Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (45 page)

"Weapons don't mean a thing, colonel. Disparity in armament is simply one of the factors to which we assign weights in the tactical and strategic equations." He took a cigar from his pocket and lit it carefully, staring cross-eyed down his long nose.

"Twenty years ago, we put
our
faith in gadgets—radar and guns and engines and nuclear explosives—and you remember what happened. We learned our lessons. There's always somebody with bigger and better stuff. So now we learn to use what we do have with maximum effect, and stick to simple weapons we know won't fail us. Our hole card is the infantryman walking on his own two legs with good solid steel in his hands.

"We can't lose, because we don't depend on tools, we depend on knowing what
people
are going to do with tools, and adapt our own action to the circumstances. With the Latin-Americans we used a combination of force and economic and moral action. With the British, we used economic and political means. With these gooks, we use force at the moment, it's cheaper to kill them than to educate them. I don't know just what we'll use with the Raiders, but we'll take them, don't ever doubt that, all in good time, after we've cleaned our own house and have this planet organized.

"I worked on the initial evaluation, right after the raid, we had plenty of material to work up, and we learned enough even then to show they had weaknesses. Our biggest unit is still working on it, every time somebody comes up with a new refinement they work it down a little finer, every time we get new data it goes into the mill. The pictures we got of that fellow this afternoon are on the way back already. That's what we want now, little things, which side the pilot sits on, what part of the battle interested them, anything to fill in the picture.

"Some day, they'll land, get close enough for us to get our hands on them, and we'll be ready for them."

The major took the cigar out of his mouth and spat.

The watch chief socio-technician was monitoring reports by radio-fax, television, and voice; and keeping up a running fire of commentary for the evaluators and calculators who were screening the material and feeding it into the machines.

"Raider landing as predicted," he said, "near major urban center— Chicago. Bless
Bess,
what a ship, big as the
Queen Mary
—"

Machines clicked and chattered and hummed smoothly.

"Plan Sugar-fourteen, modification three on basis current information, just initiated."

"Somebody's dragging their feet," one of the calculators said. "I just cranked out modification five, and mod-4 was acknowledged by Field control at 2113."

"Log it," the watch chief advised. "They'll try to bounce it on us, they're always wrong but they keep hoping."

"Mod-4 coming up," he added. "Only three and a half minutes late, they're outdoing themselves today. That's old Fatso running to the ship instead of walking— Which stupid knothead took my coffee cup?"

On a balcony overlooking the control center, the commanding officer was explaining the operation to some high brass.

"Well, I can see you have a nice operation here," a general said. "Very smooth. But what I don't understand is how you Evaluation people are so sure the Raiders don't have something equivalent to our own Strategic and Tactical Evaluation. If they do, what are we going to do then?"

"They can't have," the CO said positively. "Remember, we've been evaluating these people for fifty years.

"In order to have STE, you have to have a basic science of human motivation. And they don't have it. The Raid itself is our basic evidence for that. There's no indication that they had anything whatever to gain from the raid, they did it to save us from self-destruction.

"A race that can destroy half a planet's population, forcibly impose its will on an alien race, not for the legitimate aim of self-preservation but because it wants to play God, can't possibly understand even the first rudiments of social control. That type of thinking is authoritarian, symptomatic of egotistic atomism.

"No, we'll take them all right. We have to. The universe isn't safe with people like that running loose, living in an insane world of subjective surrealism, but acting on men who live and die in the real world of objective events.

"They're like idiot children playing with a machine gun."

For a brief time there flourished
Destinies
, a series of books that were very like magazines; and they were wonderful. Edited by Jim Baen, with myself as science editor and columnist,
Destinies
was just that: an inquiry into possible destinies of the human race.

Indeed, the magazine could fairly have been called the official journal of the Advanced Planning Department of Humanity: not so much that it was so excellent as to earn that title, as that it had it by default. No one was interested in competing.

My part in
Destinies
was a series of columns called "New Beginnings." One of those was half tirade on the social sciences, and half suggestion as to what a social science might be.

Since I wrote that I've heard a lot about the "new" psychology, and "cognitive science." Its practitioners have high hopes; and since hope springs eternal, so do I. Alas, at the moment it's all hope; I've read a number of books and journals on the new sciences of the mind, and all I've seen so far is approach. There has been some healthy clearing of the sterile deadwood of behaviorism, but site clearing is not building. We can continue to hope.

Meanwhile, I see no need to revise this.

"Know then thyself, presume not gods to scan. The proper study of mankind is man."

—Alexander Pope

We science fiction people often preen ourselves over SF's successful predictions. The famous visit by the FBI to John Campbell's office during World War II; rockets and space travel; TV; etc. And in fact we haven't done too badly in the technological forecasting business; no worse than anyone else, anyway.

But we don't often mention our "predictions" in the social sciences.

Remember the Golden Age of science fiction? Those were the days when "psycho-history" was an exact science using real math; computers manipulated the calculus of values, and matrix algebra, and all that good stuff. Psychiatrists "cured" criminals; judges were physicians, not lawyers. The social ills of the nation, the world, aye, the universe were plugged into computers (big, massive ones, not the dinky little things IBM and DEC make nowadays) and lo! the answers came forth.

