Update: JSTOR does not appear to include RUSI Journal. If anyone has access to a library that does have it, please do us a favor and look it up.
elharo
Karma: 2,376
You’re vastly overstating the criticisms of S. L. A Marshall. He did not just make up his figures. His research was not an invention. He conducted hundreds of interviews with soldiers who had recently been in combat. The U.S. Army found this research quite valuable and uses it to this day. Some people don’t like his conclusions, and attempt to dispute them, but usually without attempting to collect actual data that would weigh against Marshall’s.
The Wikipedia article’s claim that “Professor Roger J. Spiller (Deputy Director of the Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command and General Staff College) demonstrated in his 1988 article, “S.L.A. Marshall and the Ratio of Fire” (RUSI Journal, Winter 1988, pages 63–71), that Marshall had not actually conducted the research upon which he based his ratio-of-fire theory” appears to be false. Spiller’s article criticizes Marshall’s methodology and points out a number of weaknesses in his later accounts. However it does not claim that the interviews Marshall described did not take place. Rather it suggests that Marshall intentionally or unintentionally sometimes inflated the number of interviews he had conducted, though it still allows for hundreds to have taken place. The RUSI article doesn’t seem to be online, (I’ll try and see if JSTOR has a copy) but some relevant portions are quoted here.
I agree that Marshall’s evidence is not perfect. I’d be interested to see better evidence, and if it came to different conclusions than he did, using better research techniques, then I would update my beliefs accordingly. Until I am see such research, though I am very wary of poorly sourced ad hominem attacks.
Maybe. However many scholars and other authors (Isaac Asimov comes to mind) have criticized this tendency in Tolkien. There’s an extent to which Middle Earth post-War and the Shire in particular are wish fulfillment. This is what Tolkien wants the world to be. For one recent take see The Anti Tolkien in the latest issue of the New Yorker which gives Michael Moorcock his say:
Moorcock thinks Tolkien’s vast catalogue of names, places, magic rings, and dwarven kings is, as he told Hari Kunzru in a 2011 piece for The Guardian, “a pernicious confirmation of the values of a morally bankrupt middle class.”
That is a really clever mixup of different argumentation modes. That being said, Mr. Cochran strangling one of his opponents would still be only weak evidence that it is not so difficult for humans to psych themselves up to kill another human.
First of all, he hasn’t actually done it (I presume).
Secondly, we know it’s difficult, not impossible.
Thirdly, we know there are sociopaths and psychopaths who can do this without much thought, as well as perhaps normal people who have become desensitized to killing. Fortunately these are a small percentage of the populace.
There is, in fact, a large amount of research that has gone into studying the minds of people who kill: in wartime, in criminal activity, in law enforcement, and so forth; and there is a strong consensus that for most people intentional killing is hard. For example,
In World War Two, it is a fact that only 15-20 percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. That is one in five soldiers actually shooting at a Nazi when he sees one. While this rate may have increased in desperate situations, in most combat situations soldiers were reluctant to kill each other. The Civil War was not dramatically different or any previous wars.
In WW2 only one percent of the pilots accounted for thirty to forty percent of enemy fighters shot down in the air. Some pilots didn’t shoot down a single enemy plane.
In Korea, the rate of soldiers unwilling to fire on the enemy decreased and fifty five percent of the soldiers fired at the enemy. In Vietnam, this rate increased to about ninety five percent but this doesn’t mean they were trying to hit the target. In fact it usually took around fifty-two thousand bullets to score one kill in regular infantry units! It may be interesting to not that when Special Forces kills are recorded and monitored this often includes kills scored by calling in artillery or close air support. In this way SF type units could score very high kill ratios like fifty to a hundred for every SF trooper killed. This is not to say these elite troops didn’t score a large number of bullet type kills. It is interesting to note that most kills in war are from artillery or other mass destruction type weapons.
If one studies history and is able to cut through the hype, one will find that man is often unwilling to kill his fellow man and the fighter finds it very traumatic when he has to do so. On the battlefield the stress of being killed and injured is not always the main fear.
-- William S. Frisbee, The Psychology of Killing
If you want a more detailed look at this, including lots of references to the original Defense Department research, there are a number of good books by army officers including On Killing by Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman. One of the originals is Men Against Fire by World War I Officer S. L. A Marshall. Bruce Siddle’s work, more focused on law enforcement, is also worth a look. E.g. Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge.
None of these are perfect or irrefutable evidence. For instance, the research I’m aware focuses primarily on U.S. and British troops and police officers. It’s certainly possible that this is culturally conditioned and the results might be different elsewhere. However, I’ve yet to see any strong critiques of the general consensus about the difficulty of killing in war. The best evidence we have is that killing is in fact difficult for most people, most of the time, even in war.
Drop the dates in the title. They just make the book seem old and outdated.
We’re similarly shocked whenever authority figures who are supposed to know what they’re doing make it plain that they don’t, President Obama’s healthcare launch being probably the most serious recent example. We shouldn’t really be shocked, though. Because all these stories illustrate one of the most fundamental yet still under-appreciated truths of human existence, which is this: everyone is totally just winging it, all the time.
