Global Slum: Digital Narrative and the New Urbanism (fwd)

[Paul Paryski]

I certainly understand and agree with Carl's concerns as expressed in the  
article he included in his email.  The use by the Pentagon of modeling and  IT
programs for present and future urban battles is rather scary.   This is a
moral question; should complexity/chaos/ABM expert lend their  knowledge and
skills to promote such warfare?  I think not.
 
The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in  such  poor
mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other  failed states where
its peacekeeping troops are involved. However, this is  morally different than
a world power using IT & applied complexity to  consolidate its hegemony or
extend its empire.  Each expert must make  a moral choice on this issue and it
might be useful to develop consensus  based guidelines on this issue (without
any evident or smelly  flatulence!).  As climate change and global warming
create urban migration,  these problems will become more pressing than ever.
 
cheers Paul
 
   



************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at
http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour
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[Marcus G. Daniels]

PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in such  
> poor mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other
> failed states where its peacekeeping troops are involved. However,
> this is morally different than a world power using IT & applied
> complexity to consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire.
Yeah, some can't bear to call their efforts the consolidation of
hegemony, so they call it peacekeeping.  
Different strokes for different folks..

[glen ep ropella]

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PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:
> consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire.  Each expert must make a
> moral choice on this issue and it might be useful to develop consensus
> based guidelines on this issue (without any evident or smelly
> flatulence!).  As climate change and global warming create urban
> migration, these problems will become more pressing than ever.

I think it's important to avoid consensus on moral issues like this.
It's important to maintain a diversity of moral choices and resulting
actions.  Any consensus, including seemingly innocuous ones, will allow
the individual moral decision-maker to become lazy and avoid thinking
for themselves.

If a set of tools really are considered neutral (to be used by good or
evil), then the experts in the application of the tools will also be
neutral.  And one can make a good argument that experts in neutral tools
_should_ be, themselves, neutral, lest they lose their expertise.

My only guideline would be:  Leave morality to the priests and do your job.

Before anyone accuses me of abdicating my moral responsibility, I can
say that I'm not an expert in everything! (or anything [grin]) So, for
those neutral domains in which I claim expertise, I am neutral.  But, in
those domains where I claim no expertise, I make moral choices all the
time.  And, of course, in non-neutral domains where I claim expertise, I
make every attempt to adhere to the good- or evil-ness of the particular
domain.

And before anyone points out that the above seems turned on its head
(where one can only make moral choices in domains of which they're
ignorant), I have to say that _morality_ is a heuristic method in
itself.  The only reason we have words like "good" and "evil" is because
we need some big, vague catch-all so we can talk about things in spite
of our ignorance, much the same way emotions are a culmination of
physiological processes.  If we had access to perfect information,
there'd be no need for morality.  Hence, experts, by definition, are
neutral (or as close to neutral as any finite being can be).

- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly
enforced. -- Frank Zappa

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[Marcus G. Daniels]

Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
> If we had access to perfect information, there'd be no need for morality.
Why?  Having perfect information says nothing about the distribution of
power.

[Carl Tollander]

I've been getting enough mail on my comment that I feel I should clarify
the meaning:

Scenario planning has been around for quite awhile, the
military/government uses of it are but a small fraction of its overall
use, it is *not* so far as I can tell a sales tool for new weapons
systems, it is simply a way of putting together coherent and contrasting
stories about possible futures in the absence of available broad
prediction capabilities.  It is not about choosing a 'best' scenario,
but in understanding what policy choices alternative scenarios may
present.  As such, to increase the contrast, alternative scenarios may
look extreme or fantastic to the outsider.   The motivation for my
comment on the articles was that I felt the authors of the articles had
misunderstood both the method and its application.  I have no problem
with the method's employment in any domain, so long as it is applicable
and done well.  That said, please don't consider me an advocate; it's
just another available tool (which does not have any necessary IT or
applied complexity component,  though now that  you got me to think
about it....).

