IrisMar 15

My first article from Wellington: it's about some weird things I've noticed about tech people and their weird phobia of observation and empirical thinking.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/tech_empiricism_problem

Tech's empiricism problem | deadSimpleTech

The tech industry has extreme difficulty integrating information that doesn't have its source in an overtly rationalist process. In practice, this means that we tend to think that if you can't give a logical chain of deductions that proves that something is the case, your information is worthless. The issue with this is that day-to-day, in the tech world and outside of it, the vast bulk of the information we use to make decisions isn't this kind of information.

deadSimpleTech
Show threadPoligofsky 🇨🇦 .. 🚫🤖

@iris_meredith Good article. It's nice to read someone's attempt to understand the problem.

May I offer a tangential interpretation?

Empiricism enables us to cope with a key feature of the world: uncertainty due to complexity. While computers can help do statistical analysis, the typical computer programmer prefers to see life as mechanical and computational ("rational"). They don't like uncertainty. Thus the rise of their new weird ideologies.

The future is incalculable (except in contrived, reductionist scenarios) because reality is characterized by complex systems. We can describe their features qualitatively, and probabilistically. But we cannot predict their macro behaviours with certainty. So we use heuristics, which "rationalists" do not like. Heuristics being a feature of "empirical" and "induction"-based thinking.

Rationalists reject chaos and complexity. The implications disturb them. Whether education can address this, I am skeptical. Moreover, rationalists control the education system.

Mar 16 at 4:23pmWeb