Boston University of Physics "Brainteaser" Demonstrates Narrowly Focused Intelligence In Action

I blogged recently about how our educational system produces people with very narrowly-focused knowledge. Here it is in action.

The brainteaser, "The Monkey and the Hunter," from the Boston University Department of Physics is as follows:

A hunter spies a monkey in a tree, takes aim, and fires. At the moment the bullet leaves the gun the monkey lets go of the tree branch and drops straight down. How should the hunter aim to hit the monkey?

1. Aim directly at the monkey
2. Aim high (over the monkey's head)
3. Aim low (below the monkey) 

The BU Physic's dept. answer, compete with equations, is based on the simple fact that gravity acts on the monkey and the bullet at the same rate, so that if you aim directly at the monkey, by the time the bullet reaches the monkey, the monkey and the bullet will have dropped the same amount. Thus, their answer is 1.

Which happens to be wrong.

What this really shows is that few BU physics students are hunters. Hunters deal with gravity-induced bullet drop every time they shoot. A rifle isn't sighted in along a straight line from the barrel to the target. The rifle is sighted in to account for the bullet drop at a known shooting distance (typically 100 yards). The shooter either manually compensates or adjusts his scope/sights on the fly if the distance is different, but the point is, the hunter's point of aim is already taking gravity's effect on the bullet into account. Unless the hunter knew for a fact back when he sighted in his rifle that he was going to be shooting at falling monkeys, he would not aim directly at the monkey, because that point of aim is already lower than a straight line, to account for bullet drop. He would have to estimate how much the bullet would drop due to gravity and adjust his aim by that much.

Unfortunately, an education in physics at Boston University doesn't equip you with any knowledge about how people deal with gravity in practical applications every day.

The U.N.: A Force For Decline?

I was reading Vladimir Putin's Op-Ed in the New York Times and it got me thinking again about the United Nations. My distrust of the organization is not new. I think it's a corrupt vehicle for greedy parasites and stealth world socialists and marxists.

But lately I've been thinking that not only the U.N. is bad, but some of what people consider the civilized norms that the institution is intended to promote are bad. In other worlds, the U.N. isn't just bad because it's a failure at what it does. It's also bad to the extent that it succeeds!

Prior to the 20th century, conquest of one nation by another was something that happened frequently. Nations were not considered to have a fundamental right of existence. Nations were created, destroyed, merged and fractured with great regularity. It was an accepted reality of global politics.

However, during the 20th century, not starting with the U.N., but growing as a general sentiment expressed in the world of international politics and in the failed League of Nations, was the idea that invading another country is wrong. Conducting wars of conquest is wrong.

This assertion is, I think, generally accepted by at least the world at large. The consequence is that international borders have become virtually set in stone. The only time they change is when a state fails so badly that it breaks up into smaller states (the origin of the world Balkanization), such as in Sudan and South Sudan and, of course, the Balkans, or, theoretically, when two independent states jointly agree to merge (has that happened in modern times?).

Many current nations didn't even exist until the early 20th century -- Iraq, Jordan, Israel or Somalia. In fact, if you look at a historical maps of Africa from the early 19th century, the borders are almost unrecognizable compared to modern maps. But now, every nation's sovereign borders are considered inviolate, and wars of aggression, no less conquest, attract international outcry.

And therein lies the problem. We have determined that even the worst nations -- nations that are essentially lawless no-man's-lands like Somalia, are "too big to fail." We acknowlege, enforce and revere their borders long after those borders cease to contain anything like an actual functioning nation state.

These facts -- new nations only form from the dissolution of sufficiently failed nations and wars of conquest are not acceptable -- are almost an ironclad recipe for slow decline. The only direction we willingly let nations go is down.

In previous times, an utterly dysfunctional land would be considered ripe for takeover by a more-functional neighboring land. This is how all successful states grew. There was no sense that Somalia had a "right" to be Somalia instead of, say, Northern Kenya.

The United States may never have been settled at all, if the right of natives to their native lands had been respected, or it may have stopped as a little coastal strip, or with the Louisiana purchase -- at whatever point it was at when the modern world's towering respect for international borders took hold.

