Introduction

I wrote my first computer program in the fall of 1966 as an entering college freshman.  I immediately fell in love with the beasts.  This was a time when they cost millions of dollars and filled entire rooms.  I then spent over 40 years playing with them and, for most of that time, getting paid to do so.  I am now retired and busy letting my computer skills atrophy.  To deal successfully with computers you have to be logical, analytical, detail oriented, and data driven.  Computers have no opinion.  Something just is the way it is.  The good news is that computers don't get mad and they don't keep grudges.  So if you mess something up you can just do it over, correctly this time, and all is forgiven.  I have been very successful dealing with computers for a very long time.

People do not work like computers.  They are inconsistent and illogical.  Most people are not very analytical.  We all get mad and most of us hold grudges from time to time.  This is not all bad.  The real world is a very complicated place whereas computers are engineered to behave in simple predictable ways.  The world of even the most complicated computer system is vastly simpler than almost any real world system.  People have to operate in the real world.  It is a place that is literally impossible to completely understand.  People are forced to deal with the real world any way they can.  While the strategies people employ are not the best strategies they do permit people to cope with a world that seems illogical and inconsistent, where the world sometimes seems to be mad at us and where out understanding of what's going on can charitably be described as incomplete.

So it is not possible to adopt a pure "computer" approach to the real world.  It is not even a good idea.  Computers are programmed by people.  Computer programs are designed to handle a limited set of situations.  If you don't believe this then observe the behavior of a computer that is having hardware problems.  In general computers react poorly to unexpected situations.  Sometimes they even react poorly to expected situations.  So is the "computer" approach completely useless in the real world?

I don't think so.  People have been trying hard to figure out how to deal with the real world at least as long as written history has existed.  All this time people have been asking the fundamental question:  Is this approach more successful than that approach in dealing with the world?  The answer is frequently unclear.  But not always.  In fact, while it may be manifestly obvious that a certain approach is flawed and inadequate, it may also be manifestly obvious that it is more effective than another approach.

The test for effectiveness in some cases is very straight forward.  If two civilizations clash and one destroys the other completely then it is clear that the surviving civilization is more effective, at least in a military sense.  There is no need to invoke arcane mathematical calculations to come to this result.  Short of complete annihilation there are other measures that can be indicative.

Civilizations have been testing themselves against each other for thousands of years.  So we have lots of results to sift through.  It is illuminating when someone characterizes a specific civilization as "primitive".  Stripped to its essence the idea is that the primitive civilization is less effective than the "advanced" one.  There seems to be a historical trend from primitive civilizations to advanced ones.  But a careful study shows that the trend is not a straight line through time from primitive to advanced.  Primitive is somewhat in the eye of the beholder and many civilizations once thought to be advanced have declined.  Examples of this include the Roman Empire and China.

A lot of people have spent a lot of time on this subject of the advance and decline of civilizations and I am not one of them.  So I look at the problem from the most basic perspective I can think of and ask:  What does an advancing civilization look like?  My most basic observation is that advancing civilizations change.  Over time they do things in a different and better way.  I just can't see how a civilization can advance without changing.  Societies can change in two ways.  They can do things in a new and different way or they can change back to an older way of doing things.  Now I can imagine that a society can make a change and after a while decides the change made things worse.  In this case it makes sense to go back to the old way of doing things.  But I can't think of a single example where a society has made a large scale change, decided it made things worse, went back to doing things the old fashioned way, and things got better.

Certainly there many examples of yearning for the past.  Confucius decided that China had made a mistake in its adoption of new religious and social practices and that it should go back to "that old time religion".  But this was a con.  Confucius changed Chinese religious and cultural practices but it was to a new way, not back to the old way.  Perhaps someone can think of an example but I think it will turn out that reversions back to the old ways will actually turn out to be changes to a new way sold as a reversion back to the old way.  So I think advancing civilizations are like sharks.  A shark dies if it stops moving.  A civilization can not advance without changing.

Since change is a necessity the next logical question is:  How does a civilization change in a good way rather than a bad way?  This is a really hard question.  Given that civilizations have frequently declined it is obvious that it is easy to get the answer wrong.  So how do you go about getting the right answer to a hard question?  Let's turn the question around.  How do you get the wrong answer to a hard question?  It turns out that we know something about this.  People have been studying the question of how to get the answer wrong for thousands of years.  In western civilization the first ones to seriously tackle this question were the ancient Greeks.  They invented something called logic.  They basically said "if you don't follow the rules of logic you will get unreliable answers".  Since then no one has been able to poke any holes in the ancient Greek system of logic.

The situation is actually a bit more complicated.  It is possible to get a good answer using a flawed chain of logic.  But if you use a properly constructed chain of logic you always get an answer you can depend on.  Finally, there are many problems for which logic will not deliver a solution.  So logic is of limited use.  But when you can use it and when you use it correctly the result is completely dependable.

The ancient Greek system of logic has been refined and extended since.  Most visibly modern mathematics encompasses logic but also covers much more.  But the limitations remain.  It is possible to get the correct result with flawed mathematics and there are many problems for which mathematics delivers no result at all.  In fact, this has been mathematically proved by Kurt Godel in 1931.  But where it works, it works.  And more broadly Science embodies that which made ancient Greek logic so powerful.  Science, or more specifically scientific thinking, is mathematics expanded to cover more territory.  And yet again, it is possible to get a good result in an unscientific manner and Science can't answer all questions.  So it has major limitations.

It is my belief that for those questions that mathematics and Science can make a contribution then mathematics and Science will generally yield better results than alternative approaches.  And if mathematics and Science says something is wrong it is very likely wrong.  At a minimum the holder of the contrary position must acknowledge the mathematical or Scientific result and provide a good reason for discounting it.

In short I am a Sciency kind of guy.  And that perspective will be reflected in my posts.