Busytown or Lazytown? Note that the author is not assuming (or advocating) the infantilization of the audience. He says the key to Busytown is who does what -- i.e., architecture. Children are taught a social architecture -- whichever kind, by whatever teachers; there is no such thing as no architecture at all -- and receive it as an ideal because that is the only category that they possess. The fact that it is an ideal does not mean that the needle cannot be moved toward it in real life. Scarry's focus on roles and responsibilities may seem trivial or naive, but it is also essential.
What is success? In 1911, Winston Churchill converted the Royal Navy from coal to oil. Was that a success? Show your work, with particular reference to events from 1947 to the present day.
It is devolution. It is species-wide, if the Americans got a head start. Turn off education, fast-forward one lifespan, and you are at zero. We're nearly there.
The next step in the pitch is: we can shut it down, but doing so will involve large capital costs and stranded costs that we did not anticipate. Make us whole for those costs and we will shut it down. They have been watching how the electric utilities have handled the political winds slamming back and forth: coal yes, coal no, coal yes.
This thread is dead, but my point was about radical alternatives to academic fads. These are stickier than most fads -- they typically last a generation to a lifespan, because the only thing that kills them is the death of their believers. And they are always wrong, and absurdly wrong, and destructively wrong. Any alternatives to them are either light paraphrases of them, or else radical; and the radical ones are mostly crank. But the only way to make actual progress is to find the rare radical hypothesis that is not crank, and the only practicable way to do that is to generate more radical hypotheses. (The impracticable approach is to wait for a genius. People have starved to death doing that.)
I learned to read when I was three. Accordingly, I have only pinprick memories of the process. When I entered K, the fact that I could already read was a showstopper; I was kicked upstairs into first grade with panicky haste. In first grade, they were "using" "phonics" to teach what I already knew, and it wasn't working, because have you seen English? The approach was to lay out a sprawling tree of special cases and leave the children to draw the only possible conclusion, which was that the spelling and pronunciation of each word must be memorized.
The difficulty in apprehending Joyce comes from the fact that we are given a frozen corpus of an idiom whose distinction is its fluidity. If these tales were transmitted orally they would never be twice the same, but we know that Joyce corrected and post-corrected every detail: freezing not just the text, but the storyteller and his audience. The result is a braid of category errors, a text that says "I am that I am not." The only option is to receive it sensually.
The nonexistence of that external database is the crucial bit. The enterprise ontology has been the holy grail for decades. That is why I say that he was assuming the hard bit.
The rest of the right way to think is the obligation to discard radical hypotheses that don't work out. Visionaries see things that other people don't. Mostly that is because they are not there. Every so seldom, they are.
De mortuis and all that, but someone has pointed out the poor track record of his later initiatives and I think the reasons for those failures are an important part of the picture. Look at his last few blog posts, outlining a radical alternative to LLMs. Read closely, and at the heart of that idea we find "assume enterprise search". But the willingness to consider radical alternatives is part of the right way to think.
Nothing baffling about it. Politicians need voters to identify with them. Except in a few places, any whiff of competence interferes with that identification.
Post hoc, propter hoc? Or was it ante hoc? Software comes with an assumed set of business rules; rules imply roles, and roles imply organization. Adopters of ERP systems are told that they are infinitely customizable; what actually happens is that the implicit model and the actual model fight each other to a bloody draw. Where the software wins, the organization loses, i.e. is forced to change. /Perhaps this is what Conway observed./
The clone hardware manufacturer was Systems Concepts. Microsolutions was a software play -- I think they had something to do with trying to port 1022/1032.
Another falsehood: the absolute value of the offset from Greenwich cannot exceed 12 hours. When New Zealand is on DST, they are GMT+13. The first version of the XML spec got this wrong.
The NT kernel contains many fine things, but it was released in a badly immature state. Until NT 4, the multiprocessor support was unfit for purpose. DCE RPC was also broken. The publicly-available DDK documentation was insufficient for anyone to write a kernel-mode driver. If you wanted the real doco, Microsoft would sell it to you under NDA, but no one told you that. If they had had any real competition, the product would have discredited itself out of existence within two years.
The first states were city-states. Singapore has uniform population density, therefore it can be governed. Entities containing both high and low population density cannot be governed unless one is explicitly subordinated to the other. We would like to learn from Lee's insights and methods, but they do not travel.