Views of a Modern World

Everything else Rick writes

Shifting objectives shifts outcomes

June 5, 2015 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

I recently finished the first draft for my book on the nine principles of war, reformulated and recast as they should be applied to business. My friend Tom read the draft to provide some initial comments, and we ended up talking about whether to add a discussion on the seeming inapplication of strategy to the long-running wars against terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then, as if on cue, an article by Mark Kukis appeared on whether wars can be “won” today at all.

The research is extremely helpful on this question, and there is no real arguing with the facts. But let’s take apart this paragraph:

In these internal, fragmented conflicts, victory is elusive for any party involved. From 1946 to 1989, for instance, there were 141 internal conflicts worldwide. Of those, 82 ended when one party achieved victory. From 1990 to 2005, there were 147 internal conflicts. Of those, only 20 ended with one faction legitimately claiming victory. Put another way, since 1990, less than 14 per cent of internal conflicts produced a clear winner. About 20 per cent produced a ceasefire. And about 50 per cent simply persisted. Statistically, the odds of the US coming up a winner in a modern war are perhaps as low as one in seven.

The last sentence, with US odds of “winning” as low as 1/7, is a great bit of writing, but entirely misleading. Yes, those are the numbers overall, but they aren’t the number of conflicts in which the US participated. So that’s issue number one.

But the real question is tied to the sotto voce thesis of the article: we can’t win wars the old way because we’ve chosen not to fight them the old way.

Here’s a later line that connects this “problem” with the principle of Objective:

No significant debate arose about what victory might mean.

Objective: direct all efforts towards a clearly defined, decisive, and obtainable goal.

As a former Army infantry officer, we prefer missions that meet this standard. What we knew then is something I practice daily as a lawyer: being forced to define success in a clear manner is valuable not just because of the outcome, but because the process requires someone to actually think about what success looks like. That Eisenhower-like approach leads to better outcomes.

The recent conflicts described in the article are different from the older wars for one basic reason: we decided not to conduct wars in the same way. We decided that killing vast numbers of otherwise innocent civilians was no longer acceptable to us. This theme is recognized briefly but then ignored for most of the article.

We made war harder because we imposed humanitarian or moral or practical limits on ourselves. No longer would we choose to engage in actions like the fire-bombing of Dresden, the aerial bombardment of London, or the bombing of Hanoi. We have chosen to try to conduct operations around civilians rather than against them.

Because we respect the fundamental human rights of the people who live in, under, and near the regimes or bad actors we are fighting (whether Saddam Hussein, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, or ISIS), we have created a new set of rules. They make things much harder for us. Like a grandmaster who plays a novice and starts out by taking off two rooks and agreeing not to attack any pawns, the chances of “victory” go down.

Add to that the distinction between traditional military objectives: the destruction of people or materiel and the occupation of territory, and the nation’s goals in these new conflicts are certainly fuzzier than what might have guided us in the past.

To me, the notion of “no victory” is really about two things: (1) our decision not to kill seemingly innocent civilians and (2) goals for the end state of the conflict that do not match up with traditional military objectives. You want stuff blown up? The Air Force does that better than anyone on the planet. You want to go build a nation? You send the Special Forces, but it takes a really long time and there aren’t enough of those hard-charging heroes to remake a whole country. A village or tribe? Of course. A region? Probably. All of Afghanistan? Probably not.

And finally, a post-script: another thing that has changed about our approach from WWII is that we have greater respect for self-determination. We might be keen on an interim level of control to smooth over the transition, but we’d be loathe to instill the equivalent of a modern-day MacArthur to rule over post-Imperial Japan. Inherent in that value judgment is the recognition that some of those people will choose systems that are not only not controlled by us (cf. 1970s Philippines) but not necessarily even favorable toward us. That’s really okay though: “If you love something, set it free.”

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: military, objective

My kids live in the future.

March 4, 2014 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

Thinking about my kids’ world. It’s already different from mine. Answering machines and voicemail came when I was in grade school and are almost dead. Long distance isn’t. It’s easier than ever to create. And everyone gets to be an individual. 