Institutions – from national newspapers to governments and politicial parties – invest an enormous amount of money and effort in denying this truth. The facades they maintain are crucial to their authority, and thus to their legitimacy and continued survival. We need them to appear ultra-competent, too, because we derive much psychological security from the belief that somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are some near-infallible adults in charge.
In fact, though, everyone is totally just winging it.
-- Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian, May 21, 2014
Possible, but unlikely. We’re all just winging it and as others have pointed out, impostor syndrome is a thing.
Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine has published my flash piece “To the Point” in their January/February issue. It’s short (250 words) but at 10 cents a word, it’s my first Mystery Writers of America qualifying sale.
It strikes me that the original Franklin quote really identifies a specific case of the availability heuristic. That is, when you’re focused on safety, you tend to adopt policies that increase safety, without even considering other values such as liberty.
There may also be an issue of externalities here. This is really, really common in law enforcement. For example, consider civil asset forfeiture. It is an additional legal tool that enables police to catch and punish more criminals, more easily. That it also harms a lot of innocent people is simply not considered because their is no penalty to the police for doing so. All the cost is borne by people who are irrelevant to them.
That someone has never experienced some state X does not imply that they do not have a vision for the state X they wish to achieve in the future. If you want to know what someone’s positive vision for the future is, ask them, “What is your vision for a better future?”; not “Have you experienced something better than this in the past?” These are two very different questions.
Most people grow up in some status quo.* That doesn’t mean they can conceive of no alternative to that status quo.
What qualifies as “status quo” is of course very local to some time, place, and subculture. The status quo described in the article quoted isn’t remotely close to anything I’ve ever seen, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t an accurate reflection of the status quo at one particular English-speaking university in Montreal in the early teens.
I’m reminded of Eisenhower:
I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of “emergency” is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.
-- From a speech to the National Defense Executive Reserve Conference in Washington, D.C. (November 14, 1957) ; in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1957, National Archives and Records Service, Government Printing Office, p. 818 : ISBN 0160588510, 9780160588518
SJs? Can you elaborate? I’m not sure what you’re referring to.
This strikes me as a common failing of rationality. Personally I’ve never really noticed it in politics though. People arguing politics from all corners of the spectrum usually know exactly what they want to happen instead, and will advocate for it in great detail.
However, in science it is extremely common for known broken theories to be espoused and taught because there’s nothing (yet) better. There are many examples from the late 19th/early 20th centuries before quantum mechanics was figured out. For example, the prevailing theory of how the sun worked used a model of gravitational contraction that simply could not have powered the sun for anything like the known age of the earth. That model wasn’t really discarded until the 1920s and 30s when Gamow and Teller figured out the nuclear reactions that really did power the sun.
There are many examples today, in many fields, where the existing model simply cannot be accurate. Yet until a better model comes along scientists are loath to discard it.
This irrationality, this unwillingness to listen to someone who says “This idea is wrong” unless they can also say “and this alternative idea is right” is a major theme of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
You did. Demand for computer professionals is noticeably higher than the supply. It therefore is much easier to become a highly paid computer professional than a successful doctor/lawyer/teacher/writer/police officer/scientist/musician/real estate agent/salesperson/etc.
Unlike WoW and other MMORPGs, nothing in the real world requires different character classes to be balanced in leveling, power, and effort. Being a computer professional in the early 21st century is like playing the game on easy mode.
Rationality Quotes November 2014
Third Flatiron has published my short story Refusing the Call in their winter anthology, Abbreviated Epics. (Also available from amazon for kindle and paper).
This story isn’t explicitly rationalist fiction, but I do expect readers will find my protagonist to be a tad more compos mentis than the usual fantasy hero in the Harold Shea/Richard Blade/John Carter/Tarl Cabot/Wiz Zumwalt/Thomas Covenant/Adam Strange/Pevensie mold.
November 2014 Monthly Bragging Thread
if people use data and inferences they can make with the data without any concern about error bars, about heterogeneity, about noisy data, about the sampling pattern, about all the kinds of things that you have to be serious about if you’re an engineer and a statistician—then you will make lots of predictions, and there’s a good chance that you will occasionally solve some real interesting problems. But you will occasionally have some disastrously bad decisions. And you won’t know the difference a priori. You will just produce these outputs and hope for the best.
--Michael I. Jordan, Pehong Chen Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Machine-Learning Maestro Michael Jordan on the Delusions of Big Data and Other Huge Engineering Efforts
As usual, the word “better” hides a lot of relevant detail. Better for whom? By what measure?
Shockingly, in at least some cases by some measures, though, it works better for us if I pay your debt and you pay my debt, because it is possible for a third party to get much, much better terms on repayment than the original borrower. In many cases, debts can be sold for pennies on the dollar to anyone except the original borrower. See any of these articles
--Anita Wooley, Thomas W. Malone. and Christopher Chabris, Why Some Teams Are Smarter Than Others, New York Times, January 16. 2015