Martin Rees mentioned that "The pessimism that underlies my proposed 'Final century' book is of course likely now to become more widely shared. But what terrifies me most is that, in years to come, biological advances will offer new 'weapons' that could cause world-wide epidemics, etc; moreover such catastrophes could be caused by a single individual. Not even an organised "cell"or network of terrorists is required — just a single fanatic, or a wierdo with the mindset of those who design computer viruses (or even someone who is merely incompetent rather than malign) — and there seems no realistic chance of effectively combating these growing risks.

Paul Davies wrote "It occurred to me that an Edge discussion of technological solutions to the problem of aircraft hijackings may be timely. I am forwarding my own modest contribution to this topic in the form of some recent correspondence with a web news column devoted to cosmic impacts and other natural disasters.....Regarding technological solutions to aircraft hijackings, there is a simple solution. Aircraft are perfectly capable of being landed safely entirely by computer, a provision that is occasionally used in poor weather conditions. It would be an easy matter to pre-programme airliners with default instructions to fly to a designated airport in event of an on-board emergency. These instructions could be made irreversible from within the aircraft, and deactivated only by a coded instruction from Air Traffic Control. If these measures were taken, and widely known, it is almost certain that they would never be invoked. Any residual risk to passengers from the measures would be far less than the risk from further hijackings."

Richard Dawkins forwarded the piece he wrote for The Guardian last week — "Religion's Misguided Missiles." In it, he suggests that research conducted by the psychologist BF Skinner during the 2nd World War on pigeon guided missiles, might shed light on last week's terrorist acts and why the hijackers could be considered human guidance system, which, unlike the pigeon version, ... "knows that a successful mission culminates in its own destruction." [Click here for the Guardian article.]

The ever-counterintuitive Kevin Kelly, during a telephone conversation, explained to me his idea that this is not a hi-tech war at all but that the entire operation was low-tech (plastic knives, box cutters, etc.). No spy satellites for these guys, and no possibility than an $80 billion expenditure on a star wars defense would have had any deterrent effect whatsoever.

I wrote the following to the list: "I believe that the Edge community can mount a serious conversation about the catastrophic events of the past week that might do some good. Within the community is invaluable expertise in many pertinent areas, not to mention the intelligence that the "Edgies" can bring to the subjects. I am interested "hard-edge" comments, derived from empirical results or experience specific to the expertise of the participant. Edge is not the proper venue for people to vent their justified rage at the acts of terrorism, displeasure with the administration, U.S. Mid-East policies, etc. But it is the right venue for an informed, intelligent commentary."

"So how about a new Edge question: WHAT NOW?"

nature

[Editorial: 20 September 2001 Volume 413 Issue no 6853, p 235.]

Fighting against terrorism, engaging with Islamic science

Last week's attacks in New York and Washington were an offence against fundamental values that merits a well-targeted response, helped by science. But enhanced contacts with Islamic colleagues should also be pursued.

As Nature goes to press, the world is wondering how President George W. Bush, given extra powers by Congress and significant support by other nations, will respond to the barbaric killings of thousands in the United States. The impact on the scientific community has already begun to make itself felt (see page 237). Leaders of the scientific community around the world have expressed their horror and sympathy: see http://www.nationalacademies.org.

Science itself will play a critical role in the identification of the victims and in the unprecedented intelligence and military steps that the United States and others will now take to prevent such attacks in the future (see page 238). Many of the finest scientists and engineers will be called upon to channel their expertise into the defence of their countries against repetitions of last week's atrocity, and against its perpetrators and their defenders in every corner of the globe.

Appropriately, given last week's offence against fundamental values, most are likely to respond in full measure. A previous generation of scientists quietly helped to assure victory for the Allies in the Second World War, through the development of radar, code-breaking algorithms, and the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb (the last of which, as things turned out, had the least strategic significance of the three in that conflict). This time, the challenges lie in security innovations and counter-terrorism, intelligence gathering, and enhancing an already large military advantage.

Science's role
But scientists, and others engaged with science, can do more. Last week's terrible events are utterly removed from normal relations between countries and peoples. But they are not divorced from underlying political and social forces that also affect those relations. Perhaps the least to be expected of those in a position to make a difference is some reflection on the roles of science in the cultures and societies caught up in this conflict. How might contacts between scientists and between scientific organizations, of a sort that proved valuable during the cold war, play a constructive role in long term relations?

With thousands of dead still to be identified and put to rest, engagement of any sort will be the last thing on many people's minds. But others, deeply affected by the conflict, may feel that not to explore it could be seen as a minor victory for terrorism.

Last week's terrorist violence, after all, was not the expression of a clash of civilizations: many Islamic scholars and leaders have emphasized that the murder of the innocent is as offensive to their beliefs as to anyone else's. Their societies should not stand condemned because of extremists who disagree.

Although there could be said to be a tide of Islamic activism in the Arabic world and in Asia, there is no uniformity about it. There is a common aspect, according to knowledgeable commentators, in which resurgent Islam appears to be giving a sense of values and cultural identity to populations that may see themselves as disadvantaged or repressed within their countries. But the political contexts and the consequences that follow are diverse - for example, only some activist groups are revolutionary in intent. Understanding that heterogeneity will be important.

Views of the Enlightenment
Differences in world view between most Western scientists and influential Islamic intellectuals (including scientists) can be profound. Societies in which Islamic beliefs are important include those actively importing Western science and technology, yet which have a distrust of the modernity and secularism of the West. Iranian political commentators, for example, saw the collapse of the Soviet system not as a triumph of the West but as a prelude to the total collapse of a system based on humanist beliefs fostered in the Western Enlightenment, which, in their eyes, committed the fatal error of divorcing a scientific understanding of nature from an appreciation of its divine aspects (see, for example, http://web.syr.edu/~mborouje/jpr.html). Most Western scientists, and this journal too, would consider a denial of Enlightenment values as a betrayal of everything science stands for.

