Education

Clausewitz, On War, Book II: The Intellectual Style of the Military Genius

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Last week Lexington Green and I wrote on the virtues intrinsic to military genius. These virtues were categorized as intellectual, or psychological, or both. The truths revealed came from Chapter 3, Book I of On War.

Book II of On War attempts to serve as bedrock to the theory of war, and in doing so, provides a guide to the kinds of knowledge that belongs in the intellect of the military genius. Book II also explains how that knowledge ought to be learned, and used, and ultimately the intellectual style of the military genius. This supplements the lengthy treatment I gave to psychological, emotional, and moral factors that help describe the military genius.

How does the commander go about learning what he must? What is his intellectual style and what are his habits? What must he learn? How must he learn it? Should have be a disinterested third party with respect to his knowledge? Must he internalize his military knowledge? Is his knowledge derived mainly from experience, or from study? What are the pitfalls of the intellectual methods of the military mind?

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Drucker on Management Mentalities

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Among liberals, “progressives,” and especially academics, there is great joy at the prospect of an administration dominated by people who had very high SAT scores and who possess advanced degrees.

At the same point in time, we are experiencing a serious credit crisis, brought about to a substantial extent by naive and inadequate mathematical models–mostly developed by people with very high SAT scores and very often with advanced degrees.

About 20 years ago, Peter Drucker wrote a wonderful pseudo-autobiography, “Adventures of a Bystander.” It tells his own story only indirectly, via profiles of people he has known. These range from from his grandmother and his 4th-grade teacher in Austria to Henry Luce (Time-Life) and Alfred Sloan (GM).

In the chapter titled “Ernest Freedberg’s World,” Drucker writes about two old-line merchants. The first of these, called “Uncle Henry” by those who knew him, was the founder and owner of a large and succesful department store. When Drucker met him, he was already in his eighties. Uncle Henry was a businessman who did things by intuition more than by formal analysis, and his own son Irving, a Harvard B-School graduate, was appalled at “the unsystematic and unscientific way the store was being run.”

Drucker remembers his conversations with Uncle Henry. “He would tell stories constantly, always to do with a late consignment of ladies’ hats, or a shipment of mismatched umbrellas, or the notions counter. His stories would drive me up the wall. But gradually I learned to listen, at least with one ear. For surprisingly enough he always leaped to a generalization from the farrago of anecdotes and stocking sizes and color promotions in lieu of markdowns for mismatched umbrellas.”

Reflecting many years later, Drucker observes: “There are lots of people with grasshopper minds who can only go from one specific to another–from stockings to buttons, for instance, or from one experiment to another–and never get to the generalization and the concept. They are to be found among scientists as often as among merchants. But I have learned that the mind of the good merchant, as also of the good artist or good scientist, works the way Uncle Henry’s mind worked. It starts out with the most specific, the most concrete, and then reaches for the generalization.”

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Politics and Education

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According to this, voters with postgraduate educations supported Obama by 58% versus 40% for McCain.

This article suggests that the election results can be characterized as “the triumph of the creative class,” with “creative class” drawn from “Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the younger, go-go set in the financial world.”

For discussion: what, if anything, should Republicans/conservatives/libertarians do to increase their appeal to these categories of voters?

Let me get things off to a contentious start by suggesting that the “creative class” tag is more than a little presumptuous. Is a stock trader really more creative than a production control specialist in a factory, or a platoon commander in the Marines? (Indeed, I’ve seen research suggesting that the cognitive skills of a good trader and a good combat commander have a lot of similarities.) Is a computer programmer automatically more creative than a mechanical engineer? Is it really true that spreadsheet mavens on Wall Street are more creative than small businesspeople? Is a professor of electrical engineering inherently more creative than a practitioner of the same field who works for a defense contractor?

Maybe “credentialed class” would be a more realistic descriptor than “creative class.”

What say you?

