Links #6

A new Sins of a Solar Spymaster article on deception and bluffing. 

Another article on BigPharma companies using deception that was mentioned in this set of links. That article is specifically how the company created a bogus scientific journal. It is an example of agnotology. 

An article on propaganda, the environmental movement, and the use of words to shape others’ minds. 

A great article on how to cheat at everything from The Economist’s ‘More Intelligent Life’. Quote:

“I could sell shit at an anti-scat party,” he says, “you have to figure out someone’s wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void.” A con man is essentially a salesman–a remarkably good one–who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people.

It requires avid study of psychology and body language. It’s an amazing paradox–a con man has incredible emotional insight, but without the burden of compassion. He must take an intense interest in other people, complete strangers, and work to understand them, yet remain detached and uninvested. That the plan is to cheat these people and ultimately confirm many of their fears cannot be of concern.

Mr Lovell draws people in by mirroring their body language. He breaks their defences by entering their physical space.

This article on the interrelation between public works and deception reminds me of Caro’s “The Power Broker,” which had the same themes. Robert Moses would underestimate the cost of a major public work, which suckered in politicians as a major public work for cheap was a dream come true for them. Then once he’d run out of money, he’d go ask for more, as the politicians wouldn’t want their reputations tarnished by a failed project. Quote from article:

But a professor at Oxford University in England has done a compelling series of studies trying to get at why big public-works projects such as bridges, tunnels and light-rail systems almost always turn out to be far more costly than estimated.

“It cannot be explained by error,” sums up one of his papers, matter-of-factly. “It is best explained by strategic misrepresentation — that is, lying.”

The use of donkeys as a platform for terrorist tactics.

This post on lying within robots that came up in one of my feeds is from 2008, and the accompanying study is from 2007, but I thought it was interesting. Deception emerged from interactions between artificial intelligence. 

An article on “digital deception.” Quote:

Woodworth began his exploration by looking at how to detect deception in face-to-face environments. But he soon recognized the invasion of information and communication technologies into nearly all aspects of our lives was an opportunity to study how technology affects “digital deception” – defined as any type of technologically mediated message transmitted to create a false belief in the receiver of the message.

“Given the prevalence of both deception and communication technology in our personal and professional lives, an important set of concerns have emerged about how technology affects digital deception,” says Woodworth. He points out a growing number of individuals are falling prey to deceptive practices and information received through computer mediated contexts such as the Internet.

More links to follow, sometime today. I’ll tack them onto the end of this post.

Two Wikipedia Articles: Crypsis and Power Behind the Throne

Crypsis:

In ecology, crypsis is the ability of an organism to avoid observation. A form of antipredator adaptation, methods range from camouflage, nocturnality, subterranean lifestyle, transparency, or mimicry. The word can also be used in the context of eggs and pheromone production.

Power behind the throne:

The phrase power behind the throne refers to a person or group that informally exercises the real power of an office. In politics, it most commonly refers to a spouse, aide, or advisor of a political leader (often called a “figurehead“) who serves as de facto leader, setting policy through influence or manipulation.

Two Wikipedia Articles: Agnotology and Éminence grise

Agnotology:

Agnotology, formerly agnatology, is a neologism for the study of culturally-induced ignorance or doubt, particularly the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. The term was coined by Robert N. Proctor, a Stanford University professor specializing in the history of science and technology. Its name derives from the Greek word ἀγνῶσις, agnōsis, “not knowing”; and -λογία, -logia. More generally, the term also highlights the increasingly common condition where more knowledge of a subject leaves one more uncertain than before … Agnotology also focuses on how and why diverse forms of knowledge do not “come to be,” or are ignored or delayed. For example, knowledge about plate tectonics was delayed for at least a decade because key evidence was classified military information related to underseas warfare.

