BenRayfield’s favorites
Recently commented on
Self Defeating Goal
Project: Polytopia
Project: Polytopia
DARPA is USA's military's advanced technology department. There's a lot of geniuses working there.
Their goal is illogical in the context of game-theory and would be insane to continue working toward.
I'm not generally against militaries. If my country was in danger and its military could not handle it, I would do something about it, whatever I thought would solve the problem most effectively for the least resources/cost/effort/problems. But theres a lot of things I don't like about those who control militaries to do certain things, sometimes including the primary purpose of their whole organization, as their website says. This is such an example:
Quote from http://www.darpa.gov/stratvision.html
STRATEGIC VISION
DARPA’s original mission, inspired by the Soviet Union beating the United States into space with Sputnik, was to prevent technological surprise. This mission has evolved over time. Today, DARPA’s mission is to prevent technological surprise for us and to create technological surprise for our adversaries.
DARPA’s main tactic for executing its strategy is to constantly search worldwide for revolutionary high-payoff ideas and then sponsor projects bridging the gap between fundamental discoveries and the provision of new military capabilities.
Like most other parts of the USA government (and most other governments), their individual parts are smarter than the whole government. In general, its a
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_intelligence
problem. Adding more parts complicates it more than its worth, and the whole system diverges into insanity. We see similar problems in computer programming in operating-systems that sometimes are millions of lines of code. Nobody knows how it works except for the few parts they've looked at and worked on. Governments are similar, and their goals are a result of that process that nobody understands.
DARPA's goal, specificly the "prevent technological surprise for us and to create technological surprise for our adversaries" part, is self defeating. If your goal is to surprise your enemies that way, then anyone who is surprised that way is more likely to think that you think they are your enemy, and to keep your technology surprising to your enemies you have to keep it secret from your enemies and some of those who are not your enemies, therefore those who use a similar strategy tend to surprise you more that way, therefore you label them as your enemies (by symmetry of thinking your own strategy is a good one), therefore your strategy increases in cost and decreases in effectiveness over time, therefore your chance of accomplishing your goal decreases over time, therefore your strategy (except in rare cases) will fail.
Considering how smart DARPA's people are, its surprising how they can follow a self-defeating goal that completely ignores any deep analysis using game-theory between countries.
The goal could be improved by trying to not surprise (in that technology way) those who try to not surprise you. More generally, there would be less wars and more efficiency and productivity of the whole Human species if more governments decided to define their enemies as those who keep more secrets. If governments are not doing anything wrong, then they would have nothing to hide. That's what they say to us. Lets say it back to them. Accusations and secret laws about "national security" are a negative-sum-game, and, for example, DARPA is insane and illogical for defining its goal in terms of such a game it has a continuously decreasing chance of winning.
4 comments
| Promote (1) |
|
Add to favorites
|
| Synapses (3) |
|
Connected to
