rulesets

[Roberto Verzola <rverzola@phil.gn.apc.org>]

Reply to Glenn Bacon:

 >My understanding of how I managed corporate programmers in the 70s
 >and 80s and your insistance on how you think corporations are
 >motivated and behave differ widely.  I suggest we agree to disagree.

If you say you were not gain-maximizing when you managed corporate
programmers, fine, I won't question that. But "managing corporate
programmers" is different from "managing corporations". Also there
WERE programmers who admitted they were gain-maximizing -- like Alan
Greenspan. Anyway, I think I'll heed your suggestion and leave this
issue for a while. We can always come back to it later.

 >constraint is continued survival and the notion of discounted future
 >value/cost.  Both of these issues provide a context to deal with Y2K
 >in a balanced way.

We can pursue this point then. So, how do corporate survival and the
notion of discounted future value/cost provide the context for Y2K?

 >You seem not to buy my point that denial and lack of credibility of
 >the programming staff were important in delaying remediation.

I did accept "denial", although I suggested that the motivation for
denial was "cost-minimization". If solving the problem didn't cost
much, I suggest that they would not have denied the problem.

As for lack of credibility... well, maybe, but I think it would have
been a minor one, if ever. Can you imagine this dialogue?

staff: "sir, we have a problem" etc.
chief: "really?"
staff: "yes, blah blah."
chief: "that's impossible. I don't believe you."

Don't you think the dialogue probably went more like this?

staff: "sir, we have a problem" etc.
chief: "how much will it cost to solve?"
staff: "a million blah blah"
chief: "when did you say will the problem happen?"
staff: "year 2000."
chief: "not this year, we'll do it later."

That's cost reduction by cost postponement.

Actually, you had earlier suggested shortsightedness as a flaw, and I
completely agree with you. I would put this flaw right beside
gain-max.

 >Who "finely-tunes" rule sets?  Orwell examined the issue and Mao had
 >the Red Guard.  You need to advance a political mechnaism that is not
 >noxious to democracies.

Orwell and China describe a social system with a "master conductor" or
a "master plan". My suggestion about changing rulesets is based on a
social system with neither "master conductor" or "master plan", in
which individuals guided by their own inner sense of right and wrong
(based on some ruleset they have learned/acquired) freely interact
with other individuals and their environment; the social structures
are not imposed from above but an emergent property of the system.
With your extensive background in automata, you are familiar with the
theoretical basis for this bottom-up approach, I'm sure.

Some of the communities which are today reorganizing themselves to
prepare for the Y2K crisis are already doing so based on a new set of
behavioral rules, which are quite different from the rules which
brought them this crisis.

Roberto Verzola