Peace of wisdon: The good the bad and the Ugly

"See in this world there is two kinds of people my friend. Those with loaded guns. And those who dig...

... You dig."

Stop being a fuckin joker!

I just read a thread from one of my favorite Blog: SebastianMarshall.com: Strategy, Philosophy, Self-Discipline, Science. Victory.

There come times that you need a slap in the face and a kick in the butt. This post was one for me.

One of the advantage of being kicked in the butt is that it propels you forward. This is a post that I will read again and again. See. I've been a fuckin joker for several years. And now it is time I put my foot on the floor and start atchieving.

It is about time that I unleash myself on to the world.

I will eather find a way or make one. Let the forces of hell be with me!

What stroke me most on the post is when he is asking: "...you're all highly highly skilled, top 1% at your craft. You're all highly intelligent, top 1% of the population. You've all got excellent social skills, top 1% communication skills. And yet, you're middle class. Have you reflected on that? You're the top 1% IN EVERY CATEGORY THAT MATTERS, and yet, you're relatively poor."

This is a slap in the face to remember. Not just a "yes, yes he is so right" and then move back to incipid activities.

Like Hannibal I shall either find a way or make one. And by doing so I will appear as the one who has the Forces of hell on my side.

Thanks Sebastian.

Today shall mark the death of the Joker.

Cry havoc! And let slip the math of war

Warfare seems to obey mathematical rules. Whether soldiers can make use of that fact remains to be seen.

In 1948 Lewis Fry Richardson, a British scientist, published what was probably the first rigorous analysis of the statistics of war. Richardson ahd spent seven years gathering data on the wars waged in the century or so prior to his study. There were almost 300 of them. The list runs from conflicts that claimed a thousand or so lives to the devastation of the two world wars. But when he plotted his results, he found that these diverse events fell into a regular pattern. It wasas if the chaos of war seemed to comply with some hitherto unknown law of nature.

At first glance the pattern seems obsious. Richardson found that wars with low death tolls far outnumber high-fatality conflicts. But that obvious observation conceals a precise mathematical description of the link betweenthe severity and the frequency of conflicts to follow a smooth curve known as a power law. One consequence is that extreme events such as the world wars do not appear to be anomalies. They are simply what should be expected to occur occasionnally, given the frequencywith which conflicts take place.

The results have fascinated mathematicians and military strategists ever since. They have also been replicated many times. But they have not much impact on the conduct of actual wars. As a result, there is a certain "so what" quality to Richardson's results. It is one thing to show that a pattern exists, another to do something useful with it.

In a paper currently under review at Science, however, Neil Johnson of the university of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, and his colleagues hint at what that something useful might be. Dr Johnson's team is one of several groups who, in previous papers, have shown that Richardson's power law also applies to attacks by terrorists and insurgents. They and others have broadened Richardson's scope of inquiry to include the timing of attack, as well as the severity. This prepared the ground for the new paper, which outlines a method for forecasting the evolution of conflicts.

Progress, of a sort

Dr Johnson's proposal rests on a pattern he and his team found in data on insurgent attacks against American forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. After the initial attacks in a given province, subsequent fatal incidents become more and more frequent. The intriguing points is that it is possible, using a formula Dr Johnson has derived, to predict the details of this pattern from the interval between the first two attacks.

The formula in question (T_n=T₁n^-b) is one of a familiar type, known as aprogress curve, that describes how productivity improves in a range of human activities from manufacturing to cancer surgery. T_{n is the number of days between the nth attack and its successor. (}T_{1 is therefore the number of days between the first and the second attacks.) The other element of the equation, b, turns out to be directly related to} T_{1. It is calculated from the relationship between the logarithms of the attack number, n, and the attack interval,} T_{n. The upshot is that knowing} T_{1 should be enough to predict the future course of a local insurgency. Conversely, changing b would change both} T_{1 and} T_{n, and thus change that future course.}

