This blog (July 2007) and its sister (
7'oops7 - August 2007) started thirteen years ago. The motive of this blog was truth engineering which developed under the auspices of Boeing and several projects. These were principally related to commercial aircraft but included others.
How did truth engineering come about? I was involved in the AI that had its infamous winter. After the winter began, the context and tools changed a little, but we continued for over a decade with knowledge based engineering (KBE). Not unlike what we have seen for the couple of decades of the www (IP, internet), advances in computing have inspired lots and lots of progress. And, because of this, we have a landscape of ability without any overview that means much.
In fact, those pushing at the edge are to where they have to deal with black boxes of unknown value and possible failure points. Nothing new. We knew of this type of thing, and the cyclic nature of the energies, decades ago. It's just that things are much more complicated now.
In fact, I remember my first drafting of thoughts about truth engineering in the context of KBE and the new thing, internet, that was taking things in new directions. I puzzled on how to express the issues of ideas that were on the verge of becoming problematic. As one can see with the blog, I merely started in 2007 with thoughts that were to cohere at some point. When was this to happen?
Well all along, I noticed little crackings of the underpinnings. And, we have a lot to discuss about that. Too, one saw major shifts as products moved people in directions that were not healthy. I could see this? Why do you think that I used 'silly valley' (billionaires with no real sense of the nature of things - yes, categorically so)? In any case, of late, the acceleration to the path to perdition has become more obvious, generally.
So, it's time to resurrect this approach, again, after a sidetrack in Quora. There, I answered questions and had blogs. They moved the latter to spaces which I will used, however I need to organize years of work, first.
One huge factor with this rework is the 737 Max. Having seen what workers wrote, I want to explain this to Boeing management. After all, engineers are the core of the business. If engineering cannot be ethical and do things right, then, where will leadership arise? I might, true leadership? That is, smart people lead themselves, even when they join groups. We don't know much about that dynamic, but Carl G. Jung's thoughts apply.
So, we're not picking on Boeing. KBE did phenomenal work, at the time. There were even efforts a machine learning. So, the current hype comes about from better tools and toys. The understanding has diminished. But not, truth engineering is right down this alley.
Oh yes, this is cursory. But, let's look at one thing that is important. At the guts of machine learning (say, CNN) are tricks of mathematics that might be nuanced a little different now, but we knew them decades ago. Like I said, the toys and tools are better. But those came from hard work by lots of folks.
The magic of computing gets abstraction's appeal to be too much since we really have no way to dampen that energy. On the other hand, we want to encourage innovation. Ah, what might be a key thing? Ethical economics. And, I am not referring to macro manipulations that are the love of the political crowd. No, I am talking a micro and operational approach that I have seen no one, but myself, take. If I overlooked something, I'll admit it. But show me.
In the meantime, let's look at crapularity (necessary hermeneutics) and at the fact that we've created a deep set of unhealthy conditions. The real tragedy is that all of this was done in the name of science (yet, it has been accepted due to the sexiness - well, we'll get to anthropology, too).
'Enuf for one day.
Remarks: Modified: 01/14/2020
01/14/2020 --