Eminence Grise:

An éminence grise (French for “grey eminence“) is a powerful advisor or decision-maker who operates secretly or unofficially. This phrase originally referred to François Leclerc du Tremblay, the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu. Leclerc was a Capuchin friar who wore grey, or rather brown, robes. Brown or light brown (now called “beige”) was called grey in that era. The phrase “His Eminence” is used to describe a Cardinal in the Roman Catholic Church. Although Leclerc du Tremblay never achieved that rank, it is not improbable that those around him may have addressed him thus in reference to the considerable influence this “grey friar” held over “his Eminence the Cardinal”.

Exploiting Honor

I have been in a number of social groups where the concept of honor was talked about it. Or if it was not talked about, then it was present a lot of the time in various physical or non-physical forms. These range from groups like the military to martial arts groups. Within these groups honor was always thought of as a strength. 

Pride, code, duty. These were terms bandied about often, but what of them? Is honor useful in conflict? 

A key aspect of power is getting inside the worldview of your opponent and presenting to them what they want to see, then finding ways to exploit that worldview for your purpose while maintaining the false presentation. 

Can honor be exploited in such a way? Can we use honor in a way that will make our opponents dance like puppets? I will lay out some thoughts on this question. I’ll consider why honor is important in war, how it comes about, then I’ll discuss the strategic and tactical exploitation of honor.

Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate” has a chapter on violence that states honor, or as he terms it, “glory,” is one of the major causes of violence. Historically, he lists the following wars had major aspects of honor to them: Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador versus Honduras, and the Falkland Islands. More recently we’ve had riots and some of the largest cyberattacks in history because a soldier’s statue was going to be moved. 

What you can take from this is that honor is a major condition for starting, maintaining, and ending conflicts. 

Those who control honor can effectively control when a conflict starts, when it ends, how intense it has to be, and a number of other aspects. It’s no wonder that Sun Tzu talks in “The Art of War” about subverting a leader’s pride. 

How do we control how, and when, honor is brought about into action? Pinker goes on to state, ”Cultures of honor spring up all over the world because they amplify universal human emotions like pride, anger, revenge, and the love of kith and kin, and because they appear at the time to be sensible responses to local conditions.”

Pride, anger, revenge, love of kith and kin. By attacking, subduing, or co-opting these emotions within cultures of honor you could control how and when honor, and hence conflict, arises. 

For example, imagine a long-term cultural takeover of a culture of honor. A group of memetic engineers and propagandists turn some belief, object, or person — that was a formerly a source of pride to the target culture — into something that is considered shameful, or not worth believing in. The memetic engineers and propagandists have effectively neutered the culture of honor. Why fight for something you don’t have pride in? 

That is one example of using those emotions to control a culture of honor. 

At the strategic level it could be applied in a myriad of ways. When I say strategic I mean the overbearing aim, goals, and plans that your opponent is acting on. Shimon Naveh called this realm the tension between culture and strategy. Honor could be considered a primary tension within cultures of honor and strategy. Look at the way the neoconservatives, culturally influenced by southern cultures of honor, reacted to al Qaeda. Honor and pride took place over the ethically-dubious actions of torture and mass domestic surveillance. They drove down their former moral principles to save face, and are now paying for it at the moral level of war. 

So step one at the strategic level is to work out what your opponent’s aims and goals are, then work out how he is going to achieve them (the strategy). Step two is identify possible aspects of honor within his worldview (the culture). Does anything anger him? Is there anything he considers a source of pride? Is he vengeful? Is there anyone within his social network he is very protective of? Step three is identifying the cross product between strategy and honor (the tension). Is there anything that would make him angry and make him veer off his current strategy? Can you subvert their source of pride, and hence force them not to fight for some idea, cause, thing, or belief? Can you make him take revenge on the wrong person, thus creating a double cross, and re-arranging their strategic targets? Can you turn someone he holds dear in his social network against him, thus co-opting a source of honor?

At the tactical level, honor is used more as a tool to buy yourself time. It’s less to do with exploiting cultural-strategic tensions, than just pissing off your opponent so he makes a mistake. It occurs when you’ve found yourself backed into a corner and can’t think of anything else, so you need to regain the initiative through subverting your opponent’s pride. Again, make him angry. Insult him. This is a move of last resort. Exploiting honor at close range could be considered dangerous, but if the opponent makes a mistake, as they are not thinking straight, then an opportunity could open up for you to exploit.

