I’ve ranted for years to the CSG that if we want to have a revolution, we must revolt. We can’t just go on using the same old customary modes of observation, description, and explanation if we want to find the significance of the first new concept of human nature since Descartes. If people are going to try to make a smooth transition into control theory, preserving everything they had thought important up to that point and simply adding a few new interpretations, where convenient and supportive of former beliefs, we are going to get exactly nowhere. Control theory gives us the chance to tear all of our old ideas down to their components and put them back together into a new structure of understanding. There is a great reluctance even in the smartest people I know, many of whom are on this net, to give up on the old approach and really try out the new one. Everyone has something (and for different people, different things) that is too valuable or true to give up or ret
hink. Everyone has past accomplishments that they don’t want to analyze too deeply in terms of control theory, lest a flaw be found. That’s just controlling for being right, and is quite natural.
But anyone who wants to be a control theorist has to start trying out things that seem unnatural, doubting what seems right, giving up what seems valuable. We have to have faith that by such acts of internal destruction, we will arrive at something closer to the truth, and salvage what is really worth salvaging, when the reconstruction, under new management, begins. God, I really sound like a mindless revolutionary. But this is the way it has to be. Otherwise we’re just fooling around and trying to impress each other for our own entertainment.
I’ve ranted for years to the CSG that if we want to have a revolution, we must revolt. We can’t just go on using the same old customary modes of observation, description, and explanation if we want to find the significance of the first new concept of human nature since Descartes. If people are going to try to make a smooth transition into control theory, preserving everything they had thought important up to that point and simply adding a few new interpretations, where convenient and supportive of former beliefs, we are going to get exactly nowhere. Control theory gives us the chance to tear all of our old ideas down to their components and put them back together into a new structure of understanding. There is a great reluctance even in the smartest people I know, many of whom are on this net, to give up on the old approach and really try out the new one. Everyone has something (and for different people, different things) that is too valuable or true to give up or ret
hink. Everyone has past accomplishments that they don’t want to analyze too deeply in terms of control theory, lest a flaw be found. That’s just controlling for being right, and is quite natural.
But anyone who wants to be a control theorist has to start trying out things that seem unnatural, doubting what seems right, giving up what seems valuable. We have to have faith that by such acts of internal destruction, we will arrive at something closer to the truth, and salvage what is really worth salvaging, when the reconstruction, under new management, begins. God, I really sound like a mindless revolutionary. But this is the way it has to be. Otherwise we’re just fooling around and trying to impress each other for our own entertainment.