This would have been a disaster then, and it's a growing disaster now. We view successful nations as having equal rights of existence to failed nations. We even recognize the right of our sworn enemies, Iran and North Korea, to exist.

We've abandoned the creative destruction that has been the engine of world progress, because we're no longer willing to throw away bad ideas when they're shaped like a nation. It's entirely possible that the current national borders are, in many locations, bad ideas. The idea was touched on in Iraq by the proponents of the three state solution, but even this solution stopped at the borders to Iraq.

It's as if no U.S. car company was ever allowed to go out of business. Ha, yes, I know it seems we actually think this way now. Anytime one of the big three looks like it's in real danger of failing, the government steps in. But once upon a time, the big three wasn't the big three. There was competition with Packard, AMC, Hudson, Dodge, and many others.

Imagine if the list of U.S. automobile manufacturers was frozen in 1920 with all of them being considered "too big to fail" or having a "right of existence?" What kind of dysfunctional, parasitic government tenant corporations would we be saddled with?

We enforce the existence of failed nations, unless they fall apart into smaller states. But smaller states are less capable states: they have fewer resources, fewer people, they're less capable of great things. Switzerland is a wonderful country, but nobody looks to it to lead the space race. Swiss ideals of industry and culture will never dominate the world, because the Swiss are content being an insular people. But even if tomorrow they changed their mind, if they decided to invade and acquire failing Italy to the south, the entire world would have a proverbial cow. It would never be allowed.

Instead, Italy will be able to continue with, in the words of Animal House, its "long tradition of existence" no matter how utterly it has failed as a nation. This despite the fact that Italy in the form of its current borders is less than 150 years old -- a blink of the eye, in historical terms.

This excessive respect and veneration of national boundaries serves, of course, the entrenched interests. The elite. The holders of the reins of power. It's rent-seeking and cronyism on the international level. They all make a lot of noise about the spread of freedom and democracy, but the minute one of them started spreading freedom and democracy in the way that we know worked historically -- conquest -- the rest of the world would have a fit. They're far more interested in maintaining the status quo.

So we're stuck with a lot of ossified states, coasting along on their guaranteed right to exist, until they become so utterly failed that their own citizens tear them apart from within, condemning them to chaos or Balkanization. Historically, we'd been moving away from the city-state. It was a failed model. But that's the only direction allowed, now, and that means trouble down the line.

Things That Show That Someone Is Not Being Objective

I was reading some news and got redirected to an article on a blog called The Duck of Minerva, titled, "So, you want a job in policy."

I'm sure the advice was good. I'll assume so, since, as someone with no interest in a job in policy, I really don't care.

The advice in the post is second hand from Katherine Kidder

Katherine Kidder is a Research Associate at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) where she works on the Military, Veterans and Society Program.

Ms. Kidder is a Doctoral Candidate in Security Studies at Kansas State University, where she focused on defense and development policy. She writes extensively on military retention rates, professional military education, defense budgeting, and foreign aid. Prior to coming to CNAS, Ms. Kidder was the Veteran Student Services coordinator at Kansas State University, where she aided veterans through the transition from military life to university life.

Ms. Kidder holds a Bachelor of Science in History with an emphasis on military history and a Master of Arts in Security Studies, both from Kansas State University. She is the spouse of an active duty Army officer, and remains active in the Army community.

What I found interesting were some of the blanket assertions about Washington, D.C. people and the Washington, D.C. community. If you read between the lines, what you learn more than anything is this: these people think really highly of themselves.

Start with this assertion: "All interns in this city are smart. Really. All of them." Fifty years of life have taught me that anytime you get a sufficiently large group of people together, you're going to get some idiots. Take Congress: we've got a sitting congressman who believes that the island of Guam could capsize if too many people are on it.

I have no doubt that Washington policy interns are no different. I mean, some of the people who thought that Iran would join with us to help oppose Syria's use of chemical weapons if we just showed them good enough evidence had to be interns at some point, right? But it's very important to their image that they think of themselves as the "best and brightest." I really doubt it. There are many thousands of very, very bright people who want nothing to do with that life, for sensible reasons, and many thousands of stupid people who go into that life for all the wrong reasons.

