"on practicality": {
being practical can be quite valuable. a thing’s use value is a function of numerous variables including design, and other things that come more with time. cerebral saturation from experiencing the atrocious and the sublime, the vile and the benign.
We are born into the world with sets of sketchy information, imperfect recall after leaving notes from the prior life in the lecture hall, and venture out with hesitation and form BELIEFS. These beliefs in themselves are flawed, as tend to be varying sets of internally constructed probability distributions telling of how an event X moves with respect to another event Y, and how that relationship may or may not change after YOU come along.
Eventually each one of us develops a working set of these beliefs that, using first order conditions, we can use to optimize our life. here we arrive at law #1 of the theory of practicality, which formally states:
half of the time player i will form an incorrect belief all of the time. i.e., PEOPLE SUCK AT FORMING BELIEFS.
this is pretty much true everywhere. just because one idiot formed a BELIEF sure as shit doesn’t make it true. better to figure it out yourself, or try to. WINNING and accepting another player’s beliefs without personal confirmation are mutually exclusive events.
The WINNERS are the ontologically savvy members of the group who, when given a signal, have a means of accurately predicting the ensuing state. master modelers such as these can be found in all pockets of society, taking form as the powerful tycoon, the cunning entrepreneur, or the trustful friend. playing to their strengths, they take what they know about themselves, about their opponents and their desires, and they respond the to world as best they can.
you and I do this on the individual level, whereas larger organizations do it on a global scale. the magnitude of the exchanges are what makes them so messy. consider the problem of incompatible ontological beliefs. ontological beliefs are nothing less than formal representations of a set of concepts within a defined space and the work flow between those concepts. sometimes there is room for great mutual gains between people and groups if they can trade subsets of those beliefs, but incompatibible ontological states oftentimes render that gain unrealized in the form of dead weight loss.
THIS IS THE ISSUE OF OUR ERA, a world beset with an oversupply of relevent yet unintelligle DATA TROVES, incompatibility stemming from trivial semantic obstacles like different labels for the same object, subjective business terms, naming and defining categories and classes of software.
can a logical model built from that which is rationalizable offer the uniformity needed for ultimate efficiency, and is that state of affairs even desirable?
is it man versus machine in this zero-sum game? one can never say with certainty weather or not it’s going to rain.