Before I finish, I’d like to consider a counter-point. What if the opponent you face is not part of a culture of honor? The long-term solution would be to create one. Again, deception is the fundamental underpinning of warfare. Create an illusionary culture of honor within your opponent’s worldview. How would you do this? Pinker states that, “Violent cultures arise in societies that are beyond the reach of the law and in which precious assets are easily stolen.” He also goes onto state that, “A man’s honor is a kind of “social reality” in John Searle’s sense: it exists because everyone agrees it exists, but it is no less real for that, since it resides in a shared granting of power.” So, a possible way to generate a culture of honor is create conditions wherein a group is beyond the rule of law, and which precious assets are easily stolen. This might be beyond the capability of a single person, but within the bounds of a state-actor. Consider a country A that attacked another country B. Country A undermines the legal framework of country B by creating the perception of lawlessness. Country A amplifies underworld crime by paying off police to look the other way, supplying gangs with protection, etc. They also amplify upperworld crime by placing CEOs, politicians, and other high status individuals in compromising illegal situations. With a corrupt upperworld and violent underworld of crime, country B now has lawlessness. Combine these upperworld and underworld elements with white collar crime (fraud, looting the reserve) and blue collar crime (armed robbery, break & enters) and you now have the elements for a culture of honor to emerge. From there all it takes is a few jabs at the pride of country B to get them to overreact in some manner. 

For further reading on exploiting honor I recommend reading The Mittani’s take on honor within online games.

Two Wikipedia articles: Ketman & The Dark Triad

Ketman: 

Ketman (Arabic kitmān كتمان “secrecy, concealment”) is the act of paying lip service to authority while holding personal opposition. It is a sort of political or religious camouflage, for the purpose of survival, because, if you said publicly that you are against those in power, the consequences for you and your family would be immediate and catastrophic. So you can teach your children, in deep secrecy, to practice ketman exactly the same as you, but never to forget the real truth, as you see it. This can go on through many generations, and erupt one distant day in the form of revolutions, uprisings, etc.

Dark Triad:

The Dark triad (or the dark triad of personalities) is a group of personality traits which people would generally define as undesirable. It is called a “dark triad” because it consists of three main personality deficiencies: narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy.

Links #5

Here are this week’s links on deception and related topics. Mostly sourced from delicious, google news, and google reader (links attributed when remembered).

First article is a short piece on online dating and deception. Quote: 

Joe Tracy, editor of Online Dating Magazine, says (gasp!) people often misrepresent themselves in dating profiles. Men, his site found, lie most often about age, height and income; women are most likely to stretch the truth about weight, physical appearance and age.

A specific case of deception plans, and propaganda campaigns, by pharmaceutical companies. Here is a list of some of the ruses they pulled off.

There have been a couple of posts floating around about Twitter being used a platform for propaganda and deception.  Here are some of the posts:

• Foreign Policy’s ‘Net Effect’ blog on Twitter and Thailand.
• The Seminal on Moldova and Twitter.
• Bruce Schneier on ‘Fake facts on twitter‘.

Also, tangentally related is these series of links via Metafilter on social networks and blogs maintaining the flow of information under the Fijian coup: 

• ABC Radio on Fijian Bloggers.
• Found via one of the blogs linked to on Metafilter was this post by a Fijian blogger. It mentions that the CEO of one of the major Fijian ISPs is politically connected to the coup, and therefore there is a chance that users of said ISP could be under electronic surveillance.

The next two links were via Mind Hacks:

This really interesting article on neuroscientific explanations for magic shows how magic can help science understand trickery and deception. Quote:

Kuhn and his colleagues are tracking down exactly what happens in the incredulous brain as it witnesses an impossible act, what the researchers call the “neurobiology of disbelief.”

In particular, Kuhn is studying how people understand cause and effect relationships. Everyone knows that coins disappear because someone moves them, not because a magician waves his hand over them — and certainly not because Harry Potter mutters a spell.