In Iran and in other Islamic countries, there is no shortage of intellectual interest in the Western scientific and philosophical traditions. But questioning about the philosophical and spiritual underpinning of science can be intense. Whether only parts of Western science and culture can be imported, and whether secularization is an essential corollary of the Western Enlightenment, are important questions for Islamic scholars.

The scientist-turned-Islamic-scholar Seyyid Hossein Nasr has commented on divergent views about modern science within the Islamic world. One view, which he characterizes as 'modernist', has for over a century set about importing science without much attention to the consequences for the societies that seek to absorb it. Another view sees Western science as giving rise to ethical problems for Islam, but welcomes it nevertheless on the basis that Islam can resolve those challenges on its own ethical terms. And then there is Nasr's own view, which has been influential, and which sees science as inextricably bound up in the system of values in which it operates. It makes sense, in his terms, to identify Islamic science as related to Western science but "totally transformed into the part and parcel of the Islamic intellectual citadel" (see
http://web.mit.edu/mitmsa/www/NewSite/libstuff/nasr/nasrspeech1.html).

Evidently, in comparison with the character of cold-war contacts, there may well be fewer common assumptions between scientific communities in the West and those in Islamic countries. There is much less knowledge of each others' scientific histories, and a consequent lack of mutual appreciation. But both inside and outside the Islamic world, there is also room for consideration of shared beliefs about the values of science, its history and its significance. Funding agencies should foster collaborations between Islamic and Western scientists and between those in the humanities studying science. Now may be a particularly good time to do so.

Nature © Macmillan Publishers Ltd 2001 Registered No. 785998 England

What Next? End Economic Sanctions

America has long been spared the most painful experience of modern warfare: massive civilian casualties. The terrorist attack on September 11 has taught us what most other nations learned earlier in the century, that no one is safe. Pearl Harbor was a military target and American civilians were safe in their homes and communities through two world wars. We have also been spared that other less dramatic experience of modern warfare, the destruction of infrastructure, with all the dislocation, privation and economic disruption that follow. In earlier wars, the U.S. infrastructure was ramped up, not destroyed, but today significant parts of it are at risk. The terrorist attack has newly taught us how dependent we are on a complex and interconnected infrastructure and the economy is reeling, but we have yet to understand the implications of these new experiences.

The first lesson to learn and act on is not that terrorists are uniquely evil but that all targeting of civilians is immoral. This includes the destruction of infrastructure, which is equivalent to the Biblically prohibited poisoning of wells, the material basis, of survival and the disruption caused by economic sanctions. Economic disruption creates unemployment and lost savings in industrialized nations; in the third world it can create famine and uncontrolled epidemics. The casualties are real. One of the problems with calling our new effort against terrorism a "war" is that it legitimates punishing ordinary people for the crimes of leaders they did not choose. We must not express our anger by retaliating against populations or writing off the "collateral casualties" caused either by bombing or blockade. America learned from the smoldering enmities that followed the civil war and World War I that peace is not founded on vengeance, a lesson expressed in the Marshall Plan. America needs to combine that earlier insight with this new and painful sense of vulnerability.

The appropriate expression of this understanding would begin with the lifting of US economic sanctions in all those places where they have deliberately and apparently bloodlessly eroded the material basis of survival without changing government policies, such as Cuba and Iraq. Above all, Afghanistan, with whose civilians we say we are not at war. Only weapons and weapon building materials should continue to be blocked (and these should be reduced world wide). The "wells" that need to be protected from poison today include infrastructure of all kinds: transport, water purification plants, public health, electricity and basic industry and food production; protecting these includes maintaining communications and education. An appropriate next step would be to join with our allies in the coalition against terrorism in the creation or restoration of essential infrastructures worldwide, especially in the poorest countries which U.S. economists have taken to writing off.

The second lesson is the urgent need to take seriously the full meaning of globalization. Globalization offers huge benefits and huge dangers, and is in any case probably irreversible short of calamity. Today we must add skillful, disciplined terrorism to a list of dangers that includes new infectious diseases transported rapidly around the planet, as well as the dangers of human and environmental exploitation that have been emphasized by the anti-globalization movement. Yet globalization at its best goes far beyond economic interest and must combine respect for the distinctiveness of cultural traditions, religions, and bioregions with the awareness of a radical degree of interdependence and mutual responsibility.

Hard as it seems to realize, America's self interest can no longer be distinguished from that of other nations — not just our traditional allies but our rivals and even our enemies. Recognizing this, the United States must reengage with international efforts like those for arms control and against global warming, as a nation among nations rather than perpetually demanding to be treated as an exception. We need to recognize that we are vulnerable in our homes — and that our home depends on the health and goodwill of the entire planet.

The US must not let the war on terrorism drive out other priorities. For example, we should still pay attention to human rights, non-proliferation, free trade, and democracy. We should not make the mistake of the Cold War where we let our anti-Soviet priority lead to collaboration with brutal right-wing dictators.

Even more important, we must not let the war on terrorism distract us from dealing with other problems. Examples of other problems that need attention are the plight of millions of refugees from and in Afghanistan, the stagnation of our relationship with North Korea, the adjustment of China to the WTO, and the possibility of progress between the PLO and Israel. And if another problem arises that calls for attention, we must not be too distracted to deal with it as well. An example would be a currency crisis in a country like Argentina, that if not attended to, could spread through the continent and then throughout the Third World.

One of the most important issues facing the United States and its like is to prevent 2004 from becoming 1984 (Orwell's story of a dismal future). In defense of liberty and in order to defeat those who attempt to subvert it by terror, we must avoid so changing our society that they will have won.

