On 28/11/09 10:55 PM, Horace Heffner wrote:
http://www.physorg.com/news178178343.html http://tinyurl.com/ylcn43s Selected quotes: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization."
I am reminded of a discussion we had many years ago with some folks who were developing a parallel computer which used many microprocessors on cards interconnected across a switch (something new in those days).
We asked how you stopped the whole machine in the event of a single process encountering an error.
"You can't do that" we were told. "It's not possible to stop the whole thing at once."
I relayed this information to my boss, who laughed and said, "BS. Of course you can. Kick the plug out of the wall -- it all stops! So, we *know* you can do it -- now all we need to do is fine a more elegant mechanism."
In the case of "policy decisions" -- well, major wars have been fought, or avoided, as a result of such decisions. I'd say major wars pretty clearly have the capacity to change the course of civilization. And so, we have an existence proof: Policy decisions *can* affect the course of civilization, and the assertion quoted above is obviously false. Thus, we can set aside the blanket denial and look at the actual question, which is at what level, and to what degree, can policy decisions have an impact, and how can we maximize the impact in ways we want to see?
Remember, Hari Seldon was fictitious, and in fact his "creation" resulted in a contradiction: His own singular actions changed the course of civilization in a way that consideration of human behavior en masse could not have predicted. His existence disproved his hypothesis.
