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::{{author|W. E. Deming}} | ::{{author|W. E. Deming}} | ||
In | In Deming’s fashionable quote, one can lay a great deal of responsibility for the dogmatic madness our age. | ||
That it is woven into Dominic Cummings lanyard might tell you something. | That it is woven into Dominic Cummings lanyard might tell you something. | ||
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Just on that statistic you might wonder what is so wrong with God. But human beings are pattern-seeking machines. We don’t take the data as we see it cold, and fashion objective axioms from it, carving nature at its joints: we bring our idiosyncratic prisons and pre-existing cognitive structures to it and willfully create suitable patterns from it to support our convictions. This is not a criticism, but an observation. This is the doom our incarcerate race endures. | Just on that statistic you might wonder what is so wrong with God. But human beings are pattern-seeking machines. We don’t take the data as we see it cold, and fashion objective axioms from it, carving nature at its joints: we bring our idiosyncratic prisons and pre-existing cognitive structures to it and willfully create suitable patterns from it to support our convictions. This is not a criticism, but an observation. This is the doom our incarcerate race endures. | ||
It is not just the Twitterati. Science, too, gas its [[confirmation bias]], that subsists at a meta-level beyond control by double blind testing methodologies. Experiments which confirm there hypotheses are ''a lot'' more likely to be published than those which don’t. of those failed experiments that are published fewer are cited in other literature. Falsifications die. | |||
This is no cause for alarm and nor is it new. It is is a reminder to of the importance in contingency, provisionality, and above all humility. | |||
All of these are another way of attacking a familiar problem: the world is complex, not merely complicated. Complication is a function of a paradigm. It is part of the game. It is within the rules. Complexity, by contrast, describes the limits of the paradigm. Complexity is the the wilderness beyond the rules of the game. Complexity is is the noise, not the signal. In a complex environment the rules do not work. | |||