It is very easy to demand changes in our laws and those of our friends that will "make it easier to protect ourselves". These laws now protect our citizens from excessive intrusion of government at all levels into their private life and their private thoughts. It is tempting to argue that the government needs to be able to listen to your phone calls, to monitor you email, to make sure it can by forbidding encryption etc. It will also be argued that having cameras trained on citizens in public places and keeping those records for latter analysis will help keep us safe. Picture a future politician who retroactively applies those records to a morality in the future and shows how you met a non-person years ago and thus you must be non-loyal. Ben Franklin said more than 200 years ago — "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

We must defend our liberty not just now but we must realize that what we do now will define what nation we will pass on to our children and their children. Liberty, once given up, is almost impossible to recover. We must choose wisely and deliberately what we do to defend our democracy and our future — and our children's future.

Why does the rest of the world hate Americans so much? I agree with Roger Shank that we must face this question.

One reason surely concerns the unthinking zeal with which we export our brand of American consumerist capitalism ‹ a zeal comparable in irrationality and intensity to fundamentalist religion. Luyen Chou has observed that “We seem to conflate our technological supremacy, our consumerism and exultation of the free market, with moral supremacy and military imperviousness." Likewise, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote "We are perceived increasingly as a country willing to trample underfoot anyone who interferes with our God-given right to the latest appliances and diversions. I don't see us solving the problem of anti-American hatred unless we find a way of including the hopes of the rest of the world in our plans." They have touched the heart of our problem.

As an evolutionary psychologist researching a book about the roots of consumerism, I feel increasing confidence that contemporary American consumerist capitalism (CACC) is not the only possible form of reciprocity open to intelligent social primates such as us, nor the only possible form of a free market economy.

Rather, CACC is a particular cultural development that includes many historically contingent features, such as:

(1) Until very recently, the ability of pension funds and mutual funds to invest ethically, by taking corporate social responsibility into account, was severely limited by laws regarding fiduciary duties, and by accounting standards. Thus, the largest blocks of capital available to CACC were explicitly forbidden to use ethical criteria in deciding which companies to invest in, and how to vote as shareholders. The result has been a peculiar amoral sort of capitalism, in which individual Americans had no idea what evils their pension capital might be funding, while they simultaneously gave generously to ineffectual pro-social charities.

(2) The military-industrial complex has acted as a Keynesian employment booster since WWII, largely through resource-wasting vanity projects such as manned space flights and Star Wars programs, and through massive arms exports that destabilize other countries. People in the destabilized countries tend to resent this. Other, less harmful Keynesian employment-boosters could have been favored instead, such as France's innocuous waste of manpower in trying to out-compete the Australians in wine-production.

(3) The doctrine of corporate personhood, under which limited-liability corporations have all the same rights granted to human individuals under the Constitution. This doctrine was introduced by U. S. Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite, without argument or explanation, in a bizarre 1886 ruling in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The doctrine of corporate personhood in turn allowed corporations to corrupt the political system (through their "right" to give campaign contributions), the media (through their "right" to free speech, i.e. advertising, and their resulting tacit control as advertisers over the editorial content of national media), and the public interest (through their "right"to life ‹ i.e. unlimited persistence even if convicted of corporate malfeasance).

(4) Lack of any high-quality, state-supported television or radio system (analogous to Britain's BBC) that could offer critically incisive, internationally oriented news and analysis. Instead, we have local TV news, local newspapers, and local radio that pander sensationalism, reinforce provincialism, and never question the culture's domination by their advertisers.

(5) The ideological legacy of a Cold War against Communism, which corrupted the ability of American intellectuals to engage in nuanced, constructive argument about alternative ways to run our economy and our society. We know something is amiss when both Ralph Nader's calls to end government subsidies to corporations, and his calls to improve government subsidies to PBS, were dismissed as "socialist" by conservative pundits.

These five features of CACC, and many others, were not original with the American Revolution and could not have been anticipated by the Founding Fathers. Rather, they arose from about 1880 through about 1940 with the development of specifically American forms of mass retailing and mass advertising. In attacking the World Trade Center, I believe the terrorists were attacking not so much the free market or secularism per se, but America's arrogance that CACC is the only way any country could be run in the 21st century.

Although I think Darwinian principles illuminate a great deal of human behavior, our American problem is more cultural than biological. We need a serious, cultural self-examination of CACC ‹ not a vague, superficial debate about the importance of spiritual values in a materialist world, but rather, a historically informed examination of specific ways in which power, money, and culture have intersected to corrupt our democracy. If the rest of the world sees us undertaking this self-examination, we will have much less to fear. But if they see us persisting in our blind arrogance that CACC is best for everybody, the blood will be on our hands next time.

The events of September 11 brought to mind another vivid and uncomfortable memory. I am sixteen years old, lying in bed at my home in London on a noisy night in September 1940. I am violently hostile to the British Empire and everything it stands for. I hate London, the citadel of oppression, with its grandiose buildings sucking the wealth from every corner of the world. I lie in bed listening to the bombs exploding and the buildings crumbling. What joy to hear, after each explosion, the delicious sound of buildings falling down, the great British Empire audibly crumbling. The joy far outweighs any fear that my own home might be hit, or any pity for the people in the falling buildings. How many sixteen-year-olds all over the world are now seeing on television the pictures of the World Trade Center buildings collapsing, and feeling the same joy that I felt in 1940. I find it easy to imagine the state of mind of the young men who so resolutely smashed those planes into the buildings. Almost, I could have been one of them myself.

The only wisdom that I can extract from these memories is that the problem of terrorism is not a military problem. It is a problem of people's hearts and minds. Attempts to solve it by military means will only make it worse. I don't pretend to know how to solve it. A good way to start would be for our country to stop telling the rest of the world how to behave. We must learn to live with the world as it is, not as we want it to be. We must treat our enemies with respect, so that we do not appear to be trampling on their cultures and traditions. The ultimate goal must always be, not to destroy our enemies but to convert them into friends. And meanwhile, do whatever we can to defend ourselves without killing more thousands of innocent victims.

From: Robert Provine
Date: 9.25.01

Decision Theory And National Security

Decision theory offers guidance for national security policy and associated civil liberty issues introduced by the tragic events of September 11. Signal Detection Theory, the state-of-the art procedure for decision making considered here, provides a powerful model for detecting the presence of a "signal," whether a sensory stimulus in the laboratory, a bomb, or a terrorist. Although the underlying mathematical model is complex, predictions from the model are straightforward and will be explored in a few of the many possible security-related applications.

