Comments on: In Defense of Rumsfeld

By: Aramis Martinez

Aramis Martinez — Fri, 13 Feb 2004 04:27:06 +0000

The idea is quite mind-blowing, in the same manner that quantum physics was so mind-blowing that Schrodinger and Einstein were unable to accept all the implications of their work. Does anyone know off-hand the assumptions he used, or if they’ve been tested? I would love to find out just what the scope of this is, as well as the odds he’s right in reality as well as on paper!

By: AAB

AAB — Thu, 12 Feb 2004 16:16:20 +0000

Like Jason said, Rumsfeld’s quote as applied to epistemology is not actually a big deal. He is actually missing one case: unknown knowns. His quote as applied to WMD is a political dodge.

By: Jason McCullough

Jason McCullough — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 22:25:00 +0000

The Rumsfeld quote is just fine by itself. The problem is that it was given as an answer to a “where the hell are the WMDs” question; it’s a total political dodge, not a deep rumination on epistimology.

By: Shai

Shai — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 19:30:56 +0000

msg that reads like derrida wrote a book report about asimov foundation

By: msg

msg — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 18:00:58 +0000

Scott- Your embryonic constituents, the parental egg or sperm, see each other in your grandfather(s) and your grandmother(s), then the first tingling edge of attraction and the potential being you were vibrates toward the actual one you are, as they begin the mating ritual that culminates in your parents, who do the same thing. We call ourselves into being, in a way. Your grandfather’s crystal ball is murky, because it shows what could be, more than what is; and if he got it from a reputable dealer he was told to be very very careful with it, lest he become responsible, by oversight or mis-step, for the fate of the world. The anthropologist’s reflective aura, the impossibility of direct observation without affect, would seem to apply. Your grandfather would view a world he was in the act of creating, by looking. – The solidity of the past is, in some views, answered by the equally solid future. There’s no room for new information, and no place for that new information to come from. It’s a closed system. The moving finger writes, and moves on. Anyone with the right lens can see it all. And an eternal being looking at it all at once would see a solid thing; time as amber. Other views are less fatalistic. The alternate-worlds trope of pulp science fiction, branching histories created by your trespass in time past or future. We can change this moment, why not all moments? The tight-wire act of free will above an abyss of possible wrong moves. – The dead grandfather problem is set within a kind of vehicular travel-through-time scenario, where the traveller has independent movement, volition, and physical presence. A less problematic version has consciousness alone moving through the intervening temporal landscape, between the seer and the seen. Or even less technically difficult, perception of eventual light – wave, packet, whatever; all that requires is that events generate signals both directions in time, and the presence of someone with sight enough to see them. Thought problems are good exercise but they don’t always account for what’s observably real, present, here and now. The past five seconds were as solid as this moment is, but where are they? – The million monkeys with a million keyboards, and an infinite amount of time, founders on the lack of being for the monkeys’ end of it. They aren’t real monkeys, with real pasts, they’re theoretical. Real monkeys are a limited set, and can only do so much, even granted eternal life; and there goes your eventual inevitable complete Shakespeare. Maybe. Or maybe not.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 08:41:22 +0000

Bill – that’s not really the problem. The essense of the proof is that in order to make predictions, the simulator has to simulate the effect of its own prediction, or if there are other agents of similar computational power out there, then it has to simulate the effects of their predictions. This leads to a contradiction. There is an algorithm – I don’t know how widely it’s still used – for deciding when to buy and sell a stock. IIRC, the idea was that you buy a stock when its 50-day moving average rises above its 200-day moving average, and sell it when it falls below. Automated trading systems were built on this basis, and the effect was that no one was able to make any money using this algorithm. As a predictor of consistent gains, it failed because the gains were dependent on cognitive agents equipped with the same knowledge and cognitive abilities. This same problem is widely held to be the major cause of the collapse of LTCM. Since its algorithmic trading strategy was available to a large number of market players. This application of the halting problem shows why any algorithmic trading strategy – which is essentially the same as a prediction of future returns – will always fail. Logically, this should extend to any sort of policy predicated on predictive modelling. I think it ought to be possible to show that any sort of modelling problem – including calculating weights in decision trees – should be unsolvable whenever it has to model the behaviour of agents who are themselves trying to find the best model to guide their behaviour and who are equipped with equally sophisticated modelling abilities. I would think this to apply to situations like the prisoner’s dilemma. Even when a cooperative strategy develops, there are still gains for defecting. I think it might be provably impossible to calculate whether it is better to defect from such a strategy when both players know that resuming cooperation even after one side has defected is still the optimal strategy.

