New Mars Forums

Yes, this is one of the most agonizing issues I can think of, especially when the children, as Cindy mentions, have extremely debilitating conditions such as Down's syndrome which make them essentially unemployable in a society where almost all jobs require considerable technical training. How many of these will the settlement be willing to handle, especially through the long lifetime that, hopefully, the most advanced medical techniques would make potentially available.

Should they all be sent back to Earth? Will there be a community vote on each one to see whether they stay or go? Should the colonists adopt a modified Spartan strategy and subject them to euthanasia? Should some of the tremendous talent of the settlers be used to invent a job which would be worthwhile for them to do (possible if the numbers are small)? Or will one of the Martian colonies be the most advanced developmental biology lab in the known universe?

There would sure be a stronger impetus to solve these problems on Mars than on Earth.

Clark, your analysis is very interesting. Certainly the social group profoundly influences our understanding of events. And, as you indicate, it is a long, slow process of ego development. And many parts of our cognitive functioning are unconscious or "preconscious". All that being said, however, it is a big jump from there to your statement that individual choice is an illusion. While I only have a cursory awareness of its contents, there is an extensive philosophical literature on this issue and deep controversy remains. I personally rely upon my experience of "hard choices" and modern experimental literature based on brain scanning which indicates that there is a specific area of the brain which becomes more active when we exert the mental effort involved in choice.

I agree with the first sentence. And ego formation does occur along many of the lines you suggest. However, I believe your statesments about neurosis or psychosis appearing when the system is under stress have been outdated by current evidence. Other things being equal, system stress results in the temporary disturbances in behavior called "adjustment disorders". While some brief psychotic phenomena due to stress sometimes appear, generally psychosis requires additional specific biological weaknesses. Neurosis is no longer a term recognized diagnostically by the American Psychiatric Association. Even in its former usage, however, the disorders described (e.g. anxiety disorders, most forms of depression, etc.) also depend on additional biological foundations in order to appear in a persistent form.

In any event, thanks for the interesting ideas. There is a lot about ego development which will be critically important in a developing Martian civilization, not to mention dealing with problems here on earth.  [

To me the concrete issue is the more advanced technology on the battlefield and whether or not that is sufficient to win. In my Afghanistan analogy, the Soviets had generally superior technology but lost to a single technologically superior weapon highly fitted to the geographical circumstances of that particular war. +1, not for superior technology in general, but for having the right superior technology in the right time and the right place. I would be interested to know what Soviet self-constraints influenced the war.

The issue of Vietnam is much more complex. Even the superpower(s) aiding the Viet Cong/NVA had technology notably inferior to the US and it's allies, so their interference had a significant but relatively minor role to play. About the only area where they had technological superiority was in antiaircraft weaponry suitable for jungle terrain. We didn't need it because we weren't being attacked from the air.

Many of our self-constraints in Vietnam have been discussed endlessly, but I am not sure we would have won even if they had not been there, with one exception, direct ground attack on North Vietnam. We had one chance, interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh trail in North Vietnam and further air/sea/ground attacks following the essential annihilation of the Viet Cong in the Tet offensive. Mopping up against the Viet Cong in the south would be accomplished by the South Vietnamese army and civil authorities. But by that time the credibility of the Westmoreland crowd was so poor that nothing could be done.

I don't know where you get your information that there were few successes against the invading army until support from superpower benefactors kicked in. We were invited into S. Vietnam in the first place because the local government was having serious problems with the VC. Then we sent Green Beret advisors and that war is characterized by the book and film of the same name. We might not have been losing but we sure weren't winning, though the long-term possibilities looked promising. And when major American forces entered the war we won the first battle just barely, thanks to excellent reinforcements and the field artillery, and got the stew knocked out of us the very next day when we moved troops in very unfavorable circumstances (high canopy interfering with both close air support and field artillery and high grass concealing substantial enemy forces). Besides the VC/NVA had been receiving superpower support for a long time. No, the original statement was that the ones with the highest tech on the battlefield, if they pursue the war vigorously will win. Well, Vietnam gives a loud and conclusive "No" to that conception. US troops were there for a long time, had technological superiority, and vigorously pursued the battle (until near the end) but stategic, political, and moral failures brought it all to naught.