In detection tasks involving yes/no decisions, there are two ways to be right and two ways to be wrong. In searching for a bomb among airline luggage, for example, a security person responding "yes, I've detected a bomb," can result either in a "hit" (the correct detection of a bomb), or a "false alarm" (saying "yes" when no bomb is present). As with "yes," the decision of "no" also carries dual consequences, one right and one wrong. An inspector deciding "no" can either correctly deny the presence of a bomb (a "correct rejection"), or produce the dreaded "miss," the failure to detect a bomb when one is present.

Enough about theory. What about security policy? The decisions are not as straight-forward as policy makers may like. We must confront a pesky problem — there is no single best decision, because each alternative has linked costs and benefits that cannot be finessed. For example, the only way to detect more bombs (increase "hits" and reduce "misses") is to lower our criterion and say "yes" more often, a result that also increases false alarms. The only means of detecting all bombs is to always say "yes, a bomb is present," and act accordingly. Obviously, we must balance this impractical standard against the expense and inconvenience to travelers and airlines, and the reduced attentiveness and credibility of security personnel who would almost always be crying wolf. But instructing inspectors to respond to suspected bombs only when they are certain of their judgement is no solution — fewer "yes" responses serves only to lower the proportion of hits and increase the proportion of misses.

One means of increasing bomb detection rates by inspectors would be to increase the number of bombs to detect. Another would be to provide a reward (cash, promotion, etc.) for successful bomb detection. Both approaches produce a bias for saying "yes" and a higher rate of bomb detection. The virtue of the reward procedure is obvious, but what of the dubious procedure of increasing bombs? The best procedure would be for roving security inspection teams to plant fake bombs in luggage. Security personnel will be more attentive if they are aware that test bombs will be present to detect, rather than the present situation in which their career will probably pass without a single "hit." Currently, variants of the fake bomb technique are used only for unsystematic exposes of flaws in the security system, not to improve inspector performance.

Security decisions become more controversial when we shift our attention from bombs to the people who may plant them. Fortunately, decision theory cuts through political hyperbole and clarifies the conflicting demands of security and civil liberty. As in the task of bomb detection, the only way of increasing "hits" (e.g., terrorist detection) is to lower the criterion for saying "yes," an act that necessarily yields more false accusations. No method of improving detection rates magically escapes the costs of more false alarms.

"Discrimination learning" is another area of behavioral research that brings insight to detection tasks but forces tough decisions. Through trial-and error, humans and other animals learn cues relevant to discovering stimuli, whether a bird developing a "search image" for a caterpillar hidden on a leaf, or the police generating a "profile" of a likely suspect. Focusing on relevant cues increases the efficiency of the search, but is the basis of "profiling," a potential threat to the civil liberty of targeted groups. However, there is no way of implementing an efficient search strategy that considers all suspects in proportion to their number in the general population, a tactic suggested by opponents of profiling. In the recent crisis, evidence suggests that airline security is more at risk from Muslims from the Middle East than from Episcopalians from the Midwest and suspect profiles should be weighted accordingly.

Approaches to stimulus detection and decision making are well understood and grounded in value-free theoretical and empirical research. The challenge is to balance the social costs and benefits of various options when decision protocols become policy.

From: Jaron Lanier
Date: 9.24.01

I want nothing more right now than to have distance from the awful events of Sept. 11th, but distance is not available to me. I live five blocks from the poor World Trade Center and saw the attack from an outdoor café at the corner. I saw many things that I am not ready to describe. I was evacuated and returned almost a week later to find my home damaged. It isn't yet clear if I'll have to move or not. And yet, of course I feel lucky, even a little guilty, at my relatively extreme good fortune.

Seeing the dreadful rescue site is an unbearably sad daily ritual. It is beyond my mental capacity to register that I have seen with my own eyes over 6000 civilians suddenly killed in front of me.

I struggle for something useful to say. I think I'll be wiser about this at some point in the future, because some distance must surely form with time.

Here is a scattering of ideas that might be of some small use:

I must first address some remarks to "Leftist" readers in Europe. Many of you have suggested to varying degrees that we Americans brought this attack on ourselves through our horrid foreign policy. The claims vary from the mild- that we can't expect to extend our will around the world without somebody striking back- to the insane, as exemplified by the words of Karlheinz Stockhausen , who said the attack was "the greatest work of art ever." I'm a composer, and I fear these words will tarnish the tradition of Western music forever. That someone could even think to say this is an indictment of our esthetics. Could one of our most prominent artists really have lost touch with all concerns other than the quest for extremity and public notice?

To address the more mild slights: I don't think our recent foreign policy has been as consistently bad as it's often portrayed. Somalia really was a humanitarian effort; our Balkans policy was late and confused, but not imperialistic, and was at least better than Europe's; the Clinton mid-East peace proposal was enlightened, respectful to all sides, and at least plausible; our man Mitchell is roving around the world talking sense to all parties

There are a lot of kinds of power. There's an odd strategic parity between post-industrial democracies and the new worldwide society of suicide-cult terrorists. You really don't need to envy us now, ok?

Here is a historical framework that I have found useful in thinking about the attack: The advantages of confederation have not been constant. Rather, they've been on a constant track of modification due to changing technologies. Technology has changed the degree to which cooperation between people improves their fortunes.

If we go back far enough, say before the bronze age, there were limits to the advantages individuals could gain from forming large alliances, and indeed there were benefits to staying in small hunting or scavenging parties instead of large ones.

But once a technology like the shield appeared, it created a rationale for large scale cooperation. A line of men cold walk with their shields overlapped to form a moving wall of metal which was quite impenetrable. Similar observations could be made about agricultural and many other technologies. This enabling of scaling produced in its extremes the Roman Empire, and eventually the modern states.

