On Fri, 2014-04-18 at 13:08 -0600, Steve Smith wrote: > As individuals with "enlightened self interest" it would seem to be in > our interest to understand how these things work and work *with* them > rather than continue to try to brute-force *engineer* these things.
In the social context, it is not about engineering the systems. It's about perturbing them in big enough ways so that us humans can say, "Yes, we have have turned that knob, and these were the consequences which we now incorporated in this somewhat more general mathematical model." In contrast to "We imagine that the world involves these important features, and have built a mathematical model that predicts things about our imaginary world." The engineering is not to Make It Right, it is to pose a hypothesis and test it on ourselves using the force of government(s) to do the experiment. Turns out there are a lot of us and more coming all the time. No real danger of running out. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