Those stories had their effect, at least on me: I decided I was going to be the Hari Seldon of the XXth Century. I wanted to use the very best tools available, so I studied math and physics and hard sciences, then formal logic and Boole's Laws of Thought, and Carnap's sentential calculus, and once I was tooled up came a perfect orgy of psychology and sociology and anthropology that ended with what used to be called a "terminal degree" (meaning that thought ceases with the Ph.D.?). I studied psychology at the University of Iowa, where they had not one but two schools of psychology, Hull's pseudo-mathematical "learning theory," and Kurt Lewin's "vector psychology." I kept wondering when they were going to
use
mathematics. Surely, thought I, there would come a time when they would give rigorous definitions; but no, what happened was that they took mathematical symbols and let them stand for some perfectly good English words—but without improving the precision of their definitions one whit. And even when they played math games with the resulting symbols (none of which could
really
be quantified), the most complicated function I ever saw was a simple algebraic equation.

But then there was statistics. That, we were told, is a tough subject. Well, given that it was taught daily at 0700 by a professor of education, it
seemed
tough; but in fact all that was taught was cookbook stat, how to compute mean, median, mode, standard deviation, and the like; and how to do cookbook tests using Student's "T-test," and a peek at the Chi-square—not at the Chi-square
distribution
, of course. Heaven forbid that psychology students learn real mathematics; so actual calculations of probability not covered in the cookbook were beyond my classmates, and I suspect that if you ask the average Ph.D. in psych or sosh or an thro or ed what a probability density is, you'll either get a blank stare or hear something mumbled about specific gravities.

In due time I wandered to the University of Washington. (Accident certainly plays a large part in one's life: I was in school on the Korean-type GI Bill, which paid a fixed sum per month; I hadn't lived with my parents since a year before I graduated from high school, but to save money I had to go to a state university as a resident; my parents had gravitated to Alaska, but the state of Washington had generously declared residents of Alaska to be Washingtonians; and therefore. . .)

The psychology department at the University of Washington had its schools, too: one was headed by a maniac who'd spent twenty years in the attic studying conditioned reflexes in chickens. The best-known man at Washington was Edwin Ray Guthrie, one of the "big three" in learning theory; at Iowa they'd taught us he was not merely wrong, but stupid. (My own opinion is that he was the only practical psychologist in the theory business; his theory can be stated in two sentences, and his practical deductions from the theory are almost absurdly simple; but they can be applied—and they work. That's another story for another time.) And finally there were a couple of professors who actually understood something of mathematics, and who seemed determined to apply real scientific method to the study of man.

One was Paul Horst, who had a contract from the US Navy; he was trying to predict the four-year grade point average of entering freshmen. Lest Proxmire read this and retroactively award Dr. Horst a Golden Fleece, let me point out that the Navy had—and has—a damned legitimate interest in predicting academic success. It costs a lot of money to send a recruit through specialized training such as electronics school; if you can choose from among the boots those likely to do well in the school, you'll save the cost of Dr. Horst's grant in no time.

Those were heady days. Horst's approach to the problem was to get every possible measure on every entering freshman, wait until they graduated, then flog hell out of the data. The goal was to find a series of weights to apply to each predictor such that when you did all the addition and multiplication you had an adequate prediction; and to do that for each of thirty possible majors! Here finally was a legitimate use for matrix algebra, which Horst required all of his students to take.

We also went to computer school, because inverting a 60 x 60 matrix is hairy. Of course the best computers in the world weren't very good; IBM thoughtfully gave the school a 650, but there weren't any programs to do what we wanted, and we grad students had to learn programming: not in easy languages like Basic or Fortran, which didn't exist; not even in modern assembly language; no, we had to do it in machine language.

Eventually it was done. (My part, as I recall, was a program that would invert triangular matrices; it took a whole summer to develop it, too.) Came the day when the great grade prediction program was to be run. Since the 650 had rather limited memory (on a drum at that) the programs made it punch intermediate answers on cards, which were then carried from the punch to the reader to be fed in again; we were up all night getting just part of the answer. But at last we had the equations: take an incoming freshman, subject same to a battery of tests, plug in high school grades and class standing, plug in a correction for the particular high school (and save the data, because that correction factor needed more cases from each school to give it more accuracy); put that into the computer; and out came a prediction of the grade that student would get after four years in each of about 30 major subjects.

Only predictions, of course; now there was nothing for it but to wait four years and let those students graduate. Obviously each case would count only toward the predictions made for the major actually chosen; but enough of those would validate the predictors. Eventually there'd be enough data to validate the method used.

I'd left before the first students graduated, but I'm told it looked very good indeed; good enough that the University decided to give incoming students their predictions to help them choose majors.

And it hit the fan.

I don't know the current status of the grade prediction program at the UW now; I gather it's moribund. It seems the predictions were racist. They were detrimental to some of the high schools (remember that correction factor?). They were also detrimental to certain departments, because they showed that students almost certain to flunk out in one of the difficult majors would do well in many of the soft sciences . . . (In certain majors there was not one single predicted flunk.)

So what's the point of all this?

Two points: one, it may just be possible to do really useful stuff in the social sciences; and two, it takes a lot of time, and it takes a lot of money; and if time and money shortages don't discourage that sort of thing, the next factor is almost certain to: it's
hard work
. It takes real knowledge of real hard stuff; much harder than sophomore stat and freshman calculus.

And do they require that sort of thing in social science departments? They do not. What they do require for a Ph.D. in psych is "History of Psychology"—a course in which you're required to learn, in great detail (the textbook was written by a man named Boring; portent enough, but the reality was worse), what all the "great thinkers" of the field believed. At the end of each section you find out why they were all wrong. It's as if to get a degree in chemistry you had to spend months learning about the phlogiston theory; as if physics required a three-week course in Democritus' beliefs about atomic structure. In other words, this required course is a confession: the discipline has so little content that they've invented this artificially difficult barrier so the doctorate won't be so easy to get.