By: The Kid

The Kid — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 04:37:16 +0000

In the dark ages as a congressman from Illinois, Rumsfeld was depicted by the national press as a dummy and the perfect match for the Ford administration’s collection of nincompoops. And even though Rummy has exhibited some talent and managerial skills in two distinct industries, many – including a few here – find his management of the Pentagon and service to the country deficient. Yet he did manage to cancel a cold-war relic that had wide support in the Congress: the 70-ton Crusader artillery system. And he has successfully brought under control the one service – the Army – that refused to go along with the force modernization because its former leaders felt secure in the sort of political gamesmanship that kept key congressional districts well porked. Oh, he did stumble acrossthe right folks with the right plans for rapid response in Afghanistan. I can think of no other SECDEF who’d have been as successful in bringing out the best that the services had to offer. As for the Iraqi WMD, US intelligence may have been as deficient as that of other nations. That Foxbat found buried was certainly advertised as a surprise, being more modern and powerful that we – who’d been patrolling the no-fly zones – had any reason to expect. Or it may be that we civilians don’t know what Rummy knows. Don’t forget that a key counterintelligence precept is to compartment information according to mission and need to know. The Bush administration is infamous for its ability to keep many secrets. Along those lines, Kay, for example, had access to the information necessary to search for WMD within Iraq, but not to the entire universe of information about Iraqi WMD. More on this in a moment. One of the more remarkable secrets was the capture of Saddam Hussein, a fact not made public until the early hours of a Sunday. You may recall that Rummy hosted a holiday party the night before, yet none of the press or others in attendance found out about the capture until the fact was made public the next day. Some speculate that Hussein moved WMD components out of Iraq before the war. There are rumors that Syria has some or that Syria gave passage to a couple of tractor trailers which ended up buried in the Beka Valley. There are reports too that Rummy has approved SOF operations in a wine-producing region of Lebanon… I’m fascinated by a more practical omission: the three to six SCUD launchers and around twenty SCUD missiles that are AWOL. While they are not WMD, they are prohibited and haven’t turned up on anyone’s inventory. Are they buried in Iraq or were they loaned to Syria, a country that has its own SCUDs? Without the VINs it will be hard to tell, no? Calling Rummy a dummy is easy and has a long history. But one can readily find evidence of success in his stewardship of the DOD and the conduct of military operations abroad. The leaked memo of a few years back is exactly the kind of communication an executive of a large organization would send his subordinates to stimulate their creative juices. Journalists are neither managers nor students of organizational theory, and therefore can’t provide the context the public sorely needs. Rummy’s interchanges with the press are classic examples of a competent manager providing context to those who want information but can’t assimilate it. Finally, Rummy doesn’t need the job and doesn’t have to worry about employment in a think tank or defense contractor after his time is up. He can focus all of his energy, charm, wit, and enthusiasm on the job he’s doing. You may consider him a rube, but never, ever play poker with him. Or his boss. You’ll wind up broke.

By: asg

asg — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:44:01 +0000

Oh, and as for the individual who thinks the decision to go to war was “tragic”, I’m sure the average Iraqi shares his view entirely, thinking it especially tragic that quality citizens like Uday and Qusay aren’t still walking around and snatching the occasional bride from a wedding.

By: asg

asg — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 03:42:40 +0000

I believe you may be talking about a paper by one David Wolpert, not Daniel Wolpert. There is a paper entitled something along the lines of “future uncomputable” in PostScript format accessible from an ftp site linked to his homepage (ic.arc.nasa.gov/~dhw/).

