<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title></title><style type="text/css">p.MsoNormal,p.MsoNoSpacing{margin:0}</style></head><body><div style="font-family:Arial;">I believe Merle recommended this book to the list sometime back, but Steve's comments suggest no one took her up on the recommendation. The book: Stanley, Kenneth O. and Joel Lehman, <i>Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned", the myth of the objective</i>. (Objective in the sense of goal.)<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">The book argues that <i>"setting high level ideals" </i>(objectives) and <i>"doing enough measurement and modeling to monitor how well we are doing" </i>pretty much assures failure.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">I missed Merle's post recommending the book, but it came to my attention via Richard Gabriel and is being used in some research with Jenny Quillien (FRIAM and onetime Mother Church attendee) in the area of evolution as well as planning. The book's author's are AI professionals and researchers as is Gabriel, so out work might have some applicability to computing as well.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">davew<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;"><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">On Wed, May 26, 2021, at 2:18 PM, Steve Smith wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> In most of the trajectories through the postCapitalistic subset of my<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> imaginarium, maximizing profit or even gross production is eschewed in<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> deference to satisficing the commodity stocks (including liquid<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> currency) required to support the flows we might consider necessary and<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> good. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> I agree with the sentiments specifically spun on the list that "none of<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> us are smart enough to figure all this out ahead of time". Kurt Godel<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> warned us about that already. I am not a proponent of an engineered<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> econo-socio-political system, but I *am* a proponent of setting high<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> level ideals to strive for (e.g. a humanist, biospherist, terran,<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Sol-system, Milky-way Galaxy-ist value system) and doing enough<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> measurement and modeling to monitor how well we are doing and if we need<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> to "nudge" the knobs on our models. Engineering IS a part of our<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> evolving nature, I can't change that. What does it mean to obtain<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> enough collective coherence on those values, the models that represent<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> them and the data to gather? I'm not sure... I think the "culture<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> wars" right now are a part of that and maybe it never will be anything<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> but cacophanous dissonance. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> Technological Innovation is sure to be part of our future (short of a<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> stone-age collapse), I just hope those of us who have a stake in how<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> that unfolds include some humanist (etc.) perspective rather than<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> letting the neoDarwinian stylization of manic hypercapitalism continue<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> to be the dominant driver in *what* and *how* we innovate.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> On 5/26/21 12:23 PM, uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > Yeah, OK. I agree. As with the FinTech payment plan band-aid I posted, our nudges can, at least, demonstrate some good faith attempts to "do good". But I'd like it better if we were more aggressive in our attempts ... aim high so that when you inevitably fail, you'll end up slightly higher than you would've if you'd aimed low. But I doubt focusing on profitability is the way to aim high. The space of profitable enterprises is *heavily* biased to the low hanging fruit. As Eric pointed out awhile back, the majority of high impact innovation is launched via non-profit efforts. In that perspective, profit limits high impact innovation by diverting resources to low impact innovation.<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> ><br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> > On 5/26/21 8:59 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:<br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> >> To clarify, by "remediate" I mean that some consequences are created (e.g. a pandemic, harm to the biosphere), and then there is a problem to solve. Pfizer is a remediator. <br></div><div style="font-family:Arial;">> >> Ford is a potential remediator with the F-150 lightening, solar panel manufacturers are remediators, Impossible Burger is a remediator, etc. Yes, I recognize some will debate whether some of these are really remediators. 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