I am a survivor of the Expert Systems rage of the mid-80s. Every trade journal of every industry that even had a trickle of data processing was touting the next coming of Expert Systems. ES were premised on taking the most experienced, most expert of your business’s humans, then making a killer app with your tiny desktop computers that would cross-examine your clerks to make sure they answered all of the questions that your top guru would ask.
Category: Nobody Asked, But
System-Bound III
I was thinking, a few weeks ago, as I was approaching Chicago from Northern Indiana, a jumble of converging and diverging routes, that the last thing I needed was some electronic message carrying ironic propaganda — it was all I could do to keep from making the wrong turn. I needed focus, not entertainment.
System-Bound II
Not only do we have unforeseen consequences, we have failures to learn from the lessons of history. The course of humankind has shown a continual advancement in both the ability to kill one another and the capability of deriving wealth from the process.
System-Bound
Decisions that are based on the greater good for the greater number are often made by jiggering the frame, not by examining what is the good for whom, and not by properly accounting for the effects.
Forty-Five Horror Stories
This morning, an online friend responded to my latest rant about the current edition of POTUS, by questioning how many years — or decades — it would take to recover from the current administration. I hold no such optimistic view. I generally consider the office of POTUS to be a carbuncle on the derriere of human achievement. No such source of grief ever goes away, it merely subsides among many sources.
Perfect in What Sense? II
Once I read in a forgotten novel or a forgotten review of a forgotten novel that one character described another as able to identify and illuminate the least distinguished facet of any set of circumstances. I am reminded of this when I hear of POTUS’s latest tweet recounting the attack on Syria as “perfectly executed.”
Perfect in What Sense?
POTUS has a disturbing tendency to use more hyperbole with an inverse relationship to the likelihood of outcomes. He tweets that strikes on Syria were “perfectly executed,” when the reality is that execution has nothing to do with how the events will affect the history of humankind. “The operation was a success but the patient died.” “The cop gunned down 12 dogs, but he followed procedure to the letter.”
Tell the Truth
Mark Twain wrote, “When in doubt, tell the truth.” That seems, on its face, to be simple enough, but what does it mean? We live in a land of lawyers, where what is the truth becomes more and more a matter for speculation. POTUS has labeled a whole genre of purported information as “Fake News.” But what does that mean? Does it mean news that he doesn’t like, or does it mean misinformation for which determinate proof of falsity exists?
Chicago
Now that I’ve been home a few days, back from Chicago, I ask myself, “How does it all work?” And I keep coming back to self-ordering and the institutionalizing of individuality. Chicago works one human encounter at a time, one negotiated transaction at a time. Mises would be happy to know that the molecules of this economy behaved according to the natural laws of human action.
Education vs Schooling
I was writing a memoir yesterday of our trip to Chicago with our two youngest granddaughters, who are 13 and 11 respectively. In part of the memoir I began to consider, why the trip itself was educational as opposed to the daily regimentation of schooling (which the girls would be getting if not for Spring Break).