Well, not exactly naught. At least one of our SEA allies thought we did achieve our objective of so heavily blunting the "domino effect" that the overall communist strategy was stopped. The Vietnamese did go on to occupy both Laos and Cambodia. However, the both the West and the Chinese objected to the occupation of Cambodia (though this was probably an improvement as they took over from Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge). The Chinese invaded Vietnam in a one-month "punitive" expedition which had the result of bringing most of the best Vietnamese forces from Cambodia to the Chinese border where they stayed. Shortly afterwards an internationally negotiated "neutral" government took over Cambodia. The Vietnamese had no essential will to resist this move and the great communist expansion in SE Asia was over. No high tech there, just political and moral factors.

Hmmm. I guess we have to agree to disagree on this one because I think my point is dead heart central. The reason is that our biological foundation was generated in, at latest, neolithic times. With the coming of new technologies and cultures, the old biological foundations may become, not advantages, but disadvantages. One often cited example is continuing to eat as if we were neolithic animals resulting in chronic overweight. As a result, we have to fight "uphill" against our nature to make correct decisions as culture makes more and more of our nature maladaptive. The consequences of this have, of course, been investigated by many. For example, Robert A. Heinlein, in Starship Troopers makes his troopship pilots all women. With all the mechanization, strength and physical stamina aren't needed but superior manual dexterity is. While Heinlein's assumptions can be argued with, the overall point cannot. And if we are going to be constantly changing our conditioning to meet new challenges, the understanding of what is structural and what is content as well as exactly how you have them interact to produce a specific outcome is the meat of the issue.

Thanks. However,  I am not coming up with the book you have in mind. Clarification?

It was U Cal - Berkeley. The project produced a number of books one of which was Barron's Creativity and Personal Freedom.

One of the most fundamental questions in social science. The evidence suggests a complex interplay between them. One way of viewing it is that the structure is always there but the contents are different from culture to culture or even from individual to individual.

For example, one important structural feature of human beings is the tendency to modify our judgements according to social input. Consider a situation in which a group of people, say 11, are gathered in a room with a projector and screen and given some simple task, for example judging which of two lines is the longer. The difference between the lengths of the lines is sufficiently great that there would be no question as to which is actually longer for anyone without seriously impaired eyesight. For each combination of lines, the experimenter goes around the room and each person is asked to make her judgment. In reality, the first 10 people to judge are really stooges and are told how to respond by the experimenter. Only the 11th is the subject and truly free to respond. On most of the trials all agree, but on selected trials the stooges are told to give a wrong answer. The question is how will the 11th person respond?

Many of you already know the answer as this experiment is described in many of the Introductory Psychology and essentionally all of the Introductory Social Psychology textbooks in the country. A large percentage of the subjects will bow to social pressure every time. A much smaller percentage will make independent (and correct) judgements every time. This experiment has been repeated dozens of times in many different variations (e.g. when the subjects are alone in cubicles and the judgements of the stooges are represented by lights on the wall) and the results are always the same. Thus a strong tendency to bow to social pressure even in trivial matters seems to be a strong characteristic of human populations.

Unhappy as their life may be at times, there is an important need to have a few individuals whose judgments remain independent. This is critical for people such as scientists, who can't affort to let their judgments of reality be affected by social rather than scientific considerations. As a matter of fact, a long series of experiments on creativity at the University of California found that independence of judgment (in the sense determined by the previous experiment)  is one of the three most important characteristics of highly creative individuals in many fields both artistic and scientific, the others being preference for complexity in artistic judgments, and, of course, originality.

However universal this tendency may be in populations, this tendency may be modified by the specific, learned contents of people's beliefs. Thus a person who is generally a social conformist may not conform if a social communication violates a well-established religious belief. As we all know, conflicts of this sort are apt to be accompanied by strong emotional reactions, depending on the circumstances, such as anger or fear.

