j a c k *

Defensive Dreams...

For that reason, you need some sort of big engine to drive true high-tech innovation, an engine that values innovation for its own sake, rather than for any practical reason. That’s the Pentagon (and to some degree NIH, but forget that for now.)

Raul Groom at Liberal Avenger correctly points out the fact (awkward to capitalism's True Believers) that public money is a powerful, perhaps even essential, stimulant to innovation.  In fact modern industries considered testaments to the boldness of capitalists -- personal computers, biotech, the Internet -- were mostly a result of entrepreneurs moving in to colonize market spaces pioneered by government-funded research.

I disagree, however, that the Pentagon's missile defense program can be justified on these grounds.  Basic research is a good thing, and public investment can have returns many times what society puts into it, but we have to have some standards.  First of all, after decades of work and hundreds of billions of dollars the MDA has nothing to show.  Instead progress seems to be moving backwards.  More recent tests have had less ambitious goals than equivalent tests from several years ago.  That's not a good sign.  Moreover every independent feasibility study has come out against the very premise of the program ever producing working hardware.  Finally ICBMs just aren't the threat they used to be.  As has become painfully clear in recent wars we should be worried about portable missile launchers and IED's, not space weapons.

Absent the stated objectives of the program, to justify it as a platform for innovation you would have to show two things.  One, that it's a fruitful area of research, likely to produce interesting or useful discoveries and inventions; and two, that it's cost-effective relative to other alternatives.  I think it fails pretty soundly on both counts.  The technology to intercept ballistic missiles is -- surprise! -- another ballistic missile.  It's basically a souped-up version of a rocket from the 70's.  Same tracking systems, same boosters, same basic guidance systems.  Admittedly the guidance has to be about a jillion times more accurate (and therefore equally more prone to error or deliberate interference), but it's fundamentally the same.  Nothing new to see here.

As for cost-effectiveness -- that's hard to say.  Perhaps the program is generating a lot of technology per dollar, perhaps not.  It's difficult to know that because anything novel the program creates would be mostly classified.  Even to the extent that it can be audited it is protected from criticism by the political mantle of National Defense.  No doubt anyone who would question the value of this effort really want to help America's enemies.

But we can compare it to other programs.  The Manhattan Project was a large and expensive weapons research project (about $20 billion in today's dollars), but differs from missile defense because it was actually successful.  Starting from a small research group in 1939, the atom bombs it produced were dropped on Japan six years later, and the program was disbanded a year after that.  If the MDA had a track record like that no one would be complaining.

The Apollo moonshot program was also large and expensive (estimated at $135 billion in today's dollars).  Although some have argued that all we got was some lunar photo ops and a few hundred pounds of rocks, NASA takes pains to point out all the modern spin off technologies that resulted from the public investment in space.  Today NASA maintains a department dedicated to assisting and helping to fund ventures wishing to commercialize their aerospace technology.  Sponsoring innovation and moving it to the private sector is an explicit part of the NASA mandate.

I think Americans rather underestimate the direct rewards of Apollo.  As a voyage of exploration what it returned was not just samples or even new scientific knowledge.  What it gave us was a new outlook.  Those now ubiquitous images from Apollo 8 were the icon for a different type of environmental movement -- one that could see the whole Earth as a single interconnected planet.  Armstrong and Aldrin inspired millions of children all over the world to dream of being astronauts themselves, not to collect rocks but to experience the adventure.  Star Wars the movie might make kids want to study math, but Star Wars the weapons program never will.

There is a place for innovation in defense, of course, and that's exemplified by DARPA.  It's greatest success was probably ARPANet, the forerunner of the modern Internet, but they are currently funding some very cost-effective innovation.  After many years and who knows how many dollars of failing at top-down efforts to develop autonomous vehicles, DARPA took the unusual approach of offering a prize.  Within two years the Grand Challenge had resulted in several prototype vehicles that could complete the 132 mile course over very difficult terrain, the fastest in under 7 hours.  At $2 million for the prize and perhaps $10 million a year in administrative costs, it has to be one of the cheapest government research programs ever.  NOVA's episode about it is notable for humanizing the story, leaving us rooting for the plucky robots and their brilliant inventors.

It's hard to see how missile defense can compete with something like that.

