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RE: Are there any limits?

• To: 'Matt Gushee' <mgushee@h...>, xml-dev@l...
• Subject: RE: Are there any limits?
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@i...>
• Date: Mon, 1 Jul 2002 10:51:47 -0500

Not at all.  I'm saying that the attempt to do 
this usually results in that until the system 
learns to forget.   We have to learn to forget.

Earlier, I gave the example of the teen-ager 
and said that the simple goal of self-awareness 
does not of necessity lead to a more efficient 
system.  If we state that a requirement for 
self-awareness is introspection, then a teen-ager 
is an example of a system that is intensely 
self-absorbed and therefore, worthless for 
many tasks (energy wasted in re-examination 
cycles until controls emerge to manage 
polarities and procedures to solve problems).

But the WWW (not the Internet specifically) 
is a good example of engineering with a 
stupid fielding strategy.  It doesn't of 
necessity make us smarter although I will 
argue that in some cases, smarter users 
result.  Again, context. It also promotes superstitious 
acquisition if the control metric is frequency 
of citation instead of source of citation.  

Still there is a recursive problem in the second approach 
in that it is possible to get a certification 
for expertise based purely on frequency, so 
the control has to be one of authoritative 
or badged certification.  In other words, it 
is only as good a measure as the measure that 
measures it, and so forth.  If we posit 
that a terrorist being able to access the 
plans for an electrical generating facility 
makes him or her "smarter" we will be 
right in principle but wrong in context. 
A control system has to be vetted at 
each of its stratified levels.  

Why?  Because the idiot who posts the plans 
in the name of public transparency is the 
one that needs a bit of remediation but that 
is the history of the Web and the result of 
the unvarnished promotion of it over using 
experience to vette goals for its use.

One can be terribly self-aware and still 
be a Golem (see Green Goblin: Spiderman). 
The paradox of set theory is solved by 
emergent controls.  The cost is that  
second order controls have to be vetted 
as well.

len

From: Matt Gushee [mailto:mgushee@h...]

On Mon, Jul 01, 2002 at 08:07:10AM -0500, Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
> Or that an extraordinary amount of disk space and CPU time 
> will be exhausted handling metadata.

Are you saying that self-awareness can be achieved through sheer
quantity of data? If so, you would expect humans to have become more
self-aware (and perhaps wiser?) as a result of widespread access to the
internet. In fact, just the opposite seems to have happened.

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