Carl

PPARYSKI at aol.com wrote:

> I certainly understand and agree with Carl's concerns as expressed in
> the article he included in his email.  The use by the Pentagon of
> modeling and IT programs for present and future urban battles is
> rather scary.  This is a moral question; should complexity/chaos/ABM
> expert lend their knowledge and skills to promote such warfare?  I
> think not.
>  
> The UN currently does confront serious peacekeeping issues in such  
> poor mega-urban areas such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti and in other
> failed states where its peacekeeping troops are involved. However,
> this is morally different than a world power using IT & applied
> complexity to consolidate its hegemony or extend its empire.  Each
> expert must make a moral choice on this issue and it might be useful
> to develop consensus based guidelines on this issue (without any
> evident or smelly flatulence!).  As climate change and global warming
> create urban migration, these problems will become more pressing than
> ever.
>  
> cheers Paul
>  
>    
>
>
>
> Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com
> <http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour/?ncid=AOLAOF00020000000982>.
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> ============================================================
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
> lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

[glen ep ropella]

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Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
>> If we had access to perfect information, there'd be no need for morality.
>
> Why?  Having perfect information says nothing about the distribution of
> power.

I'll explain my rhetoric; but I'll trust that you realize I can't really
_ground_ my rhetoric in data.  I do believe there are valid scientific
experiments that could arise from the rhetoric, though.

My claim is that things like emotions, perceptions of "good",
perceptions of "pornography" (can't define it but I know it when I see
it), etc. are actually a culmination of physiological processes rather
than ontologically extant things out the world.  I.e. there is no such
thing as "good behavior", "love", "trepidation", "pornography", etc. out
there in reality.  These are all just figments of human imagination.  If
we could correlate states of the body (including but not limited to the
brain) with the body's environmental context, then we would see that
things like "goodness" are dynamic attractors within the body that
represent a kind of sensor fusion.  They're merely high-level roll-ups
of data we've taken from our environment.

Morality is the individual's organization of, grammar for, and use of
such high-level culminations.

When such organizations, grammars, and usage patterns are communicable
to many people and are actually communicated (i.e. some form of
collective morality obtains), the individuals who are successful at
manipulating the morality have the opportunity to take some measure of
power over that collective.  For example, a televangelist manipulates
the morality of Christianity to acquire and hoard money.  That's where
power enters the picture.

However, if all humans had access to perfect information, such a
collective morality could not obtain because each individual could
actually perceive reality as it is ... _without_ the culminated rules of
thumb that are necessary for the ignorant to navigate an uncertain reality.

Stated directly, because we only have imperfect information, we have to
resort to heuristics to navigate the world.  Such heuristics make us
vulnerable to opportunists who happen to be more facile with
manipulating such heuristics.  If we could perceive the world as it
actually is (i.e. had access to perfect info), we would not be
vulnerable in this way.

- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

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[Phil Henshaw-2]

Or reaity...! No?
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

-----Original Message-----
From: "Glen E. P. Ropella" <[hidden email]>

Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2007 07:04:41
To:The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] perfect info (was Global Slum: ...)


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Marcus G. Daniels wrote:
> Glen E. P. Ropella wrote:
>> If we had access to perfect information, there'd be no need for morality.
>
> Why?  Having perfect information says nothing about the distribution of
> power.

I'll explain my rhetoric; but I'll trust that you realize I can't really
_ground_ my rhetoric in data.  I do believe there are valid scientific
experiments that could arise from the rhetoric, though.

My claim is that things like emotions, perceptions of "good",
perceptions of "pornography" (can't define it but I know it when I see
it), etc. are actually a culmination of physiological processes rather
than ontologically extant things out the world.  I.e. there is no such
thing as "good behavior", "love", "trepidation", "pornography", etc. out
there in reality.  These are all just figments of human imagination.  If
we could correlate states of the body (including but not limited to the
brain) with the body's environmental context, then we would see that
things like "goodness" are dynamic attractors within the body that
represent a kind of sensor fusion.  They're merely high-level roll-ups
of data we've taken from our environment.

Morality is the individual's organization of, grammar for, and use of
such high-level culminations.

When such organizations, grammars, and usage patterns are communicable
to many people and are actually communicated (i.e. some form of
collective morality obtains), the individuals who are successful at
manipulating the morality have the opportunity to take some measure of
power over that collective.  For example, a televangelist manipulates
the morality of Christianity to acquire and hoard money.  That's where
power enters the picture.

However, if all humans had access to perfect information, such a
collective morality could not obtain because each individual could
actually perceive reality as it is ... _without_ the culminated rules of
thumb that are necessary for the ignorant to navigate an uncertain reality.

Stated directly, because we only have imperfect information, we have to
resort to heuristics to navigate the world.  Such heuristics make us
vulnerable to opportunists who happen to be more facile with
manipulating such heuristics.  If we could perceive the world as it
actually is (i.e. had access to perfect info), we would not be
vulnerable in this way.

- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know
what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be
president. -- Kurt Vonnegut

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org