By the time we come to the twentieth century, there was a new problem: States had become TOO powerful, once again because of changing technologies. Survival in a nuclear age depended on détente and treaties, structures that superceded states.

Perhaps we are now entering a period when tiny groups of people, or even individuals, routinely become powerful enough to be threats to large numbers of people. If this is so, then the original advantages of the state no longer apply. The technologies that are enabling this transition are, disturbingly, ones that I have devoted much of my life to improving; distributed communications networks, simulators, and open education institutions and teaching tools.

As I think about the forms of defense that could protect us from repeated intense threats from insane but powerful small groups of people, I see few strategies that are appealing. We could try to live in something like an immune system instead of a state with it's attendant army. It's plain, after all, that a traditional army is ill-matched to the present threat. The immune system metaphor is revolting to us, however, because we've all struggled so hard to cease to be racist or to otherwise divide the human family into the similar and the foreign.

It's hard to be completely honest about whether an immune system approach is what's really needed, or whether it's just the easiest response for us to envision. Xenophobia seems to me to be a universal human tendency, and that observation stands whatever mix of nature and nurture might be responsible.

On the other hand, maybe ever more severe social structures that resemble immune systems are inevitable, and as we learn to survive in the new situation we will expose a new grim corner of the confines of the human condition.

In the past, I was pro-privacy and most definitely against the notion of a government spying on me. Now I think I was crazy to have that position. Yes, the government poses a threat, but I wasn't willing to believe before that there were other threats that are even worse.

I can see a few rays of hope that dimly illuminate how a society might be pleasant and still protect itself from violent/suicidal cults. Instead of surveillance, a high degree of transparency might protect us from evil. An American supreme court justice famously proclaimed that "Sunlight is the best disinfectant". While this trope originally concerned censorship, it could just as easily be applied to the balance between privacy and security. The Dutch came upon a version of this. Theirs is a dense society of intense interdependence, and in it one does not close one's curtains. Perhaps we should make all our emails and phone calls freely available to anyone who is interested. Almost no one will be. Once revealed, our fascination with the private lives of other people will be so minimal that our boredom could form the basis of a stable social order.

Another possibility is that we might retain privacy but imagine more elaborate governmental structures than we have yet seen to reduce the chances that intelligence agencies will abuse their powers or become lost to their own ideological phantoms.

There is also a McLuhanesque thought that has occurred to me. In the last few years, the Arab world has encountered its own mass media for the first time, in the form of satellite television stations. I've seen a little of the material, and it is inflammatory. It might be the case that societies require some years to get sufficiently used to mass media so as not to be driven insane by it. World War II might have had something to do with the West's early experience of the power of mass media and modern propaganda. Over time one grows somewhat immune to it. In this light, cynicism is seen to be not only a good thing, but a mental habit that is necessary if any society is to survive in an age of potent media.

Finally, I must address a question to my colleagues on edge.org. In the final decades of the twentieth century we've seen an unprecedented rejection of the enlightenment. The assault on rationality has come in many forms, from pricey astrologers for coddled pet dogs, to the prominence after centuries of obscurity of the most militant and strident variants of just about every world religion. We have recently seen neo-Christian suicide cults (the Branch Dividian), Jewish extremists not heard from since Roman times (the "Settlers"), Hindu ultra-nationalists, and many others.

Is our way of marketing science and technology part of the problem? I must emphasize that it's the marketing that I worry about, not the technological capabilities or scientific theories. I'm thinking of the way we market computers as living things and Darwinian interpretation as an oracle. Some of this must play very strangely to people who are poor and wonder what will happen to them as the elites in the West soar into uncharted heavens on the wings of Moore's Law and the genome, hoping to leave even the most basic rules of life as it was known behind.

Is violent fundamentalism in part encouraged by a sense that science and technology are ruining faith in the soul?

I'm not talking about any notion of an immortal soul. I just mean the sense that a person is somehow really there, conscious, that when one communicates with other people they are similarly really there. I know many of the respondents on edge.org believe it's only a mental confusion to feel alive, but I beg you in this instance to reconsider your position. You can do so without harming science in any way, and you'd be more honest for having done it.

From: Timothy Taylor
Date: 9.24.01

'What now?' depends on our analysis of what happened and 'What happened?' depends on perspective. For most westerners, the twin towers were two office blocks for global traders. For the charismatic, inward-looking seventeenth child of a family of 50 Saudi Arabian siblings, Osama bin Laden, they did not simply symbolize the horns of Satan stretching from earth towards heaven, they were their physical reality. The actions of Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, the respective pilot-murderers who destroyed the World Trade Centre on 11th of September 2001 have been attributed to their religion both by us and by those who supported them. They cannot now tell us their own justification but, even if they were also able to say it was religion, I would remain unconvinced. Religious and political ends may have provoked this tragedy, but they needed a substrate to act on, one that is not created by religion itself. Many fundamentalist Muslims would not and could not have done what they did. It takes a particular type of personality, under particular circumstances.

It was only on the 10th of May 2001 that Judy Kirby drove her nephew Jeremy Young to an Indianapolis branch of Toys R Us to get his tenth birthday present, picked up her own three children and then deliberately drove them all at speeds approaching 100 miles an hour down the wrong side of Ind. 67. A witness saw a small boy on the front seat on his knees, gripping terrified onto the dash before the spectacular explosion that killed all the children in the car, plus two in an oncoming van and their father. Bizarrely, Kirby survived and is now serving 215 years. She was not a fundamentalist Muslim funded by bin Laden. She was a disturbed, depressed and aggressive human being with a grim romantic streak who wanted to commit suicide infamously. One look at Mohamed Atta's face in the published photo tells me that here was a protagonist who (while at one level a well-educated and financially well-off man) was profoundly depressed too. In Islam, as in many cultures both now and in the past, suicide is deeply shameful. This can give the road to martyrdom powerful appeal.

