The Mechanics of War :: War Statistics Papers

The Mechanics of WarRecently a new-fashioned trend has taken up Wall Street. Savvy broker firms bind completed that the commercialize is probably controlled by some rules, and those rules have to be found to make more than money with the least risk. They hired numerous mathematicians to look for some(prenominal) formulas that would seem to express the market. Those analyzed previous market trends and used laws of statistics to try to predict the future of the market. The funny thing is that at times this approach actually worked. It yielded a slightly more than 50 percent accuracy, and that was enough. (When dealing with tremendous amounts, even a small luck is not meager.) Statistics work for everything when there is a lot of it. They work for money, molecules, atoms, have systems, and even people. People tend to adhere to statistics when there is a join amount of people to stifle the occasional fluctuations in human behavior. many an(prenominal) things we do depend on statistics. Take war for example. War is a very good example, since the outcome depends more on the general scheme of the whole war, than on individual soldiers. It follows definite rules that can be explicit in formulas. The individual people in war tend to blend in statistics, in the eyes of the high command, the public, as well as in their own perception. Tim OBrien wonderfully illustrates this in his essay How to Tell a True War Story. He relates that there is no point to any events or actions according to the perception of the soldier during a war. You smile and think, ... whats the point? (469) he says. A person then becomes nothing more than a statistic -- a part of a whole behaving in a random way. If there is no point to existence, then his actions are really random. Something truly random can be easily studied, stimulated, expressed in some numbers, percentages, probabilities. This randomness of the soldier is what the whole military apparatus depends on. pick out if t he life of a soldier during war had a point, if he realized that there is some underlying meaning, wouldnt he strive toward the oddment assigned by that meaning? He would, for that is in human nature. Now, if there was no meaning in his perception, he could easily be persuaded that a particular thing must be done. He will obediently follow.