This thought was spurred in part by looking at summer camps and recoiling at the idea of my 7-yo son going to a camp that segregates boys and girls. I know there are studies showing possibly better outcomes for girls in some situations, but two things remain. First, I don’t think I’ve seen a study that says boys do better. And second, that’s not the way of the world. I expect my boys to live mostly in a world where women are professional and social equals. Why would I want to hamstring them by perpetuating habits that are the byproduct of stereotypes? 

Men and women may tease each other in relationships, but that’s a pattern for my life. It’ll be mostly gone by the time my son is a man, and my grandchildren will never know it except from old movies.

Filed Under: Soapbox

Reality is more complex than the map

January 19, 2014 by rickcolosimo 1 Comment

The reality of being a single dad is even more complicated than this because all the lines are about half-an-inch wide (to scale), so it’s really an enormous mass of grey. OTOH, maybe that means I really should just stop trying to figure stuff out — but that’s hard to do when your primary skill is figuring stuff out!

Advice?

 

Tumblr mxv5cdqhrv1skzu1eo1 500

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

via:  (http://leiaworld.tumblr.com/post/70408990884/so-small-is-the-different-between-all-of-that)

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: relationships

Rant on understanding what you’re studying

October 7, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

This article on increasing mortality rates, i.e., decreased lifespan, among certain American women is a good one to for econ and math professors to give to their stats students as a quiz. “Identify errors….”

In an email to a friend, I described this article as  half-written” because it so obviously makes statements that are completely wrong and non-sensical if someone had bothered to read them out loud.
 
Here’s a taste:
“Life is different for women without a high-school degree than it was a few decades ago, and in most cases it’s a lot worse,” she said. “It’s really just a perfect storm.” 
That’s following a discussion that says that education is driving the seemingly crazy increase in death rates. Of course, that’s nonsense because there’s no plausible mechanism for education qua education to lead to early death. There probably are a lot of other things correlated with or even caused by being a female high school dropout, like being poor, fat, a smoker, frequently pregnant and drunk (you *know* those two are linked as tightly as my punctuation indicates), and a meth-head. Add that to all the other crappy side effects of being poor, and it’s no wonder. But dropping out doesn’t cause these problems — handing out degrees won’t fix them. Yes, education helps, but that facile answer sidesteps the most uncomfortable of assessments in America:  people are different at the same time as they are all equal. (This is my nod to the possibility that the causes of dropping out are probably also causes of those other drivers of poor health.)
 
Earlier, the article did the same thing with location. Absolutely lazy-ass crap to write that. Unless there’s poison in the ground or radiation in the air, location is almost certainly 100% not causally related to anything that’s going on. Sure, it’s correlated, but so what? 
 
Two closing thoughts, and then I’m going to post this rant:
 
1. This is another example of Prof. Kingsley’s admonition against doing the experiments you can do instead of the ones you should do. (I have always thought that there was a subtext there about folks not always knowing the difference, but that’s mine not his. As smart as he is, I’ve never heard him utter a disparaging word about the brainpower of other scientists.)
 
2. Clay Shirky, NYU Prof among other things, recently tweeted that he realized the problem with daily journalism is that the deadline doesn’t care whether you understand what the real story is. (Of course, CNN has that problem in spades.)
 
These comments about location and education “causing” the observed death rate are either sloppy reporting/research (someone doesn’t understand how things fit together) or there are folks who frankly aren’t done with their work — if these are the proffered “explanations.”

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: data, hypothesis, science

Every day is Pearl Harbor Day

August 9, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

On Pearl Harbor Day last December, I came across someone who suggested that America needed something to wake us up and get us back on our feet. The reference was to Pearl Harbor Day and how it brought the country together 70 years ago.

Me: Didn’t we get that about 10 years ago? Of course, we may have squandered it on no-doc mortgages, but that’s our own fault.

