Think different
18 oktober 2002 | Ingen har kommenterat än
Niklas Dahlin på Webbinkarnationen har hittat den här fantastiska historien, som åtminstone jag fullständigt missat: En amerikansk marinkårsofficer som spelade Saddam i ett övningsscenario sänkte den amerikanska flottan och vann. Ingen lärde sig något av det – han blev beordrad att inte göra om det.
Marinkårsofficeren Paul Van Riper överraskade den amerikanska sidan genom att inte spela efter USAs förutsättningar:
”’You’re going to have to use cellphones and satellite phones now’, they [= spelledningen] told me. I said no, no, no – we’re going to use motorcycle messengers and make announcements from the mosques,” he says. ”But they refused to accept that we’d do anything they wouldn’t do in the west. (…)
Faced with an abrupt and embarrassing end to the most expensive and sophisticated military exercise in US history, the Pentagon top brass simply pretended the whole thing had not happened. They ordered their dead troops back to life and ”refloated” the sunken fleet. Then they instructed the enemy forces to look the other way as their marines performed amphibious landings.”
Att låsa sig vid sitt eget sätt att tänka är livsfarligt (inte bara i krig). Och det finns en påtaglig risk om ens sätt att tänka har kodats ner i formella modeller och dataprogram, där det blir mycket svårare att urskilja, och därför ifrågasätta. I ”When things start to think” skriver Neil Gershenfeld i kapitlet ”Bad words” om ”a belief in magic software bullets, bits of code that can solve the hard problems”:
”At still one more conference on mathematical modeling I sat through a long presentation by someone from the Defense Department on how they are spending billion of dollars a year on developing mathematical models to help them fight wars. He described an elaborate taxonomy of models of models of models. Puzzled, at the end of it I hazarded to put up my hand and ask a question that I thought would show everyone in the room that I had slept through part of the talk (which I had). I wondered whether he had any idea whether his billion-dollar models worked, since it’s not convenient to fight wars to test them. His answer, roughly translated, was to shrug and say that’s such a hard question they don’t worry about it. Meanwhile, the mathematicians in the former Soviet Union labored with limited access to computers and had no resources but to think. As a result, a surprising fraction of modern mathematical theory came from the Soviet Union, far out of proportion to its other technical contributions.”
(Gershenfeld borde veta, som skrivit en lärobok i matematisk modellering.)
Originalartikeln ”Wake up call” fanns i Guardian i förra veckan.
Du kan läsa ett utdrag ur When things start to think på amazon.com.
Update 2008: ”…its model for home prices had no ability to accept a negative number.” Se Hur teknologin hjälpte finansvärlden att lura sig själv, Blind Höna 27 nov 2008
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