- jack*

Material Matters...

Early in my blogging history I wrote I was a materialist.  Like Aristotle I believe that the material universe is really all that exists and that it is sufficient unto itself.  Dadahead dissented:

But even more importantly: what in the world could make someone so hubristic as to assert, with absolutely no evidence, that humans, a single species on a single planet that happened to arise as an accident of evolution, have nonetheless capable of knowing the whole of reality?!? What could possibly justify the claim that the human animal is somehow capable of painting a comprehensive picture of the universe? Why should we suppose--again, with no argument or evidence--that reality in its entirety must conform to the concepts and theories of human scientists?

I've taken my time coming up with a response, but while blog threads go cold very quickly there is no statute of limitations on philosophical arguments.  I want to comment on a few things in the quote above because it casts into very clear language typical objections to science in general: overreaching and hubris.

Overreaching here argues that because our scientific knowledge is nowhere near complete, we cannot say anything about the ultimate shape of reality.  It's clear from even a cursory glimpse at the history of science that knowledge derived from science has never given a comprehensive or even wholly accurate picture of the universe.  Scientific knowledge evolves.  Every experiment answers one question and poses ten more; every theory begs insistently to be falsified; every law lays out a program for its own destruction.  Cast by some as weaknesses, these in fact are the great strength of the scientific method -- it can bend the face of evidence.  Science, more than any other method of inquiry, has an open mind.  The gaps in scientific knowledge, however, say nothing about materialism.  While there are many things we don't know, we know a great deal about the shape of the puzzle pieces that will fill in the gaps.  New knowledge, however revolutionary, is unlikely to throw into question the core understanding that lies at the backbone of science.  Even though the physics of 1915, for example, looked very different from that of 1885, it was ultimately still materialistic.  The curvature of space-time and the particle-wave duality -- while novel -- were entirely effable, measurable, and objective.  Any future extensions of scientific knowledge will most likely be equally material in nature.

Hubris is also a common charge leveled against science.  But it is not arrogant to state with confidence that which we know to be true.  If I say that it's impossible to separate a power higher than the second into two like powers, that is not hubris but irrefutable truth hard won by centuries of mathematical toil.  Likewise, if we say with confidence that humanity arose by a blind process of variation and natural selection -- 'an accident of evolution' as Dadahead acknowledges above -- that is not hubris but an accurate explanation of our own origins that we are privileged to know by virtue of painstaking scientific research spiced by inspired insight.  If we state these truths proudly it's because of all the careful effort that first went into justifying them.

Together these amount to a charge of "scientism," a multi-faceted epithet which in this case refers to the belief that science is the only method which can arrive at truth.  Most agree that science is the best method ever employed for determining truths about the physical universe.  If you also accept that the universe consists of nothing but the physical, then science is the best method for determining truths about the universe, period.  This sounds like hubris to some.  But they have failed to grasp the profoundly deep humility of science: that all truths are provisional.  Everything we think we understand, all the mathematical laws, all the elaborate theories, everything is subject to skepticism and revision.  Even the scientific method itself.  If a new approach could be shown to have a better claim to accuracy, the old methods of science would humbly step aside.

Even the philosophical underpinnings of science are open to investigation.  Science is said to be grounded in "methodological naturalism," a tentative form of materialism that acts as a metaphysical foundation upon which other scientific results can rest.  But it is not, at least in principle, axiomatic or dogmatic.  Naturalism, like all scientific theories, is justified by abduction, because it fits the data better than other explanations.  In essence, it's true because it works.  If we imagine that this most basic theory is itself held provisionally and could be revised, what kind of evidence could be presented that would falsify it, even in part?

But we can do better than wait for evidence that will never come.  While even well-supported theories like Evolution remain tentative and provisional scientific truths, materialism is much stronger.  Materialism is true analytically.  The argument goes like this:

1. existence is objective
2. objectivity requires evidence
3. evidence is material
4. therefore, existence is material

This probably looks very weak on the face of it, something you could smash easily with a well-chosen aphorism.  I will endeavor in future posts to put flesh on this skeletal syllogism.  While not strictly formal, hopefully when the terms are defined and the loopholes are closed this argument will help persuade you, like me, of the necessity of materialism.

- jack*