A refinement Re: [extropy-chat] Wikipedia entry on the Proactionary Principle

Brett Paatsch bpaatsch at bigpond.net.au
Tue Jul 19 02:56:21 UTC 2005


I wrote:

> The Avantguardian wrote:
> 
> 
>> The Doctrine of Pre-emption can be succinctly phrased
>> as "Do unto others BEFORE they do unto you." 
> 
>>This still leaves much room for honorable conduct. 
> 
> With my evolutionary psychology and game theory hat on,
> I think this is wrong Stu, (i.e. I don't see that it leave *much* 
> room for honorable conduct) unless of course the pre-emption
> is of the sort that would be recognized as welcome assistance,
> or "cooperation", otherwise it looks like "defection" that is
> justifiable only by placing an artibrary date or event as the
> beginning and ignoring what took place earlier.
> 
> Let me clarify, the world did not start on 9/11. 
> 
> 9/11 came after 8/11 and before 10/11. When it is chosen
> as a baseline for action then it is chosen somewhat arbitrarily
> wouldn't you agree?
> 
> <Note for newbies: To my mind 9/11 was a bad thing,
> no question about that. It just wasn't the world's first bad
> thing and it probably isn't helpful to imagine that those
> who caused planes to crash into buildings were just
> crazy when they were clearly acting with coordination
> and purpose. To them they may have been retaliating not
> for 9/11 but for offenses done at some other place or date>

Instead of saying the world did not start on 9/11 which is
bleeding obvious and irrelevant ("the world", terra is the
forum for the game, not the agents in the game), I should
have said the active agents ("the people"), the players,
the folks with grievances and aspirations and friends and
loved ones did not pop into existence on 9/11. Not the 
firemen and police that rushed to the aid of those in the
twin towers, not the passengers on the jets, not the hijackers.

In fact I think it would be fair to say almost all the players
in the world in which 9/11 took place were not born 
that day but had had lives with some history and therefore
carried in them some memory. 

To understand 9/11 we do not need to look back to the
beginning of life on earth, but we do need to look back,
perhaps to the beginning of the memoryspans of the key
players. 

For instance, what was the oldest age of any of the 19 or
20 if you prefer to include the other one, that took part in
the hijacking of the four planes? Was it maybe 30?

Lets say it was 30, then we would know that the motivating
factors for those deadly agents were things that they had
been told or experienced in the 30 years leading up to 9/11.

We'd have the problem nicely bracketed in time. 

Now to pursue this line of game theoretic analysis further 
we look at the ages of the other agents. How old is say 
George W Bush, well he's was older than 30, he was but
not so old as Rumsfeld and Cheney, and Powell, or obviously
his own father George H W Bush. Young George W Bush's
entire conception of life on earth, his memory, all he knows 
and mistakenly thinks he knows goes only back so far and 
no further. 

Again we have the problem bracketed from the standpoint
of another key player in the war on terror. 

Worst case scenario, and its ridiculous, I think, but I offer
it to make a point, say 9/11 was staged like a Reichstagg
fire event. Those that staged it, even their 'bitter', 'twisted' 
minds reach back only so far, people don't live longer
than 123. So again we have the problem bracketed because
we have the experiential timeset of the agents, the 'players'
in the 'game of contempory life on terra', bracketed.

Brett Paatsch




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