_{Though the fit between the data and the prediction is not perfect (an example is illustrated at the beginnng of this post), the match is close enough that Dr Johnson thinks he is onto something. Progress curves are a consequence of people adapting to circumstances and learning to do things better. And warfare is just as capable of productivity improvements as any other activity.}

_{The twist in warfare is that two antagonistic groups of people are doing the adapting. Borrowing a term used by evolutionary biologists (who, in turn, stole it from Lewis Carroll's book, "Through the Looking-Glass"), Dr Johnson likens what is going on to the mad dash made by Alice and the Red Queen, after which they find themselves exactly where they started.}

_{Personal note: I shall explain how to defeat the Red Queen effect in another post.}

_{In biology, the Red Queen hypothesis is that predators and prey (or, more often, parasites and hosts) are in a constant competition that leads to stasis,a s each adaptation by one is countered by an adaptation by the other. In the case of Dr. Johnson is examining the co-evoluation is between the insurgents and the occupiers, each constantly adjusting to each other's tactics. The data come from 23 different provinces, each of which is, in effect, a separate theatre of war. In each case, the gap between fatal attacks shrinks, more or less according to Dr. Johnson's model. Eventually, an equilibrium is reached, and the intervals become fairly regular.}

_{The mathematics do not reveal anything about what the adaptations made by each side actually are, behond the obvious observation that practice makes perfect. Nor do they illuminate what the value of b variesso much from place to place. Dr. Johnson has already ruled out geography, density of displaced people, the identity of local warlords and even poppy production. If he does find the crucial link, though, military strategists will be all over him. But then such knowledge might perhaps be countered by the otherside, in yet another lap of the Red Queen race.}

_{Source: The Economist}

Links of the week

Julius Ceasar - Cretical moments

Excellent documentary by the BBC. I just love Ceasar. When it comes to strategy. He is one of my all time favorite.

Islam: Empire of faith.

See how Islam came to be. And this is one of the culture I am least familiar with. It is good to see where they come from. It gives ideas of where they are heading to.

Suspicious minds

Deceiving others has its advantages. Camouflage in nature is useful to the hunter and the hunted. The smarter the animal, the more likely it is to use (and detect) deception to its benefits. Humans are particularly good at exploiting trickery to get ahead - for more money, more power or a desired mate. Yet deception is difficult, regardless of intelligence. Lying often leaves us nervous and twitchy, and complicated fictions can lead to depression and poor immune function. And then there are the ethical implications.

In "The folly of fools" Robert Trivers, an American evolutionary biologist, explains that the most effectively devious people are often unaware of their deceit. Self-deception makes it easier to manipulate others to get ahead. Particularly intelligent people can be especially good at deceiving themselves.

Mining research in biology, neurophysiology, immunology and psychology, Mr Trivers delivers a swift tour of links between deception and evolutionary progress. Some of it is intuitive. The grey squirrel, for example, cleverly builds false caches to discourage others from raiding its acorns. Placebos are sometimes as effective as medication without the nasty side effects. Other illustrations require more head-scratching. Mr Trivers argues that competition between our maternal and paternal genes can create "split selves", which try to fool each other on a biological level. Human memory often involves an unconscious process of selection and distortion, the better to believe the stories we tell others.

All of this deceit comes at a price. Mr Trivers suggests that the most cunning people (whether conscious fibbers or not) tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else. He highlights the way overconfident Wall Street traders may hurt investors and taxpayers at little personal risk. Then there are politicians who spin stories of national greatness to bolster support for costly wars in which they will not be fighting.

There is certainly no shortage of human folly to concider. Mr Trivers offers some fascinating evidence of our biological cunning, yet the science of self-deception often takes a back seat to his political views and scepticism of the social sciences. This book could probably do without his long disgressions about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq war. But by the time readers reach these last few chapters, they will be very wary of taking any story at face value anyay.

Source: The Economist