“What magic is doing is producing disbelief and a sense of wonder,” Kuhn says, “and that’s what we are studying.” 

This Pure Pedantry post on a neuroscience of envy and schadenfreude paper is also very interesting (both these feelings are useful for deceptive purposes; e.g. using them to exploit certain actions, or views in others, so you can carry out another indirect plan). Quote on findings: 

Interestingly, the ACC activation in this task was only increased when the subject could relate to the object of their envy. The authors’ interpreted this finding that when a subject cannot relate to the other person — when they are not “self-relevant” — you don’t feel envy towards them: “That is, if the possession of the target person is superior and the comparison domain is self-relevant, we feel intense envy. When the comparison domain is not self-relevant, we do not feel strong envy, even if the possession is superior. When the comparison target is neither superior nor self-relevant, we are indifferent to the target.”

Tim Lott on the ubiquity of lying in politics and society.

Radio National’s ‘Philosopher’s Zone’ also had a podcast on a similar topic: moralism in politics, and is it an advantage to be moral in politics? It also discusses how ‘moralizing’ has become a bad trait. Quote:

Alan Saunders: But moralising as a vice; as vices go, it’s a fairly new vice isn’t it? I mean people 100 years ago probably wouldn’t have talked about moralizing as being a bad thing.

Tony Coady: It’s a tricky thing to say why this has come about. In the book I speculate that it may well be that it’s come to the fore in a world in which Christianity in the West has lost its central place in a whole range of human social activities and so on. But in which some of its core ideas have remained very strong, and some of those are related to the idea that someone who sits in judgment on others should be extremely careful about judging others when they themselves might be prey to the very same evils that they seem to detect in others.

I think this was one of the things that worried me about all this stuff about ‘axis of evil’ and so on. You know, there’s the projection of immorality into the outside and no sense in how these categories might apply to oneself. And in international affairs, I think this is fairly common, the idea of demonising all sorts of other agents in the international sphere without any sense that you yourself may actually be prone to the same, or similar, or slightly less dramatic versions of the same vice. That’s another problem with the moralizer.

Another Radio National podcast — ‘Big Ideas’ – also had two ex-Intelligence case officers discussing their careers and how it influences their fiction writing.

New Scientist has an article on how poor media reporting damages science.

Marginal Revolution has a post on fake TVs used to deter crime.

Also via Marginal Revolution is this Economist piece on how people judge others on their looks.

There was also an interesting quote by the Iranian president from NROs ‘The Corner’. He stated the following: 

After this I will participate in all international summits to the displeasure of all enemies. . . . If they leave, we will arrange all the summits, but it is such a strange thing that they are not ready to even listen to parts of the crimes they have committed against humanity. How are they going to prepare for the prosecution [awaiting them] . . .?

Thanks to divine wisdom, the criminal heads of state of Western countries will soon be tried for their crimes against humanity. . . . Those arranging the summit had planned everything, they had invested a lot to weaken the Islamic Republic, but as usual they had not counted on one thing, which is the divine cunning from which the Islamic Republic benefitted. . . . [emphasis added]

Threat wire has a post on competitive adaptation between the FBI cybercrime squads and hackers. 

Officer.com has a series of articles dealing with technology in low-light conditions during police patrols called ‘Deception in the Dark’: 

• Article 1
• Article 2
• Article 3

This extensive deception is impressive. Quote: 

The fraud and deception at Satyam Computer Services in India was so in-depth that it included dual accounting books, thousands of forged invoices, thousands of unnecessary employees and dozens of fake bank statements, according to court records analyzed by the New York Times.

Through the deception, managers, auditors and an adviser were able to create a perception that the company was “carrying out huge volumes of business” so it attract potential customers and investors, according to the NYT. All the while, cash was flowing into the hands of those who architected the deception.

WebMD has a list of ways to catch a liar.

That’s it for this week.

How To Outwit Military Robots

There is a lot of talk in the blogosphere about Western use of robots in war, but not much on how someone would fight said robots. The latest story (via MindHacks) is a post on DARPA wanting to have robots with human-like decision making.

