Truth engineering

This blog started two years ago with the purpose of looking at issues of computation interacting with being (ourselves, so to speak). That is, we have expertise which has been honed through myriads of years and which has been extended through generations by memes and which is still not sufficient to cover a whole lot of problems (yes, the infamous world hunger, getting a project done on time, and more) that is not capable of handling computing (and truth) without some significant changes (and, it's more than just handling hogwash).

Oh, yes, there are plenty of worldviews with answers already determined even though our experiences can indicate (except to those best-and-brightest who are completely entralled with their own mind's eye) that underdetermination is really our most frequent state (and we learn to make guesses to fill gaps - albeit this can be fun, too).

So, the original issues being addressed were general, such as things in themselves, tribal dynamics, temporal influences, the sirens of abstraction, those who know it all. There may have been a leaning toward engineering in the beginning as the focus for discussion, but finance/economics soon raised its head as of interest to the theme.

As it turns out, both engineering and economics have been unending founts of examples that can be used for motivation and illustration. The 787 controversies of the fall of 2007 created the need for a look at those issues, and that caused an engineering focus for awhile. In fact, the first post, beyond the Seeds, was looking at abstraction's appeal which has a very strong pull.

Just, look at the mess of the economy due to faulty mathematics.

That economics could offer such a wide range of topics related to truth engineering became apparent as engineering does work for the most part (are we not besieged on all sides by products demonstrating engineering prowess?).

We will show that it's the manager mindset that get things screwed up. Over the past couple of years, plenty of the discussion about the looming problems of the economy was right on. It was obvious that things were awry due to fundamental issues and, now we might add, that many of these were not resolved in the crash.

The past few days has the WSJ exclaiming that Goldman Sachs is making money hands over fists. Well, didn't they get a bailout too? Fold themselves under a wing of a government shelter for protection (ain't that so sweet?)?

You see, GS represents that part of the economy that is hardly useful (though, leeches do have an acknowledged medical use) except for its abilities to do the major sucking out of the pockets. Who is looking at their stuff in detail?

Well, will the new day handle these issues or will we just go back to the normal idiocy of a game run by fat cats that consumes lots of resources in maintaining itself and that, for the most part, is not necessary - yet, seems to be taken as some extreme example of the virtues of capitalism?

Oh, of course, casino capitalism.

Remarks:

11/30/2009 -- From 'Our basis' can grow a whole bunch.

09/09/09 -- We'll need to look at UUUN, as a framework.

09/08/2009 -- System risks are still there.

09/03/2009 -- Computational foci raise miraculous need. Yes, we need to talk NP and more way to cope. Take, for instance, truth maintenance which is NP, yet that is no deterrent for the effort covered by the blog. Why? Ah, we're getting to that.

09/02/2009 -- Lean assumes a current framework which can be improved. That the process is still effective during the change can be checked easily. However, if it is not still effective or we do not have a stable framework, then we were, by necessity, in the undecidable state.

Modified: 11/30/2009