My point, well a lot of things are "natural" tendencies but their expression depends on many learned perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, etc. To see things as "natural" or "instinctive" vs learned and to argue much about which it it is is a largely fruitless enterprise. The useful answer is to understand it's mechanism of operation.

As an example, there is a defective gene which causes phenylalinine (commonly found in food) to be improperly metabolized and generate a neurotoxin. Exposure to this neurotoxin, especially in a young, child can (and in prolonged exposure will) lead to mental retardation. Those who have the defective gene (which is often identified at birth in the US) but don't eat foods containing phenylalinine develop normally (assuming that there is nothing else wrong). It's all in the details.

Are we  sufficiently distinguishing between domestic militarization (heavily armed police and citizenry) and foreign militirization (armies/navies)? Are we distinguishing sufficiently between militirization and the nature of the political system (how well armed the society is vs the degree of political control the society builds in). For example, colonial American society was highly militarized (almost everyone owned and used firearms) but the degree of political control was rather low.

Some light on this question is given by Charles Murray's book, Human Accomplishment. In this rather massive work, Murray identifies a method of identifying people who make significant contributions to the scientific, philosophical, and artistic life of a society and then a way of measuring how relatively important each person's contributions were. He also identifies a way of identifying and counting the contributions themselves. He then takes on the massive task of trying to find those societal circumstances which are favorable to the generation of such contributions and which are not. While the results are complex, and in some areas seemingly contradictory, there was a clear relationship to political models. While cultural productivity is relatively robust over a wide variety of traditional political systems (e.g. monarchies, parliamentary democracies, etc.) there are political systems that are very unfavorable to such contributions. And these are indeed the relatively modern totalitarian states and certain older states (e.g. the Ottoman Empire) which insisted on a high degree of control of all aspects of society.

You are right. Too much "militarization - defined as heavy GOVERNMENT control over firearms and tight political control"
does indeed generate a less innovative, though not necessarily a less economically rich and sophisticated society. For example, the Romans and the ancient Chinese produced few fundamental innovations in art and science but both had, at their peaks, very highly diverse,structured, and wealthy economies.

There's a lot more to it, but there appears to be a set of very good reasons for modern (post Middle Ages) European cultural productivity and some degree of freedom of thought and action is one of them.

Be of good cheer, look at the culturally dominant societies in the world today. Nobody, not even the Chinese, want a Stalinist Russia or a Maoist China anymore. The brief Maoist interruption of the Confucian ideal in Chinese culture will, in the long run, be no more significant than that of the Mongol invasions. (The Mongol dynasty lasted hardly a generation following the death of Kublai Khan).  The only real question is whether or not a "neo-Confucianism" can evolve which allows for more rapid incorporation of change. The tremendous economic success of the dispersed ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, Singapore, the Phillipines, Taiwan, and of derivative cultures in South Korea and Japan suggests that it can.

What about war where the two sides both have some access to technology (a certain minimum level is certainly necessary) but where the side with the fewest weapons and, overall, the poorest technology,wins. E.g. Vietnam.

The case of Afghanistan and the Soviets is especially interesting here. The Soviets had more weapons of generally higher technology, but a single critical weapon made most of the difference.

Well, here's how it worked on Earth in the British Navy before the advent of radio. The Captain was the absolute commander on board ship which was run in military fashion for those on board. Sometimes there was a higher officer (Admiral or Commodore) on another nearby ship in which case control was a little tighter. Otherwise everything was up to the Captain. The fact that they were so far from home and ultimate command was largely irrelevant for daily actions, though it sometimes did cause problems in the larger political context, e.g. The Battle of New Orleans was fought after a peace treaty was signed and the war was over.

Hi Bill,

We met at the Moon-Mars Blitz. Just a note to let you know that I did make it over and registered. I will be exploring the topics for a few days (or a few weeks). Thanks for the referral.

Morris