Very, very interesting -- and if I habitually wore a hat, I think I'd have to eat it at this point. :)
235 karma · joined January 20, 2010
Of course, no intelligent birds exist, but we can see enough of the personalities of some species to get a sense of how an intelligent bird might act. They'd probably be less tribal, less extended-family-oriented, less self-serving than humans, more aloof and self-reliant, more like a startup founder... but also much more violent and warlike, as no avian however large has the same instinctive reluctance to kill a member of its own species that all large mammals share.
I don't know nearly as much about the _other_ path not taken, the cephalopods -- but I've read enough about the behavior of Humboldt's and giant squid when confronted by an unfamiliar sight to get the impression that there is a reason why nature didn't manage to take it. Unlike squid, octopodes are not psychotic, but they're easily bored and they have a malicious sense of humor. The urban legend of the octopus who waits until the lights are out and the aquarium-keepers have left, then crawls out of the water and goes over to the neighboring fish tank to have a snack before slipping back to his own tank before the morning, has happened any number of times.
Little-known medieval trivia point: if St. Thomas Aquinas was right about a certain speculation, the study of avian and cephalopod behaviors is probably a prudent one. Aquinas believed that if other worlds capable of supporting intelligent life exist, they _would_ be populated by intelligent beings, since God wouldn't let a perfectly good dwelling-place for souls go to waste. The only question, to the medieval mind, was whether such worlds existed (and, secondarily, whether Christ would have come to them separately had they fallen, or whether it would have been necessary to convert them to Catholicism; for more on this mindset, read C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and perhaps Poul Anderson's _The High Crusade_).
Aristotle discovered or taught (I'm favoring "discovered") that all creatures have an end for which they exist; the end of a chicken is to live the life of a happy, fulfilled chicken. Human beings have a right to distort that under certain circumstances (domestication, for example, is acceptable), but we must not sacrifice all other considerations for profit. Eating meat is acceptable, at least grudgingly; raising stock animals in cruel conditions to wring more money out of them is not. The American way of life _is_ negotiable, in contrast to what a certain US President said, and was not handed down on Mount Sinai. (Actually, everything handed down on Mount Sinai _also_ wasn't handed down on Mount Sinai, in the sense of being eternal and immutable -- or else Jesus Christ would hardly have run roughshod over the Third Commandment.)
There's something else I want to mention about chickens, but I'll put that in another post for ease of up/downvoting; in the meantime, I just wanted to emphasize that touchy-feely liberals aren't the only ones who believe that a chicken's happiness is worth something.
So I'd expect three things to drive down the value of small-arms designers: the point that variable costs are much higher than fixed ones in small-arms manufacturing; the presence of bureaucratic inertia in the militaries and police agencies who represent the main customers; and the fact that the problem domain is very well-understood and has been for quite some time. The AK-47 is showing its age, but is still viable; the H&K G3, the FN FAL, and the M-14 are all around 60 years old (the M-16 is a newcomer at 50 years, and the "space-age" bullpups, the Steyr AUG and SA80, are around 30); and the Colt M1911 was designed before the First World War and, from what I understand, is still one of the best pistols on the market.
There are a few "cutting-edge" weapons that are just coming into use -- the Tavor and the H&K G36, most obviously -- but I think these reflect a change in the perceived threat environment more than an advance in technology.
So, in other words: I'm not sure that there's very much to _do_ in the field of small-arms design. There are some small, innovative companies in the field -- Calico Light Weapons Systems is an obvious one -- but the problem with being a small, innovative manufacturer of firearms is that you don't have much of a market. Even when Bill Clinton _isn't_ in office, private citizens will never spend the kind of money on small arms that governments do.
I want to emphasize that I'm coming at this from the perspective of an interested amateur, and my interest is more in infantry tactics than in the weapons they use to implement them -- so there may be factors here that I don't know about. I'd second the recommendations by hga and gexla: contact people who know more about this, but, I'd say, prepare to be a little disappointed. (Aerospace engineering strikes me as being a field which is still evolving, and thus ought to be more promising for someone with an interest in designing weapons systems.)
