Comments on: Invading the Moon

By: roger

roger — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 00:40:27 +0000

fyreflye – you are thinking out of the box! That’s what we need on this war on terrorism! Some people would say, oh, blowing up everything—wouldn’t that be expensive? Balderdash! First of all, blowing up everything surely means we’d have to contract out to re-construct everything afterwards, right? This is a jobs issue. This is a freedom issue. This is about what we are doing in Fallujah right now—destroying the city to win the loyalty of the inhabitants, one blown up house at a time. Others will say, well, blowing up everything will increase the hatred of America in the world. Another myth! Spare the atom bomb and spoil the world, to paraphrase the bible. Fear, as we know from so many personal relationships detailed in some of our best advice columns, is very often the basis of love. So, what is the down side? Oh, a lot of noise will from the blame America first crowd. Nitpickers. How about the rose window in the Cathedral of Chartres, they’ll be whining. As if we can’t make glass ten times better from our factories (after we reconstruct them). I’m not saying I’m for blowing everything up. I’m a Democrat, and I voted for Jimmy Carter and the fellow who ran against Ullyses Grant, so I think I can speak from a bi-partisan perspective. Blowing up everything is merely an option we should consider, is all.

By: jda

jda — Wed, 08 Dec 2004 00:01:23 +0000

1500 (5×10^-9×3×1012), Uh—15,000? Ten times as bad as he thought it was.

By: fyreflye

fyreflye — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 23:45:45 +0000

Using the President’s logic that spending trillions of dollars to privatize Social Security now in order to prevent a possible unquantifiable shortfall in the future, it’s clear that the only way to deal with a possibly inevitable future attack would be to blow everything up now. It only stands to reason (mathematical proof to follow.)

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:51:21 +0000

Perdo, I think a purely amoral technocratic computer simulation tool may be helpful – not as crude as ‘suppose the probability is 0.3’ of course, but a reasonably sophisticated one. But then you need actual human beings to make actual decisions – based to some extent on this simulation, to some extent on intuition, experience and to some extent on ethics and principles. I guess that’s what they call ‘leadership’. If this was all about calculating the odds, then Mr. Posner wouldn’t have a job, instead we could simply ask a technician to enter a bunch of decimal fractions into MSPosner 2000 – $29.99 plus S&H.

By: bryan

bryan — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:35:52 +0000

blah blah blah one of these days Kieran, POW! straight to the moon.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:22:36 +0000

I don’t know how somebody’s dog Fifi got access to the Internet.

By: fifi

fifi — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 21:10:41 +0000

I don’t understand why our culture considers intellectuals “intelligent.”

By: Monica P.

Monica P. — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:48:46 +0000

Let’s think about alternatives to cost-benefit analysis. First, how do decision-makers actually make decisions? Probably through a set of crude decision heuristics (Do I trust Rice and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz? Is Saddam a bad guy? Is Iraq a gathering threat? Is it necessary to do something in the Middle East?). Then, is it possible to improve the decision heuristics by suggesting things that ought to be part of the decision—for example, act if you can honestly convince your traditional allies; act if you have made the case honestly to your nation and a majority supports action; act if there is lack of conflict in your inner circle on the need for action. I’m not suggesting hidebound triggers, just wondering if it’s possible to identify general criteria to improve the quality of a decision. The question of whether our decision-makers want to make better decisions, of course, is moot in this whole debate—assuming they do, and accepting that the information requirements of cost-benefit analysis are simply too high, how should they proceed? What are the things that have to be in the heuristic?

By: Ben Hyde

Ben Hyde — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:20:39 +0000

Medium Lobster and Abba Lerner in one posting! Delightful. Thanks.

By: pedro

pedro — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 20:10:29 +0000

abb1, Yep, you can quantify away, however silly it may be. (Estimating the probabilities in question in a reasonable manner seems like an intractable problem to me.) But you can also make qualitative arguments that do not pretend to be grounded on solid computation; you can recognize the risks of certain courses of action, you can choose not to exclude sociological considerations from your analysis, and you can dispense with the pompous reference to most elementary probability theory—the point is certainly not didactic, I suppose—, and still make an argument that is worthy of discussion. Call it sociologically sophisticated, qualitative cost/benefit analysis, if you will.