By: Bill Carone

Bill Carone — Wed, 11 Feb 2004 02:36:12 +0000

Scott, “You just need to assume a real dependency on agents with specified minimum knowledge and computational capacity. The stability and sensitivity of the dependence is irrelevant, just so long as the agents can affect outcomes.” Are you referring only to infinite cases? In other words “I think that he thinks I think that he thinks …” ad infinitum? I wouldn’t be surprised if, sometimes, trying to assign probabilities given that someone will try to anticipate your anticipation of his anticipation of … won’t work, since many probability and mathematical calculations don’t work when explicit infinities are involved. Does your problem still work when you take limits? In other words, only use the result of such an “infinite” case when it is the well-behaved limit of a finite case? If the limit isn’t well-behaved, you cannot learn anyhting from your model; you have to find some other model of the problem, and cannot assume that the underlying problem is unsolvable.

By: pyromania

pyromania — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 19:46:57 +0000

the theoretical correctness isnt at issue: epistemology as a response to the question “where is your homework?” is fatuous, and nothing else. rummy delving into the theory on information to cover his inability to use his eyes as sense organs is unserious in the extreme.

By: Sebastian Holsclaw

Sebastian Holsclaw — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 18:23:58 +0000

There seems to be some dismissal of the statement as ‘trite’. Well sure it is repeated all over the place. For instance in boxing: “It is the punch you don’t see that knocks you out.” Nevertheless it is a hugely important idea in politics where practically everyone acts as if they have perfect information all the time (not to mention they act as if they would know what to do with perfect information if they had it).

By: rou

rou — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 18:01:59 +0000

He misses the most important one. ‘things we don’t know we know’. This would include being careful about intelligence from single unreliable sources. Not listening to your own intelligence experts. The failure to grasp the fact that WMD’s have not been found. The failure to realize that your post war fantasies didn’t occur. Mr. Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to believe in public information at all. The closest he comes to public knowledge is this cartoon like charictature for the press.

By: apostropher

apostropher — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 17:04:29 +0000

Yes, it makes logical sense, but it still is funny when read aloud. It’s like he’d been getting policy briefings from Dr. Seuss.

By: Scott Martens

Scott Martens — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 16:09:04 +0000

Shai, don’t worry about your math background. Go take a look at the post from yesterday on important books – not a lot of grad school math texts in there, but a few crit lit ones. I flunked tensor calc myself, and lived to regret it. Your’re right, sort of, but look at the limitation you’ve imposed on the class of problems modellable using a decision procedure. You don’t need to assume anything as high-falutin’ as an “unstable sensitive dependence.” It is not the nature of the dependency or its complexity that matters. You just need to assume a real dependency on agents with specified minimum knowledge and computational capacity. The stability and sensitivity of the dependence is irrelevant, just so long as the agents can affect outcomes. This covers every possible problem in the social sciences. The efficient markets hypothesis is a proof that a particular model has certain mathematical properties. The problem is that the model’s applicability to the real world is in considerable doubt. All I have to assume to draw my conclusion is that agents possessed of a model of the world have an effect on the outcome that I’m trying to predict. I don’t see any way to avoid that conclusion if we’re talking about the stock market. My suspicion – one which I hope to one day explore when I’m not writing code for a living – is the idea that this constitutes a novel problem class beyond type 3. Or rather, that it is a sub-class of type 3 problem which is uniquely unsolvable. IIRC, a type 3 problem is one where the error surface (the environment the agent works in, if you will) changes in response to the agent’s decisions in a way which can’t be treated as a type 2 problem. A type 3 problem is not necessarily unsolvable but there is no generalised procedure for calculating decision weights, and when I was last in grad school the chic way to solve them was to drag out Holland’s theorem and use evolutionary programming to attack it. The kind of case covered by this approach is knowably unsolvable even for stochastic procedures like EP. If you take it and run with the implications, it eliminates the possibility of any form of stable public policy on the long run.