from article by Christian Kerr in "The Australian" newspaper

Kerr quotes from a document from Carr's office. "Establish a new Knowledge Connections program within the Enterprise Connect Program, to work with Industry Innovation Councils in facilitating new connections and clusters crucial to the competitive advantage of firms in knowledge-based economies."

COMMENT. This is ok if we see it as a form of Pidgin English. Much worse languages have been used in the past, for describing automation.

But how much will it cost to implement such designs? How will they be validated?

Why does a government care about "The competitive advantage of firms"? The most obvious answer is that this means that the country's firms can compete competitively with firms from other countries, if resources are available that the Carr paper proposes, i.e. connections and clusters.

(a bit of brainstorming here):

But why does Carr's paper buy the implied claim that competition is good? Whys is it good to compete, if rational analysis should turn out to show that more money or more goodness can be made by working cooperatively rather than competitively. Indeed, the CSIRO was once, presumably, cooperative, as were universities. Now, isn't it the case that departments at universities (and perhaps at CSIRO ??) are set up to compete with each other. What evidence is there that this approach gives better results than cooperation? Perhaps the truth is ignored because it conflicts with the axiom of the neoliberal that competition is good.

In fact, there may be no conflict. We may have an axiom that cooperation is good. We could also have axioms that say that conflict is good. This does not mean that we have a conflicting set of axioms. They may need to be applied under different conditions.

What we need to is to set up a system which can run our axioms to implement a simulated world.

Perhaps we can obtain the same "real world" results with more than one particular set of axioms.

Comment. I need a machine to run the axioms. But this will also include "interpreting" the axioms in some way. Because of this flexibility, we could presumably rig the results so that we interpret the axioms in such a way that they give results we favour.

To avoid this, we need to have a machine to interpret the axioms, where we can somehow convince ourselves that the machine has not been secretly rigged.

This suggests to me a method of working. We can have perhaps a very simple model, which we can run in diverse possible worlds. By looking at the results we might believe we have data which allow us to make predictions.

If we can make a prediction come true, then we may be operating a finite state S-R model which correctly models this part of the world.

Category:

Comedy

Tags:

• pidgin
• english

[iknowthatyouwillfind]

thank you