By: Monty

Monty — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:52:32 +0000

Since the beginning of time, man has yearned to destroy the sun. I will do the next best thing: blot it out!

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:26:48 +0000

Deb Frisch speaks of >1000 lives, >7000 injuries (where injury probably means amputation)’ No, Deb. You’ve over-estimated amputations by a long way, but you’ve also greatly underestimated total injuries. ‘Amputations account for 2.4 percent of all wounded in action in the Iraq war—twice the rate in World War I and World War II, said Chuck Scoville, the amputee program manager of Walter Reed. Sophisticated body armor and medical techniques in the battlefield have preserved lives but not necessarily limbs. Available figures through Aug. 31 show that Army hospitals have treated 138 amputees from Iraq. There have been around 740 amputations so far among US forces.’ That comes from this excellently-researched story: (http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5118685.html)- story dated Dec 5, 2004, so it’s a very recent figure. I haven’t seen figures for head injuries, but US Army surgeons have been quoted in a number of stories as saying how horrified they are by the numbers of amputations and head injuries: so head injuries are likely to be in the hundreds at least. According to the best-informed US casualties site, (http://icasualties.org/oif/) the currently reported total of wounded is 9552. That breaks down to 4503 wounded and returned to action within 72 hours; 5049 wounded and not returned to action within 72 hours. How many of the latter are seriously incapacitated hasn’t been disclosed, as far as I know. The Pentagon is releasing figures for the number of Americans killed in non-combat incidents, but hasn’t been giving figures for the numbers injured in such incidents, or invalided home with illness. According to CBS, whose figures were flagged up on Juan Cole’s website: ‘CBS has elicited from the Pentagon the real figure of US casualties in Iraq, which is more like 25,000. That number includes the 1230 or so killed and the 9300 classified as “wounded in battle,” but also 17,000 classified as non-combat sick or injured, of whom 80 percent do not return to their units in Iraq. Although some of the 17,000 are victims of disease, some unspecified number have actually been injured as a result of being in a theater of war.’ (http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/25000-us-casualties-in-iraq-9-of.html ; http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000727180 ) This is of course very bad news for people trying to justify the war in cost-benefit terms, but I have to say that the real scandal is the Pentagon’s refusal to publish any estimates of the number of dead Iraqis, to publish figures on artillery fire missions and air strikes on urban targets, and the failure of the Pentagon and the Iraqi interim government to make any figures available on civilian mortality. The clowns who are having a go at the Lancet need to realise that under the Fourth Geneva Convention the US should, as the Occupying Power, be making such figures available, and is not.

By: abb1

abb1 — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:11:16 +0000

But social risks? International consequences? Those are not easily quantifiable in the same currency, can they? Well, maybe not easily and maybe not in the same currency, but I think all this is quantifiable on some level. You know, predicting weather is a complicated task, but short-term forcasts are pretty reliable now – computer simulations help. So, you could build a computer model (using GPSS or something) and parameterize all the variants you can imagine: Sunni resistance, Iranian nukes, antrax attacks, etc. with a reasonable level of accuracy and sophistication. Then you run different scenarios, see the results and take the most beneficial course of action, expressed in dollars, lives, barrels, square miles, or …, nah, probably in dollars. Of course the reality may surprise you.

By: Jake McGuire

Jake McGuire — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 18:54:32 +0000

Didn’t John Quiggin post something along almost exactly these lines a few months ago? “Reagan confronting the Soviets increased the probability of global nuclear war by 1%, which outweighed the benefits of liberating Eastern Europe” or some such?

By: cloquet

cloquet — Tue, 07 Dec 2004 18:39:47 +0000

I thought there was something in here not too long ago about fish and bait.