to some of the anti-drone angst is that it is an effective use of American power against some of the worst bastards on Earth, hence the hurry to tangle up in investigations, regulations and lawfare, something that is morally indistinguishable from an artillery shell or infantryman’s bullet.

Ribbonfarm –Extroverts, Introverts, Aspies and Codies

 The reason I’ve been thinking a lot about the E/I spectrum is that a lot of my recent ruminations have been about how the rapid changes in social psychology going on around us might be caused by the drastic changes in how E/I dispositions manifest themselves in the new (online+offline) sociological environment.  Here are just a few of the ideas I’ve been mulling:

• As more relationships are catalyzed online than offline, a great sorting is taking place: mixed E/I groups are separating into purer groups dominated by one type
• Each trait is getting exaggerated as a result
• The emphasis on collaborative creativity, creative capital and teams is disturbing the balance between E-creativity and I-creativity
• Lifestyle design works out very differently for E’s and I’s
• The extreme mental conditions (dubiously) associated with each type in the popular imagination, such as Asperger’s syndrome or co-dependency, are exhibiting new social phenomenology 

An old post by Venkat I stumbled across.

Gary Rubinstein–The ‘three great teacher’ study — finally laid to rest 

Rubinstein deconstructs a study that undergirds a central tenet of corporate Ed Reform:

….When you look at this graph, the first thing that might seem unusual is that the high group is not the 555 group, but the 455 group.  Why is that?  Well, because the 555 group had a different starting point than the 111 group, so it would not be a valid comparison.  None of the twenty graphs have both the 111 and the 555 groups since those groups never had a close enough starting point.  They explain in the paper that this is because:

So they admit that the assignment to these teachers was done with bias which, it seems to me, invalidates the entire study.  But I learned that even with this bias, the authors of the report had to further distort their results.  When you see those three bars it seems that those were the only three groups that began with a starting score of around 56%.

Metamodern – Moscow Report (II): Russians embrace a radical vision of nanotechnology 

Shlok Vaidya-FICTION: PLACEIQ 

Kings of War-Persian Risk: Analyzing “The Problem of Iran”