[Arisbe] Re: Inquiry Into Inquiry

[Jon Awbrey]

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Howard Pattee wrote (HP):
Jon Awbrey wrote (JA):

JA: I lament the chance that this discussion might take
    a non-constructive and even anti-intellectual turn,
    as it is mostly the task of constructing software
    tools for the support and extension of our humane
    intellects that is my main aim. 

HP: There is nothing to lament but lament itself.
    Creating machine tools to support the intellect
    is an aim worthy of discussion.  Where in the
    course of inquiry, using any epistemic diagram
    you choose, do you feel the inquiring mind needs
    the most help?  Or is it more modest to ask where
    we could expect technically plausible software
    (and hardware) to help the most?

Ah, where to begin!?  Being there is so much to do,
and we cannot do otherwise than to start as we are,
it may be the case that we can't do better than to
let all pick their own eigenvectors as the optimal
direction for them severally to go -- and yet that
incurs the risk of chaos if there be no other form
of community among them.  Something I worry about.

Here are some of the big problems that I see here:

There is a field of activity, transected by several shifty lines:

1.a.  <What people can do>      Versus  1.b.  <What people cannot do>
2.a.  <What people do best>     Versus  2.b.  <What people do not do best>
3.a.  <What people like to do>  Versus  3.b.  <What people do not like to do>

The uses of technology worth having are those take some of the stuff that humans can do --
goodly, badly, or indifferently -- but out of which people no longer get much of a kick,
and shift these fardels so that machines will bear them.

I am pretty much content to leave the creative stuff to people for a while,
since I have no clue how to automate it, and even if I did I would have to
ask whether it's creative stuff we like or creative stuff we dislike doing.

The thing is that many activities of interest to us are cyclic or recurring processes,
and this means that we can often facilitate the whole cycle simply by identifying the
places where things are pinched a bit more than others, the points of high resistance --
no, there is no venturi flow here, it's a high viscosity current so far as I can tell --
and by loosening up these bottlenecks to whatever extent that we can.  Still, not all
of the bottlenecks are ones that we can do much about, so we have to pick our bottles.

Ok, that's my pre-ramble --
and now I have to break for a bit --
but I will try to get more specific later today --

Jon Awbrey

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