Reply: not quite what I was getting at…. Unfortunately it takes a tradegy of some sort to make our country decide that we need to start acting as grown-ups and do what is right for everyone…. if you remember the rallying of the nation after 9-11…. I do not wish for anything bad to happen, but we must find that commom purpose to pull this nation back together and be as great as we can be. [minor edits by me]

Me: I find that common purpose every time I think about a great historical document: the Declaration, the preamble to the Constitution, even the opening lines of the Gettysburg Address: “… a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal….” It only takes a few minutes, maybe just 30 seconds — on Memorial Day, 9-11, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving — to remember those things.

Works for me just as well as the Ranger Creed, but those documents are more accessible to most than that!

That’s the stuff I think about on days like Dec. 7th. Lots of days, even.

Filed Under: Soapbox

What is optimism?

May 20, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

Someone asked me recently about being a dad, and here was my response.

I think my main goal is to help them really internalize the trick of finding the upside instead of the downside, with a healthy dose of old-fashioned American “if it’s broke, fix it.” I don’t think being an optimist means you just accept whatever life dishes out — optimist is not another word for victim.

Am I injecting a bit? Yes, I’m very sensitive to this issue of fundamental optimism vs. fundamental pessimism, crossed with active/passive approaches. Seems like time for an Indexed-like four quadrant map. Maybe I’ll draw one today.

My next thoughts on this optimism/pessimism dimension were a combination of ideas:

It’s in that realm where I think Buddhism doesn’t map onto American psychology as neatly as it does in other countries’ cultures. (Of course, I saw a documentary film on Burma/Myanmar recently that made the argument that the deep Buddhist culture of the people made them more (too!) accepting of such crappy conditions in their country. My friend, native-born but from NorCal, called BS on that.)

The movie “They Call It Myanmar” didn’t make this point explicitly, but it certainly focused on, by juxtaposition, “deep” Buddhism, guilt, acceptance, and apparent passivity.

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: optimism

General under investigation in Afghanistan

April 30, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

I know Bill Caldwell. Worked for him. He convinced me, unintentionally I’m sure, to leave the Army. I know nothing about what he did, didn’t, should, or shouldn’t have done with all this stuff in the paper. But my personal opinion, FWIW, is that he’s not above suspicion and should not get the benefit of the doubt.

Shit, Rick, I do illegal searches all the time.

I debated on posting this, but there are people I know who are solidly upstanding, courageous men, full of character and good hearts. They have been in actual harm’s way for longer than I was even in the peacetime Army. Those men deserve our support and gratitude every day.

At the 3-star general level, maybe it’s no longer about moral courage, character, and choosing the hard right over the easy wrong; maybe it’s about politics just like it is when a congressman posts on Craigslist: you screw up and get caught, you’re out.

I hope you didn’t step over the line, sir.

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: character, leadership, military, rant

Don’t bother us with questions: just buy

February 28, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

Everything you do as a business speaks to your customers.

I got an email from Quicken the other day saying that they were shutting off certain services, including downloading info from banks. (How and why that should affect my desktop software, which I thought connected directly, is another version of the message in this post while being entirely different.) There’s a link to upgrade and save $20 for the privilege. What swell folks.

Occasionally, I read the fine print at the bottom of emails. (It’s an occupational hazard.) This choice language appears:

If you have any questions or comments about this e-mail, please DO NOT REPLY to this e-mail, because it is not a monitored mailbox.

Now, that happens to be pretty common in corporate emails for lots of reasons that stem from using third-party services/software to send email to huge numbers of customers and track the results. But what struck me here is that there’s nothing ELSE. No suggestion of what to do with your question or comment: no email link, no web form. You might assume that what they’d tell you to do with your question or comment isn’t very nice.

But since this is an “e”-mail, maybe this address at the bottom makes sense as an easy way to communicate with customers:

Intuit Inc., Customer Communications, 2800 E. Commerce Center Place, Tucson, AZ 85706

What’s the message of this email from Intuit?

Don’t ask questions; kindly just give us money — we don’t care what you think. It makes me wonder why to even include the “we’re not going to respond to your email” disclaimer if they’re not going to be receptive to any communication in the first place.