Human beings are individually capable of holding mutually contradictory beliefs and also of being guided as much by uncognized emotion as any species of logic, whether religious or materialist. Atta, as he flew into the side of the World Trade Centre may in one way have believed in a martyr's reward in paradise. At another level he may have hoped for oblivion, an end to inner pain, by committing a personal suicide that was masked in a cloak of fanatical religion. But he was one of 19 others, spread among the four hijacked planes. None of them quite needed Judy Kirby's level of lone resolve to do what they did. They had invidious backup and they had each other. So it was much easier.

Depressed-aggressive suicide-murderers are likely to be people who feel unloved and unvalued, the very opposite of the New York firemen and self-sacrificing passengers aboard the fourth plane, scuppered in the Pennsylvania woods. Actions that create more desperate and bitter people will contribute to the world becoming more dangerous for us all. What now? — it depends on the quality of our humanity.

There's been a lot written about our military limits, as if it were impossible to combat a network.

Actually, we've learned a great deal in the last ten years about how to degrade, detach and destroy human trust networks (as distinct from electronic networks). Ironically, it's the flip side of what we've been furiously learning about how to make ours work better.

I wrote an article in The Washington Post on September 17th about destroying networks after I got a chance to talk to a lot of smart people, from Manuel Castells to John Arquilla to Karen Stephenson. The whole piece is at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A41015-2001Sep16.html. Some key excerpts follow:

"Disconnect the Dots
Maybe We Can't Cut Off Terror's Head, but We Can Take Out Its Nodes"
By Joel Garreau
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, September 17, 2001; Page C01

But how to establish a target list in a network?

The good news is that in the last decade we have developed a whole new set of weapons to figure that out.

An industry has arisen to help corporations build new networks and junk old hierarchical bureaucracies in the age of merging and emerging companies, says Kathleen Carley, director of the Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems at Carnegie Mellon University. New tools have been developed that analyze how an organization interacts, yielding a kind of X-ray that shows where the key links are.

There is a general set of principles to any network, says Stephenson, whose company, NetForm, has developed software that mathematically analyzes networks.

She points out that typically a network is made up of different kinds of nodes — pivotal people.

The critical ones are "hubs," "gatekeepers" and "pulsetakers," she believes. Hubs are the people who are directly connected to the most people; they know where the best resources are and they act as clearinghouses of information and ideas, although they often are not aware of their own importance. Gatekeepers are those connected to the "right" people. They are the powers around the throne, and often they know their own importance. Pulsetakers are indirectly connected to a lot of people who know the right people. They are "friends of a friend" to vast numbers of people across widely divergent groups and interests.

The classic example of how to use this analysis is "finding the critical employee in the company — the lone expert who knows how to fix the machine," Carley says. Ironically, without network analysis, managers frequently don't recognize who that is and the nature of his importance.

"But there's no reason it can't be turned around in the opposite way," she says. There's no reason organizational glitches, screw-ups, jealousies and distrust that slow and degrade performance can't be intentionally introduced." A network's ability to adapt to new challenges can be degraded.

Carley says: "One of the things that leads to the ability to adapt is who knows who and who knows what. The higher that is, the better the group's flexibility. But you can reduce the number of times the group can communicate or congregate. Or you can rotate personnel rapidly." And in war, this may have to be done by capturing or killing them. "You can also segregate the things people are doing, so they learn only on a need-to-know basis. The more isolated the tasks are, the more you inhibit their ability to function as a team.

"Imagine in your office if you knew who went to whom for advice," Carley says. "If you found a set of people who gave out more advice than anyone else and then removed them from the network, so they can't communicate with others, you would infringe on the ability of the network to operate."

In the case of terror networks, people are linked by family ties, marriage ties and shared principles, interests and goals. They thus can be all of one mind, even though they are dispersed and devoted to different tasks. They "know what they have to do" without needing a single-central leadership, command or headquarters.

On the other hand, depending on the structure of the network, removing a few key nodes can sometimes do a lot of good, says Frank Fukuyama, author of the seminal work "Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity" and now a professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

"Some are so tightly bound to each other that they are not embedded in other networks. Kill a few nodes, and the whole thing collapses. Take the case of the Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path] in Peru. It couldn't have been that hierarchical. It was designed for the mountains of Peru. It couldn't have been terribly centralized. It had a scattered cell structure. It was hard to infiltrate. It was dispersed. And yet when you got [Shining Path founder and leader Abimael] Guzman and a few top aides, the entire thing fell apart.

"The idea that there is no end of terrorists, no way to stamp them all out, that if you kill a hundred, another hundred will spring up — I would be very careful of that assumption. The network of people who are willing to blow themselves up has to be limited. Sure, there are sympathizers and bagmen and drivers. But the actual core network of suicide bombers is probably a much smaller population. It is also tightknit and hard to infiltrate. But it is limited. It is not obvious to me that there is an endless supply."
Another tactic: advancing the cause of the weakest link.

"Suppose I've got a really powerful pulsetaker," says Stephenson, "vying for a position of dominance. But I also know that a member of the blood kin group is moving forward who is weaker. If you arrange an accident to eliminate the pulsetaker, and let the weaker family member come in, you've helped corrupt the network."

The beauty of seeding weakness into an organization is that you can degrade its effectiveness while still monitoring it, and not causing a new and potentially more efficient organization to replace it. "You don't want to blow away the organization. You want to keep some fraudulent activity going on so you can monitor it. If you blow them away, you lose your leads," says Stephenson. "Better the devil you know. Like [Moammar] Gaddafi. Keep him alive, because you know him. Who knows what sort of clever mastermind might replace him."

Intelligence is crucial to analyze the network's weak links so you can destroy it.

"You're talking about what amounts to a clan or a tribe or brotherhood of blood and spilled blood. That is really tough to crack. Trying to infiltrate it — we're talking years," says David Ronfeldt, a senior social scientist at Rand. However, from outside the network you can also look for patterns that stand out from the norm, like who talks to whom, e-mail exchanges, telephone records, bank records and who uses whose credit card, says Ronfeldt.