People have a high level of tolerance for corporate BS when the product behind it is good. _Spore_ only offers five or six hours of gameplay, not the five or six years it seemed to be promising; if it had delivered on its promise of the moon, I think we would have heard an awful lot less about SecuROM.
Of course, you meant the grandparent post. That means that you're saying that because witchcraft was seen as a threat to society in the Early Modern period (but _not_ the Medieval period, when the Papal Inquisition regarded witchcraft as a superstition, and referred anyone who brought them a witchcraft charge to Ye Olde Psychyatryste), and the witches were not a threat (although there were real witches -- Kieckhefer, Richard, _Magic in the Middle Ages_ (200)) -- again, because the witches (and the enormous number of innocents who were falsely killed as witches) were not a threat in the 17th Century, anything that anyone sees as a threat at the present day is similarly not a threat.
The right thing to do is to ask whether this particular possible threat is in fact a threat. I agree with your conclusion -- I think that the parent post is right, corporations are no longer the cohesive bloc that they were as late as the 1980s -- but I think you're doing it a disservice by using such a weak argument for it.
Of course, the ideal is to leak minimally; Apple has always been good at that, but very bad at allowing anyone past the abstraction in the event that it breaks down. I believe the analogy is "sports cars with their hoods welded shut."
My comment on the accuracy of zero-click info was inspired by an "acid-test" test search that turned up some zero-click information that was excellent, but some that was howlingly wrong. "Iberians" produces _splendid_ zero-click info, including a thumbnail of the Lady of Elche; "Y-haplogroup R1b" and "mtDNA haplogroup H" also worked very well; but "Iberian race" turned up zero-click info that's been refuted completely by genetic genealogy and was pseudoscience even before then.
Of course, there's an element of "garbage in, garbage out" here. I would hardly condemn a merely _mortal_ search engine for being less than up-to-date on the very young (<30 years) and distinctly arcane fields of forensic anthropology and genetic genealogy -- but Zero-Click Info mode makes it sound like this is _your_ information, not _the Internet's_ information.
Perhaps you could add a disclaimer to the effect that your elite team of ninja ducks has scoured the dark corners of the earth and returned with the best information they could find, but there's still a risk that their findings are a complete load of HealthBase?
(I would also _love_ to see a picture of your elite team of ninja ducks returning from their investigations. But maybe that's just a sign that I'm easily amused -- the kind of person who _still_ finds "All Your Base" to be funny...)
These days, the Web is somewhere between three and five titans plus a complex of secondary sites (specialist wikis, newspaper sites, news aggregators, major blogs), with a background noise that chiefly consists of spammers mirroring 90% of Wikipedia to improve their search-engine rankings.
So, in a way, this search engine is inevitable -- but I wouldn't have imagined it as early as thirty minutes ago, so it's probably not inevitable, just an idea so good that you forget that it ever didn't exist.
"Duck It!" seems to work _really_ well, too; I'm switching. My only concern is that "Duck It!" doesn't include a way of telling you whether a given paragraph is true or false...
Calvinism had _huge_ practical consequences -- in social policy, it's the difference between ensuring that the poor are fed and sheltered, and kicking them into the street; and you can only imagine what it meant for the laws of war...
Edit: And the joke you mention is only too recognizable, but it's more like the Catholicism-and-Orthodoxy situation, where it's a matter of tribal loyalties more than views of the world...
However, we can sometimes mistake _subtle_ differences for _small_ ones; but just as there's a substantial difference between the Mac OS and Windows, there's a substantial difference between Catholicism and Calvinism (which was the most successful form of Protestantism) -- the difference between God seeing that you went to Hell, and God sending you there. I could go into much greater detail (I count nine paragraphs in how I'd previously structured this comment), but that's the nutshell of the nutshell.
