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Archive for December, 2013

Two in the wild from @tinyrevolution, plus one

Monday, December 9th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — in which my doppelgänger Jon Schwartz of Tiny Revolution comes up with a few of my ideas before I’ve even woken up, see “background” below ]
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I’m posting this first pair of images with my friends Mike Sellers and Bryan Alexander in mind:

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This pair, which i snarfed from the same source, is also of interest:

Click here to see the twin texts at a more easily readable size.

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Okay, here’s some background, fished out of my personal mists of time with an assist or two from the Internet Archive:

On November 9, 2004, a certain Jonathan Schwartz had apparently read a post of mine about OSINT on the Online Journalism Review [now archived], followed me to another site where he found more of my writings — and blogged at A Tiny Revolution:

At this point I became… unsettled. Cameron’s view of the world is EXACTLY THE SAME AS MINE. I briefly asked myself: do I have a split personality, and does my other personality have a website of its own? It is possible that when I think I’m sleeping, I’m actually awake as “Charles Cameron,” busily saying the same things Jonathan Schwarz does? Or is it the other way around, and when Charles Cameron goes to sleep he transforms into “Jonathan Schwarz”? And… is either one of us a superhero?

I then discovered the strangest thing of all. It turns out that unbeknownst to me (or “me”), Cameron was already aware of this website, and had linked to it twice.

So I recommend Cameron’s site. I myself look forward to following it and his work. But he better not start hitting on my girlfriend, because she might like him exactly the same amount as me.

It seems Jonathan Schwartz is still tracking “side by side” quotes and images, just as I’m still tracking “DoubleQuotes”. And sometimes — as today, above — fragments of “his” life surface as half-remembered dreams in mind…

Or as Florence Nightingale once said:

Oh Jonathan my brother Jonathan, my love to thee was very great, passing the love of women

So it looks like your girlfriend is safe after all, Jon.

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One more from TinyRevolution before we go — not a DoubleQuote this time, but an intersection of two fields — and ZP readers already know how interested I am in the intersections of NatSec and Games

Gestures

Monday, December 9th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — I got caught in a cascade of images, swept away — and then, Mao ]
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This gesture seems to me to have the quality of a caress…

in which case a caress in Kyiv is not so different from piano music in that same city…

or, as it might be, cello music in Sarajevo…

or for that matter, simply standing motionless in Tienanmen Square…

or planting flowers in Washington, DC…

Caresses, music, stillness, flowers… there’s a kinship there.

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But then again, maybe these gestures are too idealistic for the realist’s “real world” — and to quote Chairman Mao in refutation of that last image:

Every Communist must grasp the truth, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”

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I keep coming back to that first image — stunning!

The thing about it — to my eye — the humanity is clearly visible on both sides…

Sunday surprise 11: thinking outside the Amazon box

Sunday, December 8th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — since there’s no divine surveillance on this one day of the week, I can safely post something utterly trivial here without fear of The Wrath ]
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If you’ve ever felt that Amazon mailing boxes were emblematic of the labor of Sysiphus, here’s your proof:

But wait — surely things can’t always be that bad? Next time you receive a box or three from Amazon, consider building a model Japanese temple:

From Brian Ashcraft at Kotaku:

What do you do with your Amazon cardboard boxes? Throw them away? An individual in Japan turned them into a one of Japan’s most famous temples, the Byodoin. The temple is a national treasure in Japan and is featured on the back of ten yen coins. NicoNico Douga user Upuaza Touryou took around five months to complete the sculpture, which is made up of over five thousand cardboard parts. Total cost? 300 yen or about US$3.

How are the mighty fallen…

Sunday, December 8th, 2013

[ by Charles Cameron — an event in Kyiv, in which Lenin may remind one of Saddam… ]
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Statue of Lenin, toppled, in Kiev / Kyiv, December 2013

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I apologize for the bank which tries to hitch a ride on Ben Kingsley’s reading of Shelley here, but this is the best reading of Ozymandias I was able to find.

Shelley’s poem gives, I believe — in the context of recent events in Kyiv — some clarity to another well-known observation of his, in A Defence of Poetry:

Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time.

— or more succinctly:

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

Towards Computational Strategy (Part I)

Sunday, December 8th, 2013

(by Adam Elkus)

As Zenpundit readers may know from my previous entry, I am a PhD student in Computational Social Science at George Mason University. Though I am learning the technical craft of computer modeling of social processes, I have had a longstanding interest in future war and technology. I grew up in California, and in an environment very much shaped by the technology industry. This was diluted by the fact that I grew up in Southern California and also have had a mostly liberal arts education heavy on arts, (military and strategic) history, and social science. My own struggle these days is — having spent so long developing the humanities side of myself — to think more like an engineer in developing computational and quantitative approaches to studying social science.  You can see some of my notes on this process at my own personal research journal.

My term project for my CSS 600 class is a very, very crude and simple agent-based model of military mobilization. I’m also working on an equally crude model of strategic learning and a very crude simulation of strategic effectiveness in alliances. I don’t like them, and am on the fence about whether I’ll want to post them on Github after all — though I am definitely going to post the alliance effectiveness model (which relies on an interesting optimization algorithm) to a larger audience.

That is OK. Though I began practicing Python and NetLogo all the way back in early spring, learning to program from scratch takes time and effort. Through my classes, tutoring, and plenty of sleepless nights I bootstrapped my way to being able to make computational models in Python, NetLogo, and Java. And this winter I will be practicing Java and Lisp in preparation for spring classes. I could probably, with more time and less distractions (readers who know me in person will know that I unfortunately have had to devote a lot more attention this semester to resolving some logistical problems outside of academics) have done better than the models I’m making for my classes. So I chose easier and simpler for my first models. However, I have grander ambitions in the long term.