"I would attack on the basis of their trust in the command and control structures by which they operate," says Arquilla. "If they believe they are being listened to, they will be inhibited. If we were to reduce their trust in their infrastructure, it would drive them to non-technical means — force them to keep their heads down more. A courier carrying a disk has a hell of a long way to go to communicate worldwide. If you slow them down, interception is more likely."

Human networks are distinct from electronic networks. But technology is the sea in which they swim.

"What made nets vulnerable historically is their inability to coordinate their purpose," says Manuel Castells, author of "The Rise of the Network Society," the first volume of his trilogy, "The Information Age."

"But at this point," he says, "they have this ability to be both decentralized and highly focused. That's what's new. And that's technology. Not just electronic. It's their ability to travel everywhere. Their ability to be informed everywhere. Their ability to receive money from everywhere."

In 1996, Arquilla and Ronfeldt wrote a slim but highly prescient volume called "The Advent of Netwar" for the National Defense Research Institute, a federally funded research and development center sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the defense agencies.

It predicts that in a war between human networks, the side with superior intelligence wins. It also makes some tactical suggestions about countering human networks with counter-networks that actually have been used to combat computer hackers.

They include:

• Find a member of the enemy group who is clearly a harmless idiot; treat him as if he were the most important figure and the only one worthy of being taken seriously.

• Single out competent and genuinely dangerous figures; write them off or call their loyalty to the cause into question.

• Control the stories people tell each other to define their reason for living and acting as they do. The terrorist story, says Ronfeldt, "gives these people common cause — us versus them. Right now the U.S. would seem to have the edge at the worldwide level. But within the region, there was the dancing in the streets in Palestine. Part of the story is that America's evil, and that America's presence is to blame for so many of the problems in the Middle East. We have to attack that part."

• Find the list of demands extorted by the network; grant some that make no sense and/or disturb and divide their political aims.

• Paint the enemy with PR ugly paint so that they seem beyond the pale, ridiculous, alien, maniacal, inexplicable.

• Destroy their social support networks by using "helpful" but differently valued groups that are not perceived as aggressive.

• Divide and conquer; identify parts of the network that can be pacified and play them against former allies.

• Intensify the human counter-networks in one's own civil society.

Adds Manuel Castells: "We should be organizing our own networks, posing as Islamic terrorist networks. We should then demand to join one of these networks and then destroy the trust structures. Only way to infiltrate. Oldest technique in the world."
Few of these ideas involve flattening Kabul, all of these analysts note.

Stephenson worries that massing the Navy near Afghanistan is "a symbolic show of old-fashioned strength. It's not about that anymore. This whole playing ground has shifted."

"In order to do anything, you cannot be blind," says Castells. "The most extraordinary vulnerability of the American military is it looks like they do not have many informants inside Afghanistan. It also looks like the majority of the components of this network do not relate directly or essentially to nation-states. That is new. Unless we have a fundamental rethinking of strategic matters, it's going to be literally, literally exhausting and impossible. It will be desperate missile attacks at the wrong targets with a lot of suffering. Massive bombardments turn around the opinion in many ways."

"Basically," says Ronfeldt, "you have to find somebody to wipe out."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

From: John McCarthy
Date: 9.24.01

I have lots of ideas but have decided to present just one of them:

What Can The West Do To Help Islamic Countries Overcome Fanatacism

Today fanaticism based on Islam is a major force in Islamic countries. It is a danger to the West, but it is much more a danger to the peoples of these countries themselves to whom it has already done enormous harm. What's the harm?

1. It has led to more oppressive government. Many governments in these countries have always been oppressive, but religious fanaticism makes the oppression worse.
2. It has suppressed free speech and free press and has put dissenters in prison or killed them.
3. It has reinforced educational systems based on rote learning and fostered ignorance.
4. It has hindered economc progress.
5. It has prevented these countries from making their full contribution to science and technology. In the Middle Ages and well into the European Renaissance Islamic countries were leaders in mathematics and science. In particular, they preserved the Greek knowledge, but they did a lot more.

Fanaticism is therefore not a permanent feature of these countries, and will probably die down again as new generations come to see it as a dead end.

What can the West do about this situation?

In the main the changes will have to come from within these countries, but Western media are quite influential. The purely cultural aspects of the West are sufficiently widely known, whether it be high culture or the low culture of consumerism.

Here is some of what can be done.

Western broadcasts in the languages of these countries should emphasize:

1. Historical contributions of these countries to world culture.
2. The voices of dissidents to oppressive governments.
3. Direct criticism of the harm fanaticism does.
4. Current contributions of writers, e.g. Mahfouz, to world culture.
5. Developments in Western science, technology and medicine.

Probably the number of broadcasts should be increased.

More Internet sites emphasizing modernism in Arabic, Farsi, Berber etc. are needed and people building them should be helped.

The gamut of natural human reactions to the appalling events we witnessed on September 11th must run their course: shock, grieving, fear of what happens next, and the need to take action to prevent further, even worse, terrorist attacks. There must also be action to deal with the general situation in the Middle East, particularly the need for a just and long-term settlement of Palestinian-Israeli problems, or this region will remain a seedbed of fanaticism.

But beyond these issues, I have another sadness and even greater fear: that the world will forget the even greater threat we all face from global warming. If we do not start to face up to this threat properly, the chaos that will ensue over the next century as half the Earth tries to relocate to find food and water will make these recent events, awful as they are, pale into insignificance.

From: Steve Grand
Date: 9.24.01

Since this question has been posted on Edge. I've been casting around for something useful I could say — something that I could recommend we do. I've failed. Most of the techno-fix and cultural solutions that occurred to me were either unworkable or simply closing one of many stable doors after the horse has bolted. So instead I've decided what to do at a personal level: as my tiny contribution to this learning experience I am going to become less tolerant.