How would a group of humans fight nascent artificial intelligence (AI) and automated killing machines?

I was thinking about this the other day after dwelling on whether robots could have morality. I’d imagine this is a common line of thought in households where a roomba bangs into your foot while cleaning. So … come and join me for some off-the-wall thinking and frankstein scaremongering (and I’m definitely not the first).

Firstly, let us imagine a robot reactionary organisation similar to the Birchers, but instead of John Birch imagine the organisation is called the Robert Williams Society (though in reality, robots have been killing humans for much longer. Williams’ death was perhaps the first unintentional robot death). The Robert Williams Society dedicates itself to fighting AI and robots. Pretty far fetched it seems. But then again maybe not, maybe it already began with a lone yo-yo.

Are contemporary robots a threat as our wacky murderous friend Ted thought? Probably not to us at this stage, but human-controlled robots are definitely threats to individuals in warzones. It wouldn’t surprise me if there are nascent anti-war robot groups similar to my imaginary aforementioned Robert Williams Society (perhaps of an Islamic or anti-Western flavour?).  The wikipedia page for death by industrial robot contains two people, yet the page for deaths by robot in total was deleted a few months back.

Ah, those wikipedia deletionists, obviously they see a future trend of too many entries, and therefore the category becomes meaningless.

It’d be immensely interesting to see the statistics on death by robots in war over the last few years. I’d wager the deaths would look like an exponential graph. Check out this page on the Predator UAV operations. This missile-firing mechanical duck of the skies is straight out of a violent Warner Brothers cartoon, but in this case the Elmer Fudds wear keffiyehs.

One could argue that contemporary military robotics are merely an extension from the tools long ago when we first picked up a rock and smashed open a fellow caveman’s head. But that sort of thinking leads us into what’s know as ‘heap arguments’ or the Sorites paradox, e.g. when do we draw the line between saying there is no longer a tool, and there is an autonomous device separate from humans entirely? When do AI and robots get their own branch on the phylogenetic tree? One dividing line is the notion of decision making. They’ll be considered separate from the us when they can decide on their own when, and when not, to kill.

This is where the connection between morality and AI coalesces and where we can start to think about how a Robert Williams Society would fight robots (though see here for a short argument as to why AI may not have intelligence as we define it). Part of AI decision making is reasoning ability. Let’s assume from now on that the AI researchers solve the problem of combinatorial explosion. The decision by the machines is a moral one, insofar as they are partaking in a specific type of reasoning: moral reasoning (what they should do). The sentient machine has to make a split second decision as to whether that group of people is a wedding party or a group of terrorists, then decide whether to attack. Anyone who has taken a basic ethics course can see the problem here. There is a fact-value distinction. How does the machine derive what it should do based on sensory data of what is? Typically this problem has been solved by philosophers in three ways:

(1) Values are derived from emotional responses to facts.
(2) Values are found within facts by a process of intuition, e.g. We maximize pleasure through helping an old lady across the road (a fact). Therefore it is a good thing (value).
(3) Within our decision making process we include a prescriptive statement (P1) and a descriptive statement (P2) as premises, followed by a prescriptive conclusion (C1). Thus the argument from P1 & P2 to C1 is logically valid.

There are of course problems with all these solutions, as discussed by many philosophers. But that is too much to write about here. My focus is on how to fight robots. Let’s assume our future AI doesn’t have a thinking system based on emotions (hard to believe considering reason is inherently tied to our emotions, but I digress). Solution number three looks the most likely way that near-future robots will make decisions.

The robots will probably have some form of Kantian imperative (deontological ethics). That is to say, they’ll be programmed with some form of act to kill or not kill when certain facts are met. This would seem to fit into current robotic paradigms. So we’ve come to a conclusion how autonomous robots make a decision. How do we exploit that thinking process? As per Sun Tzu, the highest form of strategy is attacking the opponent’s plan, or their thinking and decision making process. Here’s one way to attack it:

If a robot contains Kantian imperatives to do things based on certain facts, then the robot will contain a number of distinct prescriptive values. For instance a robot may be programmed to not kill children. The same robot may also be programmed to kill an armed human that is pointing a weapon at the robot. What if the armed person is a child? What decision does it then make? In moral reasoning these are value conflicts. The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy has a good standard form of these sorts of arguments. They are outlined as follows:

(1) The robot ought to do A.
(2) The robot ought to do B.
(3) The robot cannot do both A and B.
(4) (1) does not overrided (2) and (2) does not override (1).

