Re: Decentralization and the navy

["Miklos Gyorgy" <MIKLOS@ttt-atm.ttt.bme.hu> (by way of vanessa@media.mit.edu(Vanessa Stevens Colella))]

Brian, Gary and all,

> The purpose of any military organization is to take ordinary decent people
> and turn them into willing mass murderers.  It's obvious that there is no
> way such a goal can be accomplished by encouraging free and independent
> thinking.
>
> I think that this points out the weakness of the whole concept of central
> versus decentral as an organizing principle.  There are different *kinds*
> of decentralization.  It is one thing to allow people to pursue their own
> goals.  It's quite a different thing to allow people to work out small
> details about how to achieve someone else's goals.

I think that if StarLogo is to be used as a learning tool for
decentralized systems anywhere from nursery to postdoc level, in order for
it to be authentic, the relationship between the students and the
teacher must also be decentralized. What I think this means is that - among
other things - students should be allowed to take control and
responsibility over their own development, and they should be encouraged to
express their own ideas, their own personality.

As we have just heard, decentralized concepts are increasingly being used
in military contexts. But I feel that using StarLogo (or other
tools) with the above pedagogical thinking in mind would be more or less
paradoxical in an army, which in general tries to make people uniform and
obedient to command.

In my optimistic moments, I think that using decentralized means of
communications, such as the internet (and also using tools like
StarLogo), helps people to better express their ideas and feelings without
fear and get to know others', and this could help to eliminate war and
armies altogether. Just hope that future gives more reason for moments of
that kind of optimism.

Gyorgy