Intuit has (had?) a huge market share. But I can’t get a decent version for my mac after switching nearly two years ago. Is it any wonder that other companies have been making inroads. (Sure, they *bought* Mint in 2009; they didn’t come up with it.)

 

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: customer

Why DNA privacy should not be on your radar today

January 22, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

The NYT headline, “Web Hunt for DNA Sequences Leaves Privacy Compromised,” blows this out of proportion. 

 Wired’s article “Scientists Discover How to Identify People From ‘Anonymous’ Genomes” is only slightly more helpful. The key issue here is not that the DNA sequence of the participants itself was itself a magic fingerprint, but that when that information was combined with other genetic information of other people (in some cases, probably including the study participant) disclosed elsewhere on other terms, then it was possible to find people.

Indeed, there’s nothing magical here that hasn’t been done far more invasively by traditional marketers collecting personal consumer data from different sources and aggregating it.  

So what’s the point of knowing who I am if you have my DNA sequence? There’s a mention in Wired of a teen finding the identity of his sperm donor father. In that case, the teen had his own DNA and the father had put his DNA on a genealogy-related website. Well, there you go. That’s like putting your picture on LinkedIn and being surprised when someone matches your high school yearbook photo to it.

Unfortunately*, neither of these articles explains, or even hypothesizes in any way why this is a horrible thing. The NYT suggests that “severe penalties could be instituted for those who invade the privacy of subjects.” Usually we identify harms before proposing penalties.

People who disclose information know, or should know, that others will use that information and almost certainly in combination. People who buy drug-related products with credit cards and surf drug-related websites should not be surprised when an employer decides they might be smoking pot. Target, as an example only — we should all be SURE that every business that sells to consumers does this, recently got some unexpected attention when its data mining practices revealed that Target knew a teenaged girl was pregnant before her father did. 

 

By the way, in response to this study, the PGP reminded participants that this is obviously not an issue for us and of the rationale for not trying to protect sequence data.

 

Disclaimer: my position on the value of deliberately destroying any privacy of my DNA sequences is on the record: I’ve volunteered for the Personal Genome Project and will volunteer the DNA of my two boys and as many family members as they will take. Research requires data.

Ignorance is submission. Knowledge is power. Action is dignity. 


  • Wordle tells me unfortunately is a word I use an awful lot. I’m not sure that’s a good thing. I note it  here for the record and won’t edit that one out of this post. I expect it won’t appear as often in future posts.

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: genetics, privacy

Saving comment state improves usability

January 15, 2013 by rickcolosimo Leave a Comment

If you want people to comment, say on a lifehacker post about going paperless, and you require sign-ins for commenting, don’t trash their comments when they forget a password.

 

Among the least interesting passwords I remember is my lifehacker account for commenting. I don’t use it every day and it’s of zero value to a hacker (hence, a mediocre password such as “password”) to masquerade as me on lifehacker.

Today I wrote a brief comment on the post regarding scanning/ocr/storage workflow, contributing to the community in some small way. Lifehacker wants me to sign in. Of course, I forgot my password (since it’s for some reason forbidden for Firefox to remember it for me). In the course of doing the reset, the site not-so-conveniently trashed my comment. Gone. Zero. 

I don’t care enough to write it twice if you can’t care enough to remember it once. If I write it again, it’ll go on my blog as part of my workflow series.

Filed Under: Soapbox Tagged With: design, usability, web

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • Next Page »

Search this site

Recent Posts

  • That Stupid FB Notice
  • Memorial Day 2020
  • House Rules
  • Lost Spring
  • Did not find

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Tags

aba Add new tag Army autism biography blogging business model character cool culture customer data dating decisiveness economics fear finance humor language law leadership marketing military networking objective orphan Orphan ideas orphans personal politics privacy productivity quote quotes rant relationships right view soapbox software bounty tips tools wisdom workflow writing Zero-based

Copyright © 2021 · Diligent on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in