Cold, Kryptonite, and Ice Cube

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Over the last few years I have whipped myself into pretty decent shape for an almost forty something. From my heaviest point, I have lost somewhere between twenty and twenty five percent of my body weight, and in the meantime transformed what is left into solid muscle. Out of curiosity I should book an appointment with a trainer for an hour and on top of getting some more tips, I should get measured for a body fat percentage. But enough of that.

Where I am going with the description of my physical condition is that cold weather is absolutely my kryptonite now. I also shaved my head in the meantime, so any temps below, say, 50 F  require coat, skullcap and gloves. Before, when I was heavier and had hair, 50 F  was no issue in a t-shirt for me.

As I type this in my office, I have a small portable heater running under my desk. The winters here in the upper Midwest are very tough on me. Our winter is just beginning, and I am already suffering – the real cold stuff is yet to come. But so it goes.

On occasion, some interesting individuals come into my store from the UW. Well, I get people in the store from the UW all the time, but these individuals from a certain department are different. They work on the Ice Cube project. From their website, here is what the project is involved in:

The IceCube Neutrino Detector is a neutrino telescope currently under construction at the South Pole. Like its predecessor, the Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array (AMANDA), IceCube is being constructed in deep Antarctic ice by deploying thousands of spherical optical sensors (photomultiplier tubes, or PMTs) at depths between 1,450 and 2,450 meters. The sensors are deployed on “strings” of sixty modules each, into holes in the ice melted using a hot water drill.
The main goal of the experiment is to detect neutrinos in the high energy range, spanning from 1011eV to about 1021 eV. The neutrinos are not detected themselves. Instead, the rare instance of a collision between a neutrino and an atom within the ice is used to deduce the kinematical parameters of the incoming neutrino. Current estimates predict the detection of about one thousand such events per day in the fully constructed IceCube detector. Due to the high density of the ice, almost all detected products of the initial collision will be muons. Therefore the experiment is most sensitive to the flux of muon neutrinos through its volume. Most of these neutrinos will come from “cascades” in Earth’s atmosphere caused by cosmic rays, but some unknown fraction may come from astronomical sources. To distinguish these two sources statistically, the direction and angle of the incoming neutrino is estimated from its collision by-products. One can generally say, that a neutrino coming from above “down” into the detector is most likely stemming from an atmospheric shower, and a neutrino traveling “up” from below is more likely from a different source.
The sources of those neutrinos coming “up” from below could be black holes, gamma ray bursters, or supernova remnants. The data that IceCube will collect will also contribute to our understanding of cosmic rays, supersymmetry, weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPS), and other aspects of nuclear and particle physics.

Uh, yea. Maybe some of my readers with a more scientific background can decipher what they are after. I sure can’t make heads or tails of it.

You should hear the questions the Ice Cube guys  ask  us  about simple parts.   We usually stand there and stare at them like they have an arm growing out of their head.

 This is a pump for a fuel oil furnace. There are millions of them all across the United States. There are several of these in the Antarctic right now that are in use that were purchased from me, having been modified by the Ice Cube team. They have to pretty much buy all standard items for use down there and modify them since there really isn’t any industry that creates items for use in that environment.

Speaking of that environment, I would last about three minutes down there. Seven degrees F is the recorded HIGH for the South Pole. This article appeared in the Wisconsin State Journal yesterday and literally sent shivers down my spine. I didn’t know the conditions that these scientists put themselves through. Their lips and fingers crack, they get nosebleeds, snow blindness, etc. In the article, it is stated that the participants in the program have to go through a rigorous physical and seminars explaining to them what will happen to their bodies as they dry out in the worlds largest desert – the Antarctic.

They repair their cracked skin with superglue. Superglue!

It might be cold down there, but it would be hell for me.

Cross posted at LITGM.

The Choice

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A vote for Obama on Tuesday is not just a vote for Obama himself, but rather a vote for the triumvirate Obama-Pelosi-Reid…a vote to transfer enormous power to the leadership of the Democratic Party.

I’m convinced that across multiple sets of issues, the country will be far better off with a victory for John McCain and Sarah Palin. Here are some of the key factors as I see them:

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