Terrorism: the macro version of SARS

SARS,or Severe Acute Resperatory Syndrome, was a front and center issue in 2002 and 2003. It killed over 8,000 people worldwide, and received a lot of news coverage. Interestingly, the thing that sets SARS apart from most other diseases, the fact that it killed a disproportionate number of healthy adults, was not something that received a lot of followup. Most diseases affect the young and the elderly in larger numbers than the mid-adult population, SARS bucked that trend.

Without getting into a lot of technical mumbojumbo about pulmonary edema and antibody response, the reason SARS kills more of the healthy population is pretty simple: the virus that causes the illness (SARS-CoV) is ineffective and clumsy. People with suppressed immune systems have survived where healthy people have not. The reason for this is that it is the body's immune response (killing the virus and trying to get rid its waste) that causes the victim's lungs to fill with fluid. The stronger the immune system, the stronger the response, and the more rapidly the victim's lungs fill with fluid. In essence, the more healthy the victim, the faster their life is put in danger. It's the body's own reaction that puts the victim at risk by perverting disease-fighting resources to a self-destructive end.

In conventional war the goal is control. Control requires resources: people, productivity, etc. When fighting a war, one group of resources (governments, industries, populations) allied with one controlling entity try to destroy similar resources which support a rival. For the human race, this is pretty old-hat. Wars are documented in all societies from the stone age forward. Happily, societies with comparable productivity are usually mutually tolerant. Wholly incompatible societies are usually separated widely enough on the resource-and-capability scale that most wars are relatively short. Yes, there are exceptions, but many wars are so brief that they're decided fact before they make the news. It averages out.

Terrorism is quite different. It has two pathologies: intimidation and perversion. Intimidation is the most overt of the two which is why on the surface terrorism seems to fail so blatantly. From the Gunpowder Plot of Guy Fawkes to the 9/11 hijackings of Al Qaeda, the targetted population wasn't swayed in the direction of the attackers. It was completely and strongly against. Seemingly, terrorism had failed.

That, unfortunately, is only half of the story. Like SARS, terrorism's main damage is dealt by perverting normally healthy responses to destructive ends. Terrorist attacks can redirect a huge amount of resource toward ends which benefit the country virtually nothing, stunting its normal growth. On the order of a trillion dollars have already been spent by the United States trying to prevent additional plane-related attacks. In all likelihood, virtually every dollar was wasted. The other reaction: waging war upon Afghanistan, exerted sufficient control in the area that any similar hijacking plans which may have been in the offing were completely distrupted. Beyond that, the TSA, the DHS, etc., were merely public-facing efforts to put people at ease, and today represent billions in misspent resources.

Imagine for a moment the alternative history where reaction to the hijackings is delayed for a year: Al Qaeda kills 3,000 people on 9/11. The next day, everyone goes straight back to work and continues on. There are 3,000 less workers today, and there is some societal capability lost, but the other 339,997,000 Americans go back to work. On 9/12, Al Qaeda sacrifices another 20 of its zealots and kills another 3,000 americans. Rinse and repeat for one year. This assumes that Al Qaeda could field and fund over 7,000 suicidal zealots and find 365 locales densely populated enough to kill 3,000 people every day. In the course of this "year at war",the United States would have lost less than one third of one percent of its population. Finally the United States launches a war in Afghanistan, removes the support Al Qaeda was receiving, and then goes back to normal operations. In the past 10 years, that United States would have had a trillion government dollars to spend on health care, spaceflight, and fighting off the mortage crisis; in short on everything else the United States does.

Nineteen hijackers in exchange for three thousand dead Americans and "a woken, angry giant" is a lousy trade. Nineteen hijackers in exchange for removing $100 billion per year from the US economy could be considered quite a coup. Perhaps, as the 10th anniversary of these attacks approaches, we should consider rethinking our priorities.

Widely separated dots: Skills in parenting and computer usage

In foggy memory of a college course in sociology I took many years ago, I remember hearing about a study where a parent and their kindergarden-age child were paired off and given a pile of toy automobiles. Half of the toys were red and half were blue. Half were trucks, and half were cars, with each combination being about 1/4 of the vehicles. The task was to separate the toys into piles with common attributes, but only the child could touch the toys. It wasn't specified how the toys should be divided.

A pattern that emerged was that one group of parents tended to accomplish the task by making the child an extension of themselves:  "Take that truck, put it in the pile over there", lots of pointing and direct instruction. A different group of parents tended to explain the goal to a greater degree, and let the child act on their own: "Put the red toys in one pile and the blue toys in another". The groupings seemed to correlate with all sorts of interesting things: education level, income, wealth, etc. I seem to remember thinking that maybe they had cause/effect backwards: that perhaps a tendency for direction vs delegation could drive the parents' ability to learn, earn, and conserve wealth. Unfortunately the groupthink of coordinated nodding got to me, and I didn't raise the issue.

Many years later, I was working with a talented friend at a software company. He and I were each project lead on two separate but related projects. He was an OO evangelist, to which I had not yet been assimilated, but have since adopted. In short, he was a very smart guy whose opinion I did (and still do) respect. Another difference between us was that he absolutely loved Microsoft Windows. I loathed it, preferring a UNIX command line. We had long since agreed to a friendly disagreement.

One day, we were working on a common chunk of code in his office. He demonstrated a test run, which consisted of going to the database window and creating a fresh database, going to a filesystem window, selecting a range of output files and deleting them, going to the system profiler window and clearing the cache, and lastly going to the application window, and (with a mere 6 more clicks or so) starting the app, which ran to completion and generated the desired data. He spoke at some length about how easy all this was, compared to the days he'd had to use UNIX for programming. (his college days) Just point, click, and it all worked! (If I were accurately reflecting his tone, I'd've used three exclamation points there) I asked him to come to my office and see me do the same thing, and he agreed. We got to my command prompt, I typed "runtest", and the script did everything that four window selection and dozens of clicks had done, only it was less error prone and faster.

He wasn't swayed, and his objection stays with me: "But you had to write that script!". He was eminently satisfied with a system that required his presence and direction. He wanted a tool:, I wanted an assistant, and  was willing to take the time to train one (write the script). He really didn't want to waste time writing scripts, feeling that the goals changed often enough that you ended up spending more time writing than you saved by using them.

Two years ago I got a chance to follow up on that. At an offsite programmers' lunch for a  different software company, I asked: "What is your computer doing for our company right now while you are at lunch?" Some folks said "Compilling", some said "Building datasets", others "Planning a new rack layout", etc. But by far the most said "nothing". Both groups were mystified that the other group was so big.

Hegl long ago separated "self" from "other", and I don't know if there's an official separation of "other" into "tool" and "agent". In the sociologic test, some parents were employing their kids as tools to accomplish the task, while others were using them as agents. It might be interesting to poll people who have become successful in various fields and ask them about how they think their parents might've approached the original test