There are of course some fixes to these arguments that are explained in the above link, nonetheless I think that such use of paradox is key to fighting AI when combined with other strategies. Other lingering questions also remain though. Could the robot be aware enough to reprogram their Kantian imperative? How do you find the prescriptive values?What if the AI was using a logic system that was successful in dealing with paradoxical information? Perhaps a discussion for another time.

So, our first main strategy against robots is the use of paradox to confuse robot reasoning. I consider this a weak strategy compared to my second strategy. This is because of Moravec’s paradox. In essence, AI systems reason faster than their sensory and motor systems. Sensory computation demands much more on a system than reasoning processes.

The ability to tie up computation processes will become essential, as sensors are the primary means of gathering information. Near-future wars against robots will become perception wars. For example, let’s take the same child example from above. This time around the child is not armed with a gun, but they are armed with deceptively hidden suicide bomb. However, pattern recognising machine vision might eventually notice this, so the blur between what is real and what isn’t will become essential to the human deceivers. Machine learning, the process of how computers learn, is made up of a few areas, but the main two are statistics and epistemology. The ability to thwart these two areas will be the thrust of such a strategy. It’ll be about spamming the vast number of sensors and data mining capabilities with chaff, contradictory information, and bad data. Not that much different to what happens in war now. The Clausewitzian Colin Gray would agree; war with robots will probably be just like war now.

A third strategy will be attacking the gap between the military and their new toys (I’m assuming that the robots don’t rise up against them, and that like my statement above about the perennial nature of warfare that these autonomous killing machines will be killing the same third-world guerrillas). Striking this air gap is going to be essential. Take this hilarious entry on wikipedia about robotic sentries on the border of Korea:

In 2006, Samsung Techwire, a subsidiary of Samsung Group, announced a $200,000, all weather, 5.56 mm robotic machine gun to guard the Korean DMZ. It is capable of tracking multiple moving targets using IR and visible light cameras, and is under the control of a human operator. The Intelligent Surveillance and Guard Robot can “identify and shoot a target automatically from over two miles away.” … It is also equipped with communication equipment (a microphone and speakers), “so that passwords can be exchanged with human troops.” If the person gives the wrong password, the robot can “sound an alarm or fire at the target using rubber bullets or a swivel-mounted K-3 machine gun.” South Korea’s 3,500 soldiers in Iraq are “currently using robot sentries to guard home bases.”

The amount of deception opportunities abound, e.g. North Koren special forces and sappers –with a history of being most excellent at deception — sneak up, tape the password, if caught after this they can use the password. Then they could go about re-programming the sentries to fire on their own side by cutting off comms with the human operator and re-installing their own command and control. A lot of effort, but I think it could be done.

So, summing up we have three strategies:

(1) Make use of paradox to confuse robotic reasoning.
(2) Make use of deception to thwart sensors.
(3) Attack the gap between Human-computer interaction.

I could think of many problems with these arguments. One striking example is the trend of singular robots to become swarms. This is also known as physicomimetics. From wiki:

In response to growing concerns that single, monolithic robotic vehicles are expensive, brittle, and vulnerable, there has been a trend toward the development of distributed networks of small, inexpensive vehicles. The capability of these networks to dynamically monitor and sense environmental conditions, while maintaining cost-effectiveness, robustness, and flexibility, is considered to be among their greatest assets.

Vast swarms of robots, a quantitative shift from the qualititative AI, is something I haven’t considered here. One possible solution could be scalable swarm-robotics. Backyard counter-robotics networks, similar to tinkering networks.

