Phil Henshaw wrote: > It seems to have been an error to trust our gut feelings about that, but > we got worked up and did it anyway. Potentially complex system theory > could design measures to give people an outside view of these things we > get swept up in. Here are a couple of documents describing counter terrorism strategy of the White House:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/050425/25roots_3.htm http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/02/counter_terrorism/counter_terrorism_strategy.pdf Compare page 13 in the latter (as labeled in pages of the document, or 15 in the page selector) with this RAND project, e.g. page 11 (page 19 in the page selector). http://www.rand.org/pubs/conf_proceedings/2005/RAND_CF212.pdf Five pages later, some "marker issues" are listed that "locate Islamic groups ideologically", namely democracy, human rights, Shari'a law vs. civil law, rights of minorities, status of women, legal rights, public participation, segregation, and "lifestyle" issues. The next page goes on to describe examples of different groups on this spectrum and then gives suggestions on how to use it in a divide and conquer propaganda battle for the hearts and minds of Islamic moderates. These sorts of ideas could be extended into agent models to think about the rates at which such aid and propaganda efforts might progress or backfire. Searching some newspapers or blogs could give some ideas on how such efforts are likely to be resented, e.g. http://zeitgeistgirl.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_zeitgeistgirl_archive.html. In contrast, in today's New York Times, the front page has an article on Hezbollah, _Holding a Gun, Lending a Hand_, which describes the loyalty of Hezbollah fighters due to the support given to them and their families by the organization. Seems like US aid could undermine terrorist organizations by doing better at the same job. All these forces could be considered in an agent model. It probably wouldn't matter if such a simulation had 1e4 or 1e7 agents of different persuasions, but rather the mixing ratios of just enough agents so that the dynamics would be the smooth and similar in a larger simulation of similar demographics for the same relative configuration. Personally, I'd rather have political scientists and technical people developing crude models of various international stability situations than flushing billions of tax dollars down the drain on a gut feeling Maybe provide real time updates to one of those CNN ticker lines showing odds of success, cumulative cost, and expected value. :-) Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
