A 21st Century Golden Age
[Like clockwork, as soon as I put a radio silence post up, I find myself posting something in spite of it…]
Spurred by Mark’s stimulating prompt, some thoughts on the Golden Age of RAND.
A confluence of unique trends combined to create RAND’s Golden Age. The organizational dynamics in particular were extraordinary. An entirely new service leapt into being, Athena-like, endowed with birth with the capability to deliver the most destructive weapons yet designed. The confluence of no institutional inertia, extraordinary power and budgetary security gave the Air Force latitude that it, in turn, could transitively provide to RAND. The creative tension between the freedom to explore and all-consuming urgency to address the most pressing strategic questions of the day drove extraordinary advances.
Where are the equivalent confluences in the 21st Century’s trends? Is the entire think tank model tapped out? Do we need to move to a more distributed and indirect model, where people don’t get paid directly for the value they create or they are compensated through a far-flung network of prediction markets, freelance writing, and self-organizing research programs? If we do want to walk that path, then we’ll need some David Hilberts to step up and propose some programs of research. In other words, we need some common orientations to direct the ambitious energy of rising stars towards a series of problems that will move us towards our goal.
And we need it done yesterday, of course.
Perhaps you’d entertain an inversion of the research vector? Rather than Hilbert->Goedel top-down, how about distribuited proto-Goedels bottom-up? With a syntheto-Hilbert to narrate after the fact what was / is being done?
On this inversion theme, I think there’s a lot of promise / unbroken ground in the area of self-organization and self-awareness, with the 21st Century’s USAF yet to emerge from this confluence you seek. As far as the 21 Century’s RAND, well, aren’t we in it?
On another tangent, try to reverse-engineer Islamic fundamentalism. Backward-chain COIN.
Comment by Moon — March 8, 2008 @ 2:00 pm
Would you elaborate on the image at the top of your blog page? As a wargamer, I want to know what I’m seeing. ;-
Comment by Moon — March 8, 2008 @ 2:28 pm
The picture’s from a RAND wargame back in the 1950s (from the days when wargames looked more like expensive games of Risk ;-).
As far as the bottom-up Godels (and thanks for catching the reference), my only concern is their having to spend their time figuring out WHAT to study, instead of actually making progress. If Godel had needed to spend time assessing the field before devoting his efforts to exploring the line of inquiry that eventually led him to incompleteness, then the entire time line gets pushed back (and maybe doesn’t happen).
Interesting thoughts on backwards-chaining COIN - could you elaborate some more?
cheers,
W
Comment by Wiggins — March 8, 2008 @ 7:20 pm
I was hoping that was you in the picture and you’d tell us about some kick-arse project you’ve got in-flight. ;-
My proto-Goedel swarm notion implies the question: what else might a force of his depth have stumbled into without having a top-down Hilbertian program as a frame of reference? The timeline gets pushed back only w.r.t. your orientation based upon history’s single thread. But how relevant is that orientation to a counterfactual thread that does not exist but could have?
Backward-chaining COIN was nothing but a half-backed rumination on the inversion of control. Instead of starting from assumptions and premises under our present orientation and mapping the forward-chained path to our desired conclusion (and calling it a COIN strategy), start with the conclusions and cast about for intermediate steps that back-calculate you back to your present premises. The experimentation in that approach is not so much looking for full back-paths, but tossing in new and throwing out old rules here and there that, in combination/omission, might satisfy the back-calculation. Bring in the synthesizers and counterhistorians and have them color and narrate the orientation(s) that you need to encapsulate the premises your bottom-up research sifted out.
All this comes from my tinkering with rule-based systems; I’m not an expert. There’s probably another name for this concept that’s not so technologically bound.
Comment by Moon — March 8, 2008 @ 8:44 pm
Part of our problem is that the necessary research involves working against our current DoD apparatus, and there is neither internal DOD nor outside institutional support for this today. Unlike RAND, where the USAF was certain to get some value for its money.
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Hence the lack of research is a feature, not a bug.
Comment by Fabius Maximus — March 10, 2008 @ 7:48 am
Addendum: much of what we need is basic grunt-level research. Legions of grad students collecting information on the past century or so of 4GWs (however defined), on a systematic framework that allows comparisons. With that we will have a strong basis for analysis.
Comment by Fabius Maximus — March 10, 2008 @ 7:51 am
Was just at the library yesterday and skimming Ghamari-Tabrizi’s The Worlds of Herman Kahn, when I saw the source photograph you mentioned. Life Magazine, 11 MAY 1959. Looks like they were gaming some sort of strategic bombing scenario. Still couldn’t make out the geography.
Comment by Moon — March 11, 2008 @ 10:38 am