This post is the first of a series that I am constructing from notes I have scribbled throughout this semester, my first at GMU. I have, over the last year, relentlessly explored and narrowed down my idea of my research agenda. Aaron Frank, Jay Ulfelder, Mark Safranski, A.E. Stahl, David Masad, Russell Thomas, Lynn Rees, Dan tdaxp, Daniel Trombly, Joshua Foust, Trey Causey, Alex Hanna, Sina K., Anton Strezhnez, Nick Prime, Daniel Bilar, Sam Liles, W.K. Winecoff, H. Lucien Gauthier III, Dave Lyle, Daniel Solomon, Jon Jeckell, Alex Olesker, Brett Fujioka, Robert Caruso, the mysterious Dr. Kypt3ia, and many others too numerous to mention have served as sounding boards for a successive array of both promising ideas and also half and even quarter-baked “dry holes.”

I have a gigantic array of TextEdit files, Moleskine journals, and even theories scribbled in pseudocode in my Sublime Text 2 text editor. So as I turn them into coherent posts, I will space them out individually. This series concerns the concept of “computational strategy,” which I am shaping my own studies around. For example, I will be taking a survey artificial intelligence class next semester — one of two survey courses that computer science majors (which I am not  — I will have the same relationship with CS that political science has with probability and statistics in that I’ll try to borrow as much as I can but also will never be as good as an actual CS student) must take to survey breadth and depth of AI. I will also be taking a course on cognitive programming for computer models.

It will consist of the following posts:

(I) My own journey as a PhD student up to this point

(II) Contrasting generative social science with theoretical computer science — and their deficits when applied to strategy

(III) From “killer robots” to “robot historian” and computation as a universal language

(IV) Towards a preliminary research agenda for computational approaches for studying strategic theory

We begin with (I):

Between A Dead Prussian And Kenneth Waltz

Since my friend Aaron Frank convinced me to switch from International Relations to my current PhD program in Computational Social Science, I have experienced something of an identity crisis. Though I have an BA in Diplomacy in World Affairs, and two semesters’ of graduate coursework in International Relations, my largest substantive base of expertise is in military-strategic theory and history and War Studies. I am both self-taught in this subject (endless library hours in my BA) and have a MA in Security Studies from Georgetown with a concentration in Military Operations. Unfortunately, this has ensured that for most of my time in higher education I have been caught between various disciplinary boxes. International Relations and Political Science has been a home for strategic thinkers like Richard BettsMichael Horowitz, and Eliot Cohen. But on the whole, International Relations and Strategy have diverged since the high point of the 1960s nuclear theorists (Brodie, Schelling, and others).

As A.E. Stahl wrote, IR’s interest usually stops (with few exceptions) once the war begins. This is actually mirrored by the state of military history itself, which increasingly shies away from the study of strategy, battle, and tactics. Comparative politics, ironically, has picked up the slack. Quantitative comparative politics has some of the most valuable research on sub-state violence and civil war, but it is not connected to the larger strategic picture. The danger in studying one part of warfare in isolation from the whole of war and strategy is that it is easy to begin to think that your field has rules somehow distinct from the larger picture. Counterinsurgency, as Colin Gray wrote, has different particulars but on the whole does not have a separate logic from war as a whole.

To make matters worse, there is also a disciplinary disconnect in the study of strategy between a number of different camps. Game theorists — from the classical variety to more exotic subtypes like algorithmic game theory and evolutionary game theory — explore strategic interaction with mathematical models. Business strategists explore strategy and innovation from an organizational standpoint. And military strategists examine topics from a qualitative-historical mindset derived from Carl von Clausewitz’s philosophy of “critical analysis.” Though all of these perspectives have value, few attempt to bring them together (and of those who do, few are successful). This does not have to be the case. Mid 20th century strategists like Thomas SchellingJohn Boyd, and J.C. Wylie combined a set of eclectic influences. Lawrence Freedman’s new book, as I’ve been told (haven’t got a chance to read) — also takes an holistic view of strategy that manages to also throw in the Marxist social movement strategic thinking of foundational radicals (Lenin and Gramsci to Hardt/Negri). And applications of complexity science to the study of strategy have been congruent with classical strategic theory.

Strategic Schizophrenia 

Given the problems I have had finding places where I could study strategy freely, I could have aimed to do my PhD in War Studies, like my friend Nick Prime. However, the PhD program he is in is best suited to those with a very concrete and well-formed plan of study. I did not have one when I was applying for my PhD. And I also am both a product of the American political science tradition and the classical strategy school. I thought I could combine the two in my PhD at an International Relations department.

After I switched to Computational Social Science, I briefly abandoned the thought of doing something on strategy and decided I was going to look at risk and complexity. This coincided with my own sense of uncertainty over what I would do after graduation. I had always thought I was getting my PhD so I could teach at a military institution or work in military research. But with sequestration devastating many places I wanted to work, I began to radically hedge. I thought to myself, “maybe I would be happy selling widgets with computer models and writing about strategy on the side.” But as I went through intensively pushing myself through remedial mathematics, programming, and computer science I began to fear going down a million complexity-theoretic rabbit roles without a strong anchor that would guide me at least through my PhD program.

Mathematics, code, and programs are after all only just formal languages. One must first know what they seek to say before they start talking. And I also simply could not get past the basic fact that I had devoted 7 years of my life (BA up until now) to studying war and strategy. I could either use my existing base of expertise as a source of research questions and subject matter knowledge, or force myself to develop entirely new bases of social science expertise. To reduce my own sense of schizophrenia, drift, and confusion I began to think about how I could make my new studies fit my interests.

To be continued.


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