I remember thinking that the war in Iraq wasn't an intrinsically bad idea, and didn't have to be a disaster. 
 
"Didn't have to be a disaster" is an unprovable claim, but it's now plausible that anyone who might have been able to run the occupation sensibly would have had too much sense to go in. 
 
Mencius, I'm not so much chilled by the idea that the US couldn't conquer and hold a third world country (though Viet Nam should have been a clue) which had been softened up by ten years of sanctions as that the people at the top didn't know they couldn't do it. 
 
I'm not sure the paper proves that foraging armies are able to do fine-tuned reward and punishment. If nothing else, as the army moves, new soldiers who aren't familiar with local details keep moving in, and I don't know how efficiently information gets passed around. 
 
Other revelation of ignorance: I had no idea the financial system was so fragile. I had no idea that so many people there weren't paying attention to whether what they were doing made any sense.

I remember thinking that the war in Iraq wasn't an intrinsically bad idea, and didn't have to be a disaster. 
 
"Didn't have to be a disaster" is an unprovable claim, but it's now plausible that anyone who might have been able to run the occupation sensibly would have had too much sense to go in. 
 
Mencius, I'm not so much chilled by the idea that the US couldn't conquer and hold a third world country (though Viet Nam should have been a clue) which had been softened up by ten years of sanctions as that the people at the top didn't know they couldn't do it. 
 
I'm not sure the paper proves that foraging armies are able to do fine-tuned reward and punishment. If nothing else, as the army moves, new soldiers who aren't familiar with local details keep moving in, and I don't know how efficiently information gets passed around. 
 
Other revelation of ignorance: I had no idea the financial system was so fragile. I had no idea that so many people there weren't paying attention to whether what they were doing made any sense.

Thanks for posting this. 
 
Do you think it's people in general who wildly overestimate the good possibilities of action vs. inaction, or might it be something about Americans?

Have you read _Seeing Like a State_ by James C. Scott? It's got more than a little about governments wanting to limit people's choices to make them easier to govern (the author got started as a result of researching government opposition to nomadism.

Partly analytical (ok, the cube has six sides), partly visual (can almost see that plane crossing the long diagonal), and have no way so far of proving whether I've got the right answer.

Are you sure that kinesthetic/practical (get cube, slice it) isn't an interesting part of problem solving?

Here's another little puzzle--if you cut a corner off a hypercube/tesseract, what shape do you get? (IIRC, there's an inaccurate definition of a tesseract in _A Wrinkle in Time_--just assume that you're working with a four-dimensional cube.)

This may have been obvious to everyone else, but I was taken aback when dodecahedrons were described as "football shaped". Oh--British article--they're talking about about what I'd call a soccer ball. Of course, even that isn't very accurate, but it's not quite as wrong.