“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/002117.html pre-empts a post I’ve been toying with writing for the last couple of weeks by discussing the usefulness of Douglas Adams’ “Somebody Else’s Problem Field”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEP_field to the understanding of international politics. There’ve been books on Star Trek and International Relations Theory, Harry Potter and International Relations Theory etc, etc. Why hasn’t somebody written the Hitchhiker’s Guide to International Relations? Adams made far punchier contributions to the understanding of IR than either Rowling or Rodenberry; not only the SEP Field, but the Babel Fish theory of the effects of globalization.
bq. The Babel fish, said the Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.
bq. The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.
{ 13 comments }
markus 06.14.05 at 7:53 pm
yeah, but Drezner apparently missed the part about painting the whole thing pink before applying the SEP field (and the longest nightshift in the history of the universe; I believe context is important here).
That said, Douglas Adams had lots of useful things to say concerning politics, IMHO it just doesn’t lend itself well to debate since the insight is in most cases indisputable. I mean, take The other Shaltanak’s dukelberry shrub is always a more mauvey shade of pinky russet. or the phases of “Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases or careless talk and the G’Gugvuntts and the Vl’hurgs and of course the explantion of the problem with governing people. (“To summarize the summary of the summary, people are a problem.”)
josh 06.14.05 at 9:14 pm
I’m still waiting for the book on the Political Theory of Discworld. There must be Terry Pratchett fans working in relevant disciplines out there … right?
mikez 06.14.05 at 9:51 pm
James Morrow wrote a short story in which God reversed his mischief at the Tower of Babel and then some. Not only did everyone speak the same language, but everyone understood the meaning and beliefs behind everyone else’s words perfectly, no matter how well hidden they would have normally been. The results were bloody, to say the least.
nothstine 06.15.05 at 12:59 am
Adams made another contibution that rings true these days:
[Details are going to be sketchy–the book’s packed away right now. But this is the gist:]
In ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,’ a software mogul made his fortune by inventing a back-to-front relational database program. In typical db programs, you enter all the data and see what projections the software give you. In this guy’s program, you enter the conclusions you’d like the program to arrive at, and it goes back and enters the appropriate data in the spreadsheets to make the answer come out right.
The product never made it on the market; the Pentagon bought it up, as well as all the code and notes, and classified it. He claimed, though, that you could read the newspaper coverage of how different branches of the military justified their appropriations requests and figure out that the Navy was still using v. 2.0, while the Air Force was apparently beta testing v. 3.0, etc.
By 2003, Cheney, Blair, et al. were probably running v. 4.0 to “fix” their Iraq intelligence.
Jeremy Osner 06.15.05 at 6:55 am
I never quite got why the Babel Fish worked as a translator of speech — it seemed to me like as described, it would be more a telepathy machine. Why would it feed exclusively on the brain activity of the entity addressing the user? But it’s been a long time since I read the books, maybe this was addressed and I didn’t pick up on it.
euan 06.15.05 at 7:44 am
AltaVista delenda est.
Brennan 06.15.05 at 8:25 am
I loved God’s final message to his creation:
“Sorry for the inconvenience.”
dave heasman 06.15.05 at 11:45 am
“In ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,’ a software mogul made his fortune by inventing a back-to-front relational database program. In typical db programs, you enter all the data and see what projections the software give you. In this guy’s program, you enter the conclusions you’d like the program to arrive at, and it goes back and enters the appropriate data in the spreadsheets to make the answer come out right.”
This is how Analogue Computers worked for solving complicated equations. Something similar obtained for complicated homeostatic control systems, where you knew what output you wanted.
Robin 06.15.05 at 12:18 pm
Raymong Geuss, who wrote the critique of Habermas, The Idea of a Critical Theory, once said that there are case where you hate someone much more and come into more conflict when you understand them better. Interesting, the babelfish problem as the rejoinder to Habermas.
Dan Nexon 06.15.05 at 12:49 pm
Speaking of “political science fiction”, has anyone seen the top SF recommendation from instapundit’s readers? My own, overly snarky, reaction at my blog.
Uncle Kvetch 06.15.05 at 3:53 pm
With all due respect, Dan, I’m not sure there’s such a thing as “overly snarky” when it comes to discussing Prof. Reynolds.
Darren 06.16.05 at 4:21 am
“In ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,’ a software mogul made his fortune by inventing a back-to-front relational database program. In typical db programs, you enter all the data and see what projections the software give you. In this guy’s program, you enter the conclusions you’d like the program to arrive at, and it goes back and enters the appropriate data in the spreadsheets to make the answer come out right.â€
Isn’t this how the process between observation and orientation (before decision and action) works?
See here to be read with …
Darren 06.16.05 at 4:24 am
mmm … on second thoughts, perhaps it’s not!
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