This very human tendency to ascribe superior qualities to one's own tribe has a corollary: if your tribe is the best and brightest, other tribes must necessarily be inferior. This explains the natural gravity toward statism in Washington policy and bureaucracy. "We're the brightest, so of course we know best. We know better what they need than they do themselves."

I think an assumption behind this is that all these people come from good schools, they all have M.A.s or Ph.D.s, they must be smart! I've worked with a whole lot of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s over the years and, lord, believe me, they're not all smart. Success in advanced academics selects for a certain set of talents -- the talents of being good at studying, taking tests, writing research papers, and researching deeply into a very narrow academic area. Those skills don't make you a genius. In fact it's a truism that the more advanced the degree the less the person knows in the broader sense.

Once upon a time, we venerated the "Renaissance Man," the sort of man who could paint a masterpiece in the morning and design a new kind of water pump that afternoon. The modern university system is designed -- almost deliberately it would seem -- to ruthlessly weed out that sort of person.

Instead, the typical path is: Get a B.A. or B.S. in some broader but still tightly targeted area, such as Ms. Kidder's history degree, then find a narrower area such as "Security Studies" and pick a thesis in that that hasn't already been done to death by 10,000 other grad students. Then, find an even more esoteric specialization within your doctoral field (in Kidder's case, Security Studies, again) to base your dissertation on, and after many years of study, you are an absolute expert in a very narrow, obscure area of knowledge.

To characterize such a person as "smart" just based on that degree is to demean the notion of what it is to be smart (no offense to Ms. Kidder, I'm just using her academic path as an example). Even worse, it takes genuine smartness and buries it deep in a blinkered academic education.

The university pays lip service to the renaissance ideal by implementing a common core curriculum at the undergraduate level, to supposedly ensure that engineers get some humanities courses and humanities majors have to have some exposure to science and math, but it's widely understood that these core requirements are a joke and that, overall, the system is designed to turn out computer scientists and engineers that know nothing about politics, history and literature, history and English majors who can barely calculate a tip, and economists who have no idea how to run a business.

I work every day with people like this: they are very competent at their jobs. In that respect, I suppose they are smart, but take them outside their comfort zone and they're babes in the woods. Knowing a lot about military retention rates doesn't mean you know a thing about, say, economics. But, my observation of this crew has told me that they simply assume that since they're very well-educated in their areas, they're smart enough to make judgments in many areas where they have towering ignorance. Their culture encourages this.

The strange thing about this town is that what you claim to be an expert on, your [sic] are perceived to be an expert on until proven otherwise (which can be a really good thing or a dangerously bad thing!)

 Hmm. That doesn't sound very smart, does it? In fact, it sounds suspiciously like these highly credentialed people are assuming that credentials equal actual expertise and, even worse, working competence. I suppose that's comforting to them: "I have a Ph.D. This piece of paper means I must be smart!" The assertion that this "can be a really good thing" is never explored or proven. I think the "dangerously bad" part is obvious. It does certainly fit in with the perception of us outsiders that D.C. is filled with charlatans, frauds, sycophants and empty status-seekers.

This is the town that has been trying to sell us on the genius of Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Somehow, I'm not convinced.

Just as in Academia, publications carry a lot of weight. But the difference in Washington is that volume kind of counts for more than quality (I know…it makes me shudder).

 Another admission that form is more important than substance.

So start getting your name out there with smaller pieces- op-eds, pieces in smaller publications, etc. Of course, it never hurts to have a piece placed in ForeignPolicy.com or Foreign Affairs- but when in doubt, get something out there. And this is a great way to get an edge on your “expertise.”

It's the unconscious details that mean the most. The "expertise" in scare quotes is particularly telling. Not real expertise, just so-called "expertise."

Do you suppose people like this, a tightly-knit, highly competitive crowd with an inflated sense of their self-worth, an unsubstantiated faith in credentialed academics, and an extreme eagerness to ingratiate itself with senior people in the "really tiny" communities they're competing to be part of  might be susceptible to, oh, group think? Yeah. me too.

Who Needs Pravda When You've Got The New York Times?

