Our basis

Every so often, there will be a post that can relate across the blogs. The subject of this post is an example, as was the train (7oops7, trutheng, fedaerated).

As a reminder, the following list the motivations for the blogs.

• Truth engineering - the modern conundrums brought by success applying the artificial methods are wide and deep. Of course, this is debatable as many viewpoints attempt to cover these themselves. Yet, none seem sufficient, except that may be due to the variability inherent in the human. One role for computation will be augmentation, or filling in where we fail (or just don't want to perform) due to either complication or difficulty. It's not laziness, folks, rather many times reluctance is insightful. Watson, of IBM, suggested (paraphrase) that he looked for improvements to alleviate tasks that were repetitious and boring. That is, the 'necessity as the mother of invention' moral applies here. Yet, any accumulation of innovation has side-effects. These appear to have an interminable source. Computation exacerbates the problem due to the speed of change and the vastness of the domain (the ever-growing cloud, for example).
• 7oops7 - any endeavor ('oops) requires talent and resources in a continual stream (loops), yet managing side-effects (oops) is key. Some call this risk management. Turns out that finance and engineering have similar traits in this matter, though the latter has more of a claim for invoking science. That is, engineering does have a test bed framework that is more real than anything that we've seen possible with finance. But, failures can still lurk.
  
• FEDaerated - our current situation has a basis that is flimsy, for several reasons. Mind you, the flimsiness is not inherent, rather it deals with understanding the issues that truth Engineering tries to address. Unfortunately, wizards (yes, quants, I mean you, in part) run the necessary realms with little oversight. Of course, there is always the blustering of those with top-down power; however, what bottom-up, or middle-out, considerations do we need to address to resolve some of the issues. Not easy to say.
  

Each blog is to provide a different perspective on a matter so as to fill in a more thorough discussion. That is the hope.

Now, truth engineering gets to look at the fun stuff such as talk about what's mentioned in the Aside on the 'Our basis' post. Some may wonder if the topic can be expanded without resolving, or at least addressing, t-issues. No problem there. In the beginning, there may be more metaphor than fact, yet, so what, as science itself deals both top-down and bottom-up. One thing constant, and consistent, is quasi-empirical approaches of which Lakatos' method of thought experiment is part of the tool kit. Too, the whole dynamic behind the clouded web applies here; we'll see many types of experimentation available now. Analogous efforts, such as business intelligence, are just a little mole hill, so far.

Remarks

08/03/2011 -- The relationship to economics is important.

Modified: 08/03/2011