Shimon Naveh’s Concept of Mētis

Shimon Naveh is a former General in the Israeli Defence Forces. What makes him interesting is that he has applied continental philosophy like Deleuze and Foucault to warfare. The other part that makes him interesting is this slideshow where he visualizes the structure of Mētis [1]. He explains Mētis as a “mental system” for Generalship, which comes across similar to John Boyd’s survivor attributes and Robert Greene’s “way of seeing“.

All three of these authors have outlined a set of attributes needed to outwit and out-compete other human beings.

The first slide that introduces the concept lists four attributes:

1. Modesty
2. Heresy
3. Skepticism
4. Idealism

The slide itself is this:

He then has a second slide that has an indepth description of what Mētis is:

 

The next slide has the four attributes, and their sub-attributes.

It’s a nice thinking framework that fits in very well with Boyd & Greene’s works. 

Notes

(1) Naveh has a great selection of books at the end of the slideshow. He has listed jumping straight into Deleuze and Guattari’s books, but this is like suggesting someone who wants to learn math jumping straight into calculus without having done trig or algebra. Not that I’m being snobbish about it, but their works are confusing for first time readers. I’d recommend starting with Manuel De Landa. His books are readable, and he is heavily influenced by Deleuze and Guattari. War in the Age of Intelligent Machines is good, but if you want a clear explanation of what Deleuze is about then I’d suggest “Intensive Science & Virtual philosophy.” It was written with the intent of explaining Deleuze’s concepts to scientists and non-philosophers. Then I’d read Deleuze’s “Dialogues” by Claire Parnet. It is (surprisingly) clear as well, and explains Deleuze’s main concepts. From there just jump into whatever chapters in Deleuze & Guattari’s books look interesting too you (I believe they once explained in an interview that is how they wanted them read. A rhizomic reading process for philosophers with ADHD). I’d also check out the limited information out there on the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus. He is (again, suprisingly) very similar to Deleuze in his talks of flows etc.

Notes on Strategy: Boyd’s Patterns of Conflict

Trying to sum up John Boyd‘s briefing ‘Patterns of Conflict’ probably won’t do it justice. The full presentation can be downloaded here (PPT file).

Much of the briefing is a long history of successful patterns within warfare, with Boyd trying to continuously synthesize the patterns into a succinct form (a process he referred to as building snowmobiles).

The three main points I took from it:

1. There are certain “Survivor’s Attributes” that allow individuals and groups to survive.
2. There are successful patterns of conflict within physical, psychological, and moral warfare.
3. The tying together of the two above points into an “art of success” for warfare and survival.

Survivor’s Attributes: Variety, Rapidity, Harmony, & Initiative

The core attributes that an organism must have to survive are a variety of responses, applying those responses rapidily, harmonizing those responses with other organisms, and to be proactive and show the initiative on the preceding three traits. Boyd wrote that they are, “key qualities that permit one to shape and adapt to an ever-changing environment” and whoever “is willing and able to take the initiative to exploit variety, rapidity, and harmony—as the basis to create as well as adapt to the more indistinct – more irregular – quicker changes of rhythm and pattern, yet shape the focus and direction of effort—survives and dominates.”

Patterns of Conflict: Physical, Psychological, and Moral

Before synthesizing the different conflict areas, Boyd separated them into physical, psychological, and moral conflict. The concept was to, “Destroy adversary’s moral-mental-physical harmony, produce paralysis, and collapse his will to resist.”

At the physical level of conflict the aim was to, “Tie-up, divert, or drain-away adversary attention and strength as well as (or thereby) overload critical vulnerabilities and generate weaknesses.”

At the psychological level of conflict the aim was to, “Subvert, disorient, disrupt, overload, or seize those vulnerable yet critical connections, centers, and activities as basis to penetrate, splinter, and isolate remnants of adversary organism for mop-up or absorption.”