It's a private theory of mine that the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods were so lively because "this is an excellent shoulder of pork" sounded exactly like "I will attack your city at dawn"... :)
This sentence cites an obscure [Russian expatriate|investigative journalist|fringe physicist|absurdly cross-disciplinary|Eric Scott Raymond|Theodore Dalrymple] author with a coherent yet slightly cranky theory that [explodes|confirms] the argument of the blog post. This sentence was originally a veiled insult directed at everyone who hasn't already read the book, but was edited.
This sentence is an admission of the irony inherent in laughing off the subject followed by arguing about it.
(And while we're on a roll, can we also get an interview with Gary Larson?)
This is not to imply that the nobility always _did_ oppose the enemies who they should have been opposing; but it's not at all the case that had there been no feudal militaries, medieval Europe would have been a peaceful place.
(I acknowledge that this is a very late post, and I apologize for that; but it's a common mistake to imagine that medieval European history occurred in a vacuum. The primary culprit here is the, ah, _insular_ way that English-speaking schools teach medieval history...)
Look up the "Ultimatum Game" for a particularly effective demonstration of where it fails -- and the commenter here who points out that rational-agent theory would destroy civilizations is completely correct. (Mental exercise: apply "the tragedy of the commons" to a defensive war.)
We see how this works out in the historical patronage system; before the development of copyrights, most reproducible art (poetry and the like) was created not to sell, but to flatter some aristocratic bigwig -- that's why its conventions were so stubbornly moribund, and why it took something like 1400 years for the novel to be reinvented after the end of the Western Roman Empire.
I think this is a particularly alarming situation in regard to computer games; it would mean that the average game would probably be a cheaply-produced advertising piece -- imagine a world in which the Burger King promotional games outnumber _Jagged Alliance_ and _Final Fantasy 6_ by an even larger margin than they do now. I think that we can get a hint about what would happen by looking at the Arab world, where piracy is unusually rampant and the only active game development is done by Muslim fundamentalists...
The parts of the Jesuit Relations dealing with the Jesuits' first missionary work among the Hurons relates how the Hurons weren't particularly interested in accepting or rejecting the Jesuits' religious message; what they were interested in was how to build French-style houses. The Cherokee tribe took this even further than the Hurons, developing a syllabic script, and assimilating completely to the norms of the American South (even to the point of owning African slaves, unfortunately).
Personally, my complaint about the wars with the American Indians is not that the United States all but annihilated deadly enemies like the Iroquois and the Sioux (although coexistence with them would have been better, and we're doing a little better that way at present); my objection is that the United States all but annihilated peoples like the Cherokee, who were better Europeans than most of the American frontiersmen who wanted them displaced. Like the American Indian casinos, I try to avoid twenty-dollar bills.
The history of the rulers of Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul also illustrates this cycle. The Byzantines began dynamic and powerful, then they became self-seeking and were conquered by the fiercely cohesive Ottoman Turks (omitting the history of the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, which went through this cycle almost as quickly as the Mongols did), then the Ottoman Turks went from fiercely cohesive to fiercely self-interested (look up the Auspicious Incident) and collapsed in turn.
Now, the collapse part of the cycle is slowed down by a world peace that will last until/unless the United States disintegrates (and it's in trouble; look at the self-serving corruption of groups as unlike each other as the Pentagon and the labor unions) -- but I discussed both the merits and the problems of this situation in another post on this subject.
Turchin's model of asabiya is much more developed than the article's, but goes in exactly the same direction. He emphasizes the importance of frontiers and warfare -- the civilizational counterpart to Darwinian selection pressure, and a reminder that there are worse enemies than one's neighbor and higher causes than one's checkbook -- for asabiya development and, thus, the cohesion of societies. All this is borne out with some very impressive styles of measurement; he's the founder of a new discipline called "cliodynamics," taking its approaches from ecological population modeling.
On the other hand, before we embrace war as the road to prosperity, we need to remember what commentors here observed -- that most civilizations wage war lawlessly, to the point of torture and genocide; so some sort of authority to control the intensity and severity of warfare would be a good idea. I don't think the United Nations will cut it; but Chesterton thought that the Pope would have, had the medieval project been taken to its conclusion...