Effort and truth

From a cynical view (and in many situations today), we get our information fed from some PR machine which we are to take passively. Opinions differ about the amount of believability we can assign to such phenomena. Though, there are laws that attempt to maintain that information is not too problematic.

In more analytic terms, we always have a disparity between substance and surface; we just expect that the mappings that project from interior information to the exterior are not manipulated beyond some reasonable extent (that which is necessary).

Whether we put forth effort to go beyond the message depends upon several things, such as whether there is money involved (we want to control book cooking), whether there is personal interest (an extreme example would be the airplane), and more.

Actually, any effort requires resources, getting back eventually to money. Regular assessments of 'truth' will be costly, hence we would want them to be effective.

Opinions, without any backup, are easily captured using blogs and comments. Would one weight more heavily a signed comment as opposed to that one provided anonymously?

Would a technique, like bet2give, has a better way to weight than would the poll (7oops7)? The former is a permutation on the idea that the market can be used as a measure.

Remarks:

01/20/2013 -- Changed link for bet2give.

09/02/2009 -- Let's face it, folks, undecidability needs to be discussed and adopted in any complex situational setting, especially if computers are involved. Only hubris pushes us to make loud exclamations about what we're going to do in the future.

01/27/2009 -- At the time of this post, engineering was the main focus. Then, other areas become of interest due to overlaps in the problems: map-territory, computation and being, and much more. There will be more integrating posts to bring some cohesion, such as leveraging and fiction.

10/18/2007 -- This post was timestamped early am. Later the same day, there was an announcement of a delay in the case of a particular program that is of interest. With the announcement was a disclaimer (Forward-Looking Information is Subject to Risk and Uncertainty) that is encouraging in that it recognizes the forward-looking problems.

Sometimes, one wonders if reporting wants to be based upon a static view that can be impossible to attain. It's even more difficult assessing how well risk was defined and managed.

Further discussion will pull together earlier posts dealing with earned-value and status checking.

Modified: 01/20/2013