It's official: The New York Times is the U.S. propaganda outlet for Vladimir Putin

A Red Line

I'm going to say that Barack Obama has crossed a Red Line with his incompetent handling of Middle East foreign policy.

A year from now. I fully intend to assert that, hey, it wasn't my Red Line, it was the world's Red Line, and the credibility of the world is at stake if they don't get rid of Barack Obama.

Slate "Likes" Irony On Privacy

Slate magazine has this good article on safeguarding your children's online privacy. The article focuses on how Facebook works to tie your real life to your online identity, is building facial recognition databases, behavioral databases and social connection databases that extend well beyond your Facebook friends list. This should give you pause not just for your children's privacy of course.

The irony? You can't post to Slate unless you have an account on one of the big social networking sites: Facebook, Yahoo, Google or Twitter. Of course, I have to have a Google account to use Blogger. But I try to diversify. I rarely post elsewhere using this account. I imagine it wouldn't be that hard to connect the dots, and Google knows a disturbingly large amount about me, but I work to limit it.

I don't have Facebook or Twitter accounts. The first because Facebook is simply nothing but a giant data collection engine and because I find Twitter to be the intellectual equivalent of a lobotomy. I also won't sign in on Yahoo or Google to outside services because I don't want to cross-link all that info.

Many sites suck up your entire contact list when you sign on with Google or Yahoo, plus they all cross-pollinate with tracking cookies, and then link that info back to your social networking identities even on third-party sites. See that little "like" button on your favorite site? Facebook knows you were there, even if you didn't click "like." If the site doesn't have a "like" button, they're probably serving ads from a major ad agency, and the fact that you viewed the ad is purchaseable info. All they have to do is link the ad cookie with your Google/Yahoo/Facebook/Twitter/Tumblr cookies and they can add that info into the massive online profile of Everything You've Ever Done On the Internet. That exploratory foray into broccoli-fetish.com? That Google search for "hot sexy livestock?" Oh, yeah, they know about all that. And they can tie it to you. Individually. Probably to your real name.

What all that means is, at Slate, and many sites, unless you're willing to buy into the whole privacy-robbing social networking industrial complex, they don't want to hear from you. In fact, the sites that don't tie into one of the major social networking sites or one of the commenting service giants like Disqus or Livefyre, are getting few and far between.

You can try to obfuscate, but unless you're willing to live the life of a serious privacy wonk, using Tor and anti-tracking software, you're probably failing.

So: write articles about protecting your privacy. Require you to sacrifice all your privacy to comment.

Nice.

Attacking Syria: Why Us?

The ambivalence of many Congressmen mirrors my own. You can't wage war by bureaucracy and with pre-defined limits (and bombing another country is making war, no matter how you try to "nuance" it). If you establish to the world beforehand that your military actions will be narrowly defined and follow a pre-established script, you fundamentally undercut one of the prime fears of your enemy -- that he doesn't know how far you are willing to go in pursuit of your goals. We saw this demonstrated in Afghanistan and Iraq once the wars there were put on timetables. Afghanistan suddenly got a lot more dangerous for our troops, and in Iraq whatever good we had done for the country swiftly unraveled.

I reject the notion that the chemical weapons represent any more threat to U.S. interests than the conventional weapons both sides are using. The reality is that the U.S. is acting as morality cop for a conflict it has little interest in, otherwise. And why? Obama and the anti-war left have repeatedly chastised the U.S, for its interventionist arrogance, claiming that this arrogance has soured the world's opinion of the U.S. Fair enough, if that's what they think, let's follow that to its logical conclusion. We have here a situation where no major nation but France seems to feel that the situation warrants intervention. So why do we presume that it falls on us? If this is such an important humanitarian disaster, why is it *our* job to do something about it when the U.K., Germany, Australia, Canada, India, Canada, Israel and every other supposedly free western nation with money or an army feels like it's not worth stepping in?

If the chemical weapons are so bad, let the oh-so-civilized, nuanced EU do something about it. Let Sweden, whose Nobel Peace Prize Committee is so willing to engage in frivolous anti-Americanism pony up some blood and money instead of mere words.