A lot of people have expressed the opinion that we need to become more tolerant, not less; that we need to understand the reasons behind the terrorists' actions and see how their decision made perfect sense to them in the context in which they found themselves. Speaking for the human species as a whole I think this is true, but for myself I would say that I have always thought this way and have probably been overdoing it. I'm a "cybernetic" fatalist: I consider that most people, most of the time, find themselves in situations where they have no real choice. Murderers do not kill on a whim, and governments do not start wars for amusement. They do it because their circumstances have driven them to it, or at least because they believe their circumstances have driven them to it, which is essentially the same thing.

All complex systems, from brains to societies, contain myriad feedback loops. Every now and then something will happen that triggers the creation or dominance of a positive feedback loop, which drives the system into some extreme state. From here it will probably rebound and thrash violently, eventually perhaps shaking itself to bits. Once started, these things become increasingly hard to stop, and beyond a certain point the individual actors in the drama will be impotent puppets, driven to do whatever they are driven to do, regardless of how distasteful they find it. So from my position as a cyberneticist I have always been (I hope) extremely tolerant of people when they act as they inevitably will in the context in which they find themselves. By the time someone does something truly awful it is probably fair to say that it's not their fault.

Nevertheless, the purpose of intelligence is precisely to predict such runaway situations well in advance and prevent them while we still have the energy to do so. Only the stupid blunder into situations from which they have insufficient power to extricate themselves, and at the level of individual organisms it is this predictive energy management that keeps us alive. Equally, it is our responsibility as members of the human race to ensure that we do not do things that might let the whole of society run out of control. And we already know a good deal about the science behind such systems behaviour. Blame does not, therefore, lie with the end product — the terrorists, murderers, hooligans and bullies. It lies with those of us who make trivial decisions with insufficient thought as to their long-term consequences. The terror starts with a poorly considered policy, a minor bit of selfishness or a moment's lapse of concentration. Above all it starts with simplistic, fallacious or lazy reasoning.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a lack of intelligence is the inability to distinguish more than two categories at once. For such people the world is divided into Us and Them, Black and White, Good and Bad, while in reality nothing is that simple. Such people frequently lapse into dogma, and I agree with Richard Dawkins about the culpability of religion in this instance (on both sides — the number of times God was invoked by Westerners in the aftermath of this tragedy depressed me enormously). Religion is a powerful force for polarisation, as are nationalism, sexism and party politics. Such dogmas create monolithic and potent forces that can easily topple the system. They allow people to be lazy; to avoid taking personal responsibility and ally themselves blindly and unquestioningly to a formula (whether the Bible, the Koran or a manifesto).

What we need is for all of us to use our brains to the best of our ability, and when we see lazy, selfish, illogical or short-term thinking in other people, we should point it out to them in no uncertain terms. So I have vowed to become less tolerant of stupidity and irresponsibility than I have been. From now on I intend to be militantly intellectual. I shall always remember my moral duty not to hurt people's feelings, but their beliefs, cultural assumptions and political opinions I shall consider it my responsibility to consider and then, if necessary, to challenge. Sadly, it won't save anybody's life today, but it may help avert disaster for tomorrow.

From: Robert Aunger
Date: 9.24.01

The "first war of the new millennium" — with its very different targets, and hence tactics — provides an excellent opportunity to make use of what has become one of the most sophisticated, but relatively unknown, corners of contemporary social science: the formal study of social networks.

The possibility that the US Administration might now be interested in this arcane branch of knowledge has already been recognized by the mainstream press. Terrorists are organized in loose, intercontinental fabrics of social relations, linked together as nodes in what have been called "cells" from Lenin to bin Laden, but which are better recognized as a group of nodes connected by links which represent the exchange of some sort of resource — ranging from information to machine guns.

For example, the effort to "follow the money" which makes terrorist activities possible is made more difficult by the existence of a covert, world wide laundering system called hawala banking in India or the Hundi system in Pakistan. This network, defined by the exchange of money, is based entirely on trust, so that no paper-trail is left behind (it is strictly a "word of mouth" network, which is what "hawala" means in Hindi). Still, once the structure of a social network becomes known, the crucial links for maintaining that structure (or destabilizing it) can be rigorously identified — no matter how distributed the power relations in it might be. In the present context, this has obvious implications — implications which have already made a number of practitioners of the networkers' art nervous about the ethics of their hard won knowledge being used by politicos in war-making mode. Still, the terrible recent events in the United States provide a rare opportunity for a much maligned profession — academic social science — to make itself useful to the society which funds it. Surely part of the answer to the question of "what now?" will be: Do formal analysis of terrorist social networks.

It is possible, however (as Martin Rees observes in an earlier posting here), that the next escalation in terrorist activity will not involve a network at all. Theoretically, a single biotechnologist with a grudge and a round-the world plane ticket could instigate a thoroughly modern Black Death. The paltry remainders of the human race might then have to go underground for generations until the surface of the Earth becomes safe for multi-cellular life-forms again. (This is, in fact, the scenario from Terry Gilliam's gripping movie, "Thirteen Monkeys".) Tor Nørretranders' suggestion to decentralize personnel would not help much in such a case. So network analysis may only work in the short run. The answer to the "what now" question is thus possibly more frightening even than what we have contemplated so far, just as driving people-laden planes into people-laden buildings seemed incomprehensible only a few short weeks ago.

From: David G, Myers
Date: 9.23.01

1. The social psychology of terrorism

What compels people to commit simultaneous mass murder and suicide? Although evolutionary psychology may be challenged to invent an adaptive purpose for such behavior (it can more easily explain its rarity), my own discipline of social psychology can help. Research on the roots of hatred, aggression, and conflict shed light. For example, experiments on "group polarization" reveal how groups amplify their members' shared tendencies. In one study, I observed that when prejudiced high school students discussed racial issues, their attitudes became more prejudiced. When low-prejudice students discussed the same issues, they became more tolerant.

Group polarization can amplify the mutual resolve of those in a self-help group. But it can also have dire consequences. In other experiments, group decision making has amplified retaliatory responses to provocation (a phenomenon we may now be experiencin