At the moral level of conflict the aim was to, “Create an atmosphere of fear, anxiety, and alienation to sever human bonds that permit an organic whole to exist”

The “Art of Success” in Conflict

There are two slides that I consider the most important within Boyd’s briefing. They are quite similar, but I’ll quote both. The first slide is his idea of what strategy should be. He states:

Penetrate adversary’s moral-mental-physical being to dissolve his moral fiber, disorient his mental images, disrupt his operations, and overload his system, as well as subvert, shatter, seize, or otherwise subdue those moral-mental-physical bastions, connections, or activities that he depends upon, in order to destroy internal harmony, produce paralysis, and collapse adversary’s will to resist.

The other slide is entitled “The Art of Success,” which states:

• Appear to be an unsolvable cryptogram while operating in a directed way to penetrate adversary vulnerabilities and weaknesses in order to isolate him from his allies, pull him apart, and collapse his will to resist.

yet

• Shape or influence events so that we not only magnify our spirit and strength but also influence potential adversaries as well as the uncommitted so that they are drawn toward our philosophy and are empathetic toward our success.

Links #4

Via marginal revolution is this behavioural economics blog post on deception, from EconLog. Quote:

“Masonomics looks at the human brain as an organ that is highly evolved to engage in deception, including self-deception. It can reason without necessarily being rational. The way I see it, Masonomics does not necessarily agree that humans tend to choose the best ways to achieve their objectives. Instead, we are limited by our capacity for self-deception, among other shortcomings.

Humans tend to make many mistakes. One way to reduce mistakes is to consult other people on decisions, or even to outsource decision-making to others. Tyler Cowen is intrigued by mechanisms in which the outsourcing choice is voluntary, made by the individual. For example, you ask the waiter to recommend something at a restaurant. One can think of government regulation as the outsourcing of individual decision-making, but with the outsourcing choice not made by the individual.”

Hackers manipulate a Time Magazine poll for the world’s most influential person (via Metafilter). Good quote from Metafilter:

“The poll announces (perhaps subtly) to the world, that the most influential are not the Obamas, Britneys or the Rick Warrens of the world, the most influential are an extremely advanced intelligence: the hackers.”

A new Real-Time Strategy game called R.U.S.E. based on deception and ambushes (via Google News). Video here. There is a good interview here. Quotes:

“Games On Net: We’ve seen what R.U.S.E looks like now, but can you tell us how the concept came about?

Mathieu Gerard, Ubisoft Senior Producer: We had lots of inspirations. Inspirations like Risk, classical real-time strategy games, and also games like poker. Poker is really interesting, because poker is a game of bluffing. When you play Texas Hold ‘Em, you have the “flop” of cards which is shared among the players: everyone shares some information and then there is some incomplete information, and you have to decide based on probabilities and how the other is betting. So it affects perception.

We actually based our fog of war, so to speak, on the Texas Hold ‘Em model. Basically, you can see all the units of the enemy, but you don’t know their type, and you don’t know if they’re real. Some of them might still be hidden, so you have to make decisions based on what your recon gives you, and based on the deception skills you’re going to use to verify or create false information.”

Subtopia has a great post on Tunnels. It reminds me of the Tunnels of Cu Chi, or the tunnel warfare mentioned in the works of Asian warfare theorist H. John Poole. Quote:

“As I see them, the tunnels are among the most adaptive and evolutionary typology in the realm of spatial politics; they’re a kind of liquid landscape capable of circumnavigating anything. Through out history they’ve saved people, defended national sovereignties, some have allowed people to escape immanent torture while others have led to abduction. They’ve been sites of war, refuge, passage, storage, economy, housing, criminality, you name it. They’ve served humanity for as many noble purposes as they have suspect. Today, where border porosity and fluidity are limited the very nature of tunnels gets at the profound violence of architecture via its own decolonization … Their mystery is undeniable, that’s for sure. As spaces of illicit economy, violent cartel turf wars, international trespass, they offer their own notorious appeal to our spatial imaginations … The tunnels as footprint of a global city that cannot be seen. Ghost cities of transnational capital – the tunnels as hard phsyical entrails of network infrastructure’s global legacy. Smuggler urbanism.”

Disinformation tactics on Twitter (via Google News).

A discussion on why Parkinson’s patients are bad liars (via delicious).