Members Sean Gourley

Jun 17 2011: and could maths help me determine if I am self serving in nature, or judgementally righteous?

Jun 17 2011: yes - anyone else think this might be feasible?

Jun 17 2011: Interesting too to note that technologies not developed for war are now being used within wars - think twitter example in Egypt. What will be the next consumer technology to be re-purposed for use within the war/peace arena?

Jun 17 2011: This is like the NASA space argument - we go into space and see look at all these cool spin off technologies we get in return (like a space pen*).

There are of course obvious technological gains that are made with all the military spending that is done. von Braun leveraged both the Nazi and the US military might to pursue his dreams of human space flight. As a result of Iraq and Afghanistan we have improved critical medical care and built very effective translation devices.

War today though has perhaps contributed the most to the rise of two things. Robots and prosthetic limbs. The prosthetic limbs coming as a direct result of the increases in critical medical care on the battlefield. More soldiers that lose limbs are now surviving - so we generate new technologies to help them to walk again.

Whilst technologies are developed as a result of war - it is pretty hard to make the case that all the money spent on war couldn't have been spent on developing these technologies without the need to kill people along the way.




*note space pen not actually developed by NASA but makes for a nice story point :)

Jun 17 2011: another element to throw into the mix is the importance of media. Media is well known as a publicity tool - can be used to attract more resources and funding to an insurgent group. But it is also a very powerful tool for co-ordination.

The media in a place like Iraq allows all the insurgent groups to maintain a high degree of situational awareness. They can know what is going on today - and with social media they can even see things like the Bin Landen navy SEAL attack unfold in real time. This is a huge information advantage.

As this news is transmitted it can be used to see what strategies are effective, what works and what doesn't. In short the media is a great learning platform.

Jun 17 2011: Or to frame it another way - to what extent was the organizational structure behind Obama's victory in the 2008 election like an insurgency?

Will this become the model for how all political movements are formed?

Jun 17 2011: the AK-47 is one of the single biggest killers in war. It is the true WMD. It has an expected lifetime of about 80 years and will keep shooting even if it has been buried and dug up. These guns are so simple, and yet so capable that they make killing literally childs play.

Figure out a way to get these guns out of the system and you could potentially have a massive impact on violent deaths in conflict.

You can start by buying one yourself in Africa for just about $50 :)

Jun 17 2011: from the Art of war - to the mathematics of war

I wonder if we could start to codify Sun Tzu into a set of computational equations - or at least a set of testable hypothesis. We could run them on the data coming out of Afghanistan - see if Sun Tzu was correct?

just a random thought

Jun 17 2011: it's interesting to think about pulling these second order leavers. Don't try to remove guns - just increase the price of bullets.

The truth though is that our understanding of ecosystems (war, environment, business, stock markets) is actually pretty shallow. We are only just getting our heads around the mathematics of massively multidimensional networks and feedback loops.

But one of the things that is clear is that it is expensive to run an insurgency. You need to have ways to make money. That is why there are very few insurgencies that are fought without a key resource being available. Cocaine in Colombia, diamonds in Sierra Leone, Opium in Afghanistan. Human trafficking etc.

The insurgency needs to make money - take this away and you take away the blood of an insurgency.

Jun 17 2011: That's a difficult question - perhaps best left to Chris Rock to explain

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuX-nFmL0II

Jun 17 2011: We tell ourselves that we fight for emotional reasons - and yet underlying these conflicts is a cold set of mathematical equations. Hard to imagine that people would go off to fight to be another data point in a seemingly predictable formula.

Jun 17 2011: the interesting question here is defining 'winning'. An insurgency can continue to pick small fights and operate in a distributed fashion. But in order to gain power (and control of different resources, oil, cocaine etc) they must at some point formalize their structures and start to become more coordinated.

At this point they can win - i.e. control resources. But they have also potentially lost what got them their in the first place.

Jun 17 2011: This idea of 'protectors' is in many ways a handicap for conventional forces. The insurgent groups have been very effective in leveraging this to their advantage too. The groups in Iraq realized that they could get just as much media coverage by bombing groups of civilians then they would if they bombed US forces.

We were able to measure media coverage as a function of attack type, size, victim. The results of this are still being analyzed but are very interesting. For example there is a significant jump up in media coverage once an attack kills >10 people.

Jun 17 2011: Some of the key ideas here revolve around the concept of asymmetry. Understanding how and why a much smaller group can take on and many times defeat a stronger opposition. We see this in war, we also see in out here in Silicon valley. We see it in the start of new political movements in Egypt, and we can also see shades of it in the way that cancer forms within a body.

Jun 17 2011: what is also interesting about the conflicts in the middle east is the role that new technology had to play in the organizational of the uprisings (and crack down by the existing regimes). We saw the term 'twitter/facebook revolution' start to emerge.

When we have the next revolution - will it be a 'foursquare revolution'. Will people use geolocation data, or gamefication techniques to co-ordinate millions of people in opposition? Will there be a "revolution" badge?

Jun 17 2011: I think it was best put like this

"information is not power, information asymmetry is power"

Jun 17 2011: Take many small groups - give them all a set of risky strategies. Hope that one pays off. When it succeeds, then throw resources onto it quickly and try to scale it.

Jun 17 2011: what is interesting with the evolutionary model here is that there is also an interesting force acting against the strongest groups here. The strongest groups become targets for the conventional forces. And when these groups are attacked they fragment and splinter -- like breaking a sheet of glass.

All the learning and innovation is then scattered back throughout the system. This prevents lock-in and makes for a very effective distribution of knowledge.

Jun 17 2011: Nice quotes Matt - the power of a narrative is hard to overstate. Yet in many ways the actual content of the narrative is somewhat irrelevant. We look at different wars, all fought for different ideological reasons and yet despite these differences in religion, politics, geography - we see the same patterns emerge.

It is as though we tell ourselves that we fight war for one reason - yet we could tell ourselves any reason and the mathematical signature of the war would look no different.

If war is truly governed by these mathematical equations - and it starts to become somewhat predictable - will people want to continue to fight?

Jun 17 2011: yes, interesting to think about the self organizing structure of human groups. How do we make connections, how do groups of unorganized individuals make decisions.

How could we study this from places like post tsunami Japan? What would the right data be?