Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

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Forty years in the thrall of [[High modernism|high-modernist]] management
The JC likes his pet management theories as you know, readers, and none are dearer to his heart than the idea that the [[High modernism|high-modernist]]s have, for forty years, held western management orthodoxy hostage.  
Beliefs: management of a distributed organisation is best controlled from the centre, horizontally and from the the top, vertically. This is the standpoint with the best view of all the data pertaining to the business as a whole.


Materialist view: all relevant information about an organisation can be articulated as data.
The programme is as simple to state as it is self-serving: a distributed organisation is best controlled centrally, and from the place with the best view of the big picture: the top. All relevant information can be articulated as data — you know: “[[Signal-to-noise ratio|In God we trust, all others must bring data]]” — and, with enough data everything about the organisation’s present can be known and its future extrapolated.


With enough data everything about the existing organisation can be known. If one’s current status is fully known, one’s future state can be fully predicted.
Even though one inevitably has less than perfect information, extrapolations, mathematical derivations and [[Large language model|algorithmic pattern matches]] from a large but finite data set will have better predictive value than “[[ineffable]] expertise”: the learning we have assigned to experienced experts is really a kind of anecdotal folk psychology that lacks analytical rigour: this is the lesson of {{br|Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game}}: in the same way that the Wall Street data crunchers could outperform veteran baseball talent scouts, so can models and analytics outperform humans in optimising processes. Thus, from a network of operationalised but largely uncomprehending rule-followers emerges a smooth, steady and stable business revenue stream.


Even though one inevitably has less than perfect information, extrapolations, mathematical derivations and algorithmic pattern matches from a large but finite data set will have better predictive value than “ineffable expertise”: the learning we have assigned to experienced experts is really a kind of anecdotal folk psychology that has limited analytical rigour: this is the lesson of {{br|Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game}}: in the same way that the Wall Street data crunchers could outperform talent scouts when selecting baseball players, so can models and careful analytics outperform humans in optimising processes. Thus out of a network of operationalised but largely uncomprehending rule-followers will emerge a smooth, steady and stable business revenue chain.
Since the world overflows with data, we can programmatise business. Optimisation is a mathematical problem to be solved. It is a [[knowable unknown]]. To the extent we fail, we can put it down to not enough data or computing power.


Since we are overflowing with data, we can therefore programmatise business
Since data quantity and computing horsepower have exploded in the last few decades, high modernists become ever more certain their time — the [[Singularity]] is nigh. It is not long now, and all will be solved.
Optimising business is some kind of mathematical problem. To the extent we can’t do this, it is simply a function of insufficient data or computing power.


Early pioneers: [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]
The pioneer of this kind of modernism was [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]]. His inheritors say things like, “[[The Singularity is Near|the singularity is near]]” and “[[Software is eating the world|software will eat the world]]” but for all their millenarianism the on-the-ground experience at the business end of this world-eating software is as grim as it ever was.


The amount of data and computing power have each grown exponentially in the last twenty years, and this has bolstered (or as likely papered over growing cracks in) the high modernist ideology
We have a theory that this owes itself to a kind of temporal reductionism: just as radical rationalists see all knowledge as reducible to, and explicable in terms of, its infinitessimally small sub-atomic essence, so the data modernists see it as explicable in terms if fininitessimally small windows of time.


[[Taylorism]] and just-in-time efficiency
This is partly because computer languages don’t do [[tense|''tense'']]: they are coded in the present, and have no frame of reference for continuity. And it is partly because having to cope with history, and the passage of time, makes things exponentially more complex than they already are. A fine-grained snapshot of the world as data is enough of a beast to be still well beyond the operating parameters of even the most powerful present quantum machines: that level of detail extending into the future and back from the past is infinitely less calculable yet. If we can rationalise that this infinitely stretching time is really just comprised of billions of infinitesimally thin, static slices, and each slice is functionally identical to any other, we have a means of handling that complexity.


That is does not have a hope of working seems beside the point.


=== It’s the long run, stupid===
=== It’s the long run, stupid===
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