SUO: Re: Lifecycle Integration Schema
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LIS. Discussion Note 36
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JA = Jon Awbrey
MW = Matthew West
Matthew,
When I search the archives, there are many subject lines
that say "SUO Ballot with 2 Questions", so I'll subsume
this discussion back under the more descriptive title.
JA: I have voted NO the first question and YES on the second question,
but I am still open to having my mind changed on the first issue.
My concerns with the first proposal are these:
MW: And there was me thinking that it was the first motion
that was uncontroversial!
The spirit of the motion is all mom and apple pie, as we say over here,
but between the spirit and the letter many a head has been seen to roll.
My fear and trembling, etc. is over seeing yet another robot's rules of
order approach to questions of inquiry and engineering. Orderly method,
where we find it, is a boon to inquiry, but the brand of language game
that lawyers can beat engineers at 99 times out of 100 is more often
than not used to quash any attempt to address the real problems
that exist in plain sight.
JA: I am suspicious of bureaucratic procedures that achieve
an illusion of consensus about a given issue or a pretence
of credibility for a given document, when no such consensus
or credibility really exists. We have had our fill of such
procedures already, and so I am naturally somewhat wary of
seeing anymore of this kind of sleight-of-hand.
MW: It is a common misapprehension of standards that they "enforce"
some thing or other. In fact their sole purpose is to prevent
you from having to reinvent something mundane everytime you
want to use it. In this case the mundane thing is how to
raise the quality of something by noting defects and
systematically trying to remove them, against some
stated quality criteria.
Again, I stand up and salute this glorious flag.
But that is not the problem that I'm worried about.
The original furnace in our 20 year old house having
seen the last days of its lifecycle of faithful service,
I'd like to think that all of the various certifications
brochured before our eyes by the heating and cooling guys,
from ACRIS to AFUE to NATE to SEER to UL, and many whose
logos these old eyes are far too farseeing to unravel at
close range, actually mean something.
What I hope for in the semantics of these logos is that some body
of technically competent engineers and humanely-minded ergo-nomics
professionals have all done their homework, both when they went to
school in schools of engineering and ergo-nomics, and when it came
to deciding whether to stamp their logo on these 8.5 x 11 glossies.
And beyond all that, I hope that there was some overarching spirit
of public and human interest in the performance of this competence.
The devil or the god, as they say,
depending on how you translate it,
is in the details.
Here we are talking about (1) procedures for solving the actual problems
that reality throws at us, and (2) procedures for solving the associated
problems that arise in discussions among communities of people that have
radically diverse viewpoints with respect to the nature and implications
for action of the initial problems, up to and including whether problems
of these descriptions really exist.
JA: From my perspective, there is already a method for converging on
a state of congruence with both our society and our reality, and
that is known as the method of scientific inquiry, as exemplified
by all of the ways that problems are actually solved and phenomena
are really explained in the research endeavors of all our various
communities of inquiry. So I am reluctant to settle for anything
that is proposed to serve as a second-rate substitute for that.
MW: I have no objection to scientific enquiry, and I think the Quality Process
that is at the heart of what I am proposing is quite compatible with it.
It just provides a little structure which amongst other things would
mean that you knew where you were.
We all have good intenstions at heart. We set up procedures that are
hopefully designed to actualize our intentions and maintain all sorts
of setpoints withing the domains of our essential operating variables.
I worry about the thermostat. Has it been designed, hopefully or not
so hopefully, to inform us when this control system is out of control?
By what measures should we recognize that the idiot lights are rather
more idiotic than is nominally acceptable? These are real questions
of design-to-the-task and design-for-testing.
JA: Furthermore, I do not how any such work programme can be rendered
enforceable among people who do not already see the need of it,
except by means of coercion of various sorts, the main problem
here being that, once the power of coercion toward assent is
instituted, it almost always ends up being abused in ways
that corrupt the good ends intended.
MW: It can't of course be enforced. The best we get is what we deserve.
If people work and operate this process diligently I have seen it
produce great results, when people try to cheat the process for
the illusion of progress, I have seen poor results. It is not
a silver bullet.
I think that we deserve better than we are currently getting.
How do we address the gap between the suopper and the desert?
MW: The best safeguard it contains is the occassional formal votes
amongst peers. If people take their obligations for the votes
seriously, then progress should only be allowed when supported
by evidence.
The safety of this safeguard, and whether what should be will be,
depends on how well informed are those who vote on the questions.
How would your work programme facilitate that?
Jon Awbrey
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