processes

arendt claimed that to be human is to be able to recognize to interrupt processes; that real thinking occurs through judgement and choice.



to model yourself is to understand your own base processes.



i've been thinking a lot about knowledge about systems, and how the distribution of this knowledge over humanity has changed over time. science, .



we trust the knowledge or directives from a system when we trust the processes that that system runs - for some, the processes by which the system originally came about also matters (a law regarded as legitimate social directive only when instituted democratically, for example).



we can define and understand science as the process of understanding the laws that govern the world so we can intervene in those laws through technology. confidently modelling systems is a prerequisite to intervening in them deterministically.



concerns about expertise

as science has become more and more complex, we're seen the trust relationships become far weightier. the trust relationship between scientist and instrument has become more complicated with larger and more complex instruments (cf Sandra Mitchell for trust in scientific instruments). the web of scientists has been bloated with the new practice of paper mills. science itself is pushing new boundaries; people are no longer able to directly verify and replicate scientific findings themselves, and therefore need to defer at least somewhat to experts.



it's incredibly dangerous in this context to restart the Science Wars; to seriously postulate that the social construction of science endangers the knowledge that is produced from such a system. sure, science can be studied just like any other object of study; we can examine its incentive structures like an economist, its heritage and relationships like a sociologist or anthropologist, and its biases like a psychologist, clarify its shared concepts like a philosopher, but we should be charitable as to science's ultimate aim of truth-seeking, and cooperative in this enterprise, instead of attempting to create public doubt in the entire process.



concerns about automation

in a reading group i'm part of, someone worried that automation would reduce human creativity. this surprised me at first; the typical narrative is that automation will allow humans more time for creative work. this makes intuitive sense: automation occurs only to processes that are well-defined enough to be encodable; if we define creativity to be the interruption of processes, these activities seem like complementary sets. the mechanization of well-defined activities would only free up human time for creative work, with this understanding.



i thought more, and realized that this question was related to knowledge. automation stems creativity in certain domains if it offloads or leads to the complete loss of process knowledge in those domains. take hardware manufacturing; it's been automated, offloaded, mostly offshore. we're seeing a wave of hardware-based startups based out of places like Shenzhen; it's no coincidence that these places are where hardware manufacturing occurs. they understand the processes sufficiently enough to intervene in them.