Last month Sandia National Laboratories published an unlikely account of the thought of C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), the American pragmatist philosopher. See “Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Right Way of Thinking” (pdf) by Philip L. Campbell of the Sandia Networked Systems Survivability and Assurance Department, Sandia Report SAND2011-5583, August 2011.
What is the connection between Peirce’s philosophy and the national security mission of Sandia, or of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which sponsored the paper? The author did not reply to an email inquiry from Secrecy News on that point yesterday. But the paper states that “In practical terms, we can use Peirce’s lectures to build a model of how we make decisions.” (p. 12)
In recent months, we’ve seen much of these decades’ worth of progress erased. Contracts for evaluations of government programs were canceled, FFRDCs have been forced to lay off staff, and federal advisory committees have been disbanded.
This report outlines a framework relying on “Cooperative Technical Means” for effective arms control verification based on remote sensing, avoiding on-site inspections but maintaining a level of transparency that allows for immediate detection of changes in nuclear posture or a significant build-up above agreed limits.
At a recent workshop, we explored the nature of trust in specific government functions, the risk and implications of breaking trust in those systems, and how we’d known we were getting close to specific trust breaking points.
tudents in the 21st century need strong critical thinking skills like reasoning, questioning, and problem-solving, before they can meaningfully engage with more advanced domains like digital, data, or AI literacy.