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Christopher_Wolfgang_Alexander

Biased Decisions and Perceptions

“The self-conscious individual's grasp of problems is constantly misled. His concepts and categories, besides being arbitrary and unsuitable, are self-perpetuating. Under the influence of concepts, he not only does things from a biased point of view, but sees them biasedly as well. The concepts control his perception of fit and misfit — until in the end he sees nothing but deviations from his conceptual dogmas, and loses not only the urge but even the mental opportunity to frame his problems more appropriately.”

F_Terry_Baker

Code Library

“The most important of these is a development support library which encourages the visibility and manageability of the product, as well as reduces clerical effort on the part of the programmers. The library is typically maintained and operated by a programming librarian who serves to control the programming assets and to provide the necessary services for both programmers and management. As a result of its use, the entire project is maintained in a centralized, up-to-date, visible form which makes its status immediately apparent to code-competent software managers and makes it possible for programmers to answer their questions directly without relying on others.”
  • Source: Baker, F. T. (1975). Software Management Through Improved Programming Technology. ACM ’75: Proceedings of the 1975 Annual Conference, 286–287. https://doi.org/10.1145/800181.810346

Claude_Bernard

Hypothesis Theory Reason

“A scientific hypothesis is merely a scientific idea, preconceived or pre-visioned. A theory is merely a scientific idea controlled by experiment. Reasoning merely gives a form to our ideas, so that everything, first and last, leads back to an idea.”
  • Source: From the book "An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine" written by Claude Bernard published in French in 1865 as "Introduction à l'étude de la médecine expérimentale". Translated to English by Henry Copley Greene in 1927 and republished by Henry Shuman, Inc. in 1949. Chapter I, page 26. Available online at https://archive.org/details/b21270557 retrieved 2024.

Robert_N_Britcher

Important Development Things

“The single, most important thing is that the individual programmer needs to be given total responsibility and control of the programming, including its function... eliminate project design and review as an exhaustive and rigorous process. Most of the design and review should occur as the program is written. ... Monitor progress on the project by talking to the individual programmers as [code] is being written. ... You must trust developers on the project to create a good product. ... Sometimes there are failures. ... The important thing is to fail quickly so you have time to find another approach. ... Developers must also feel free to say what they think to their supervisor. ... Managers should be the best programmers; ...There should be no overtime pay. ... Use profit-sharing and bonuses to get awesome products. ... Developers should each get their own office. ... Eliminate the dress code. Avoid meetings at all costs. ... Writing software is a lot like writing a book. Almost anyone can write garbage; very few can write a best-seller.”
  • Source: Britcher, Robert N. (1999). The Limits of Software: People, Projects, and Perspectives. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley. ISBN 0-201-43323-0. Page 155-156.

Octavia_E_Butler

Choose Your Leaders

“Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be led by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be led by a fool is to be led by the opportunists who control the fool. To be led by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be led by a liar is to ask to be lied to. To be led by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery.”
  • Source: Written by Octavia E. Butler in her book entitled “Parable of the Talents”. Chapter 11. First published by Seven Stories Press, New York, NY, in 1998. ISBN-13: 978-1-888363-81-4.

Rudolf_Carnap

System of Statements

"Science is a system of statements based on direct experience, and controlled by experimental verification. Verification in science is not, however, of single statements but of the entire system or a sub-system of such statements."
  • Source: Rudolf Carnap, The Unity of Science (1934), trans. Max Black, 42.

John_Dewey

Scientific Method

“The scientific method is the only authentic means at our command for getting at the significance of our everyday experiences of the world in which we live. It means that scientific method provides a working pattern of the way in which and the conditions under which experiences are used to lead ever onward and outward. ... Consequently, whatever the level of experience, we have no choice but either to operate in accord with the pattern it provides or else to neglect the place of intelligence in the development and control of a living and moving experience.”
  • Source: John Dewey, In Experience And Education (1938), 88

Peter_Drucker

Management Decision Power

“In the modern corporation the decisive power, that of the managers, is derived from no one but the managers themselves controlled by nobody and nothing and responsible to no one. It is in the most literal sense unfounded, unjustified, uncontrolled and irresponsible power.”
  • Source: Drucker, P. F. (1942). The Future of Industrial Man. Page 64. DOI: 10.4324/9781315132143.

Big University Relics

“Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won't survive. It's as large a change as when we first got the printed book. Do you realize that the cost of higher education has risen as fast as the cost of health care? And for the middle-class family, college education for their children is as much of a necessity as is medical care — without it the kids have no future. Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Higher education is in deep crisis.”
  • Source: Peter Drucker, “Seeing Things as They Really Are”, Forbes (March 10, 1997)

Richard_Feynman

Cargo Cult

“...there have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on — with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train rats to go to the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe they were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go to the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers the clues that the rat is really using — not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. I looked into the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or of being very careful. They just went right on running rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic of cargo cult science.”
  • Source: "Cargo Cult Science", adapted from a 1974 Caltech commencement address; also published in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, p. 345.
    • Feynman, R. P. (1974). In Feynman, R. P. (1974, June). Cargo Cult Science. Science and Engineering.

Samuel_C_Florman

Government Controls

“Government controls... stem more from common sense than they do from conscience. They are essentially a consequence of enlightened self-interest.”
  • Source: From the book “The Existential Pleasures of Engineering” by {Samuel C. Florman}. Second edition published in 1994 by {St. Martin's Press}, New York, NY. First edition published in 1976. Kindle edition published in 2023. E-book ISBN 978-1466842366. Chapter 3, page 27.

Milton_Friedman

Positive Knowledge

“In both social and natural sciences, the body of positive knowledge grows by the failure of a tentative hypothesis to predict phenomena the hypothesis professes to explain; by the patching up of that hypothesis until someone suggests a new hypothesis that more elegantly or simply embodies the troublesome phenomena, and so on ad infinitum. In both, experiment is sometimes possible, sometimes not (witness meteorology). In both, no experiment is ever completely controlled, and experience often offers evidence that is the equivalent of controlled experiment. In both, there is no way to have a self-contained closed system or to avoid interaction between the observer and the observed. The Gödel theorem in mathematics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in physics, the self-fulfilling or self-defeating prophecy in the social sciences all exemplify these limitations.”
  • Source: Milton Friedman, Inflation and Unemployment (1976), 348

Charles_Goodhart

Goodhart's Law

“Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.”
  • Source: Goodhart, Charles (1975). "Problems of Monetary Management: The UK Experience". In Courakis, Anthony S. (ed.). Inflation, Depression, and Economic Policy in the West. Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books (published 1981). p. 116. ISBN 0-389-20144-8.

Joseph_Heller

Mysterious Ways

“‘And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,’ Yossarian continued, hurtling on over her objection. ‘There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about — a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil, scatological mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?’”
  • Source: Heller, Joseph. 'Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition'. Chapter 18 'The Soldier Who Saw Everything Twice', page 207. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

Tony_Hoare

All Problems Technical

“Basically, all problems are technical. If you know what you want to do and you have the necessary technical background, there is no point in making a great management problem out of it. Obviously, a certain amount of resource control and personnel work has to go on but that’s all. On the other hand, you might have a task which is difficult in that you don’t know what you have to do, and that even if you did you wouldn’t know how to do it. Since this is a very difficult task you can start out with the hypothesis that it will take a great number of people. Following down this slippery slope of reasoning, as soon as you have a very large number of people you have a very large management problem. But it all originated out of the fact that you didn’t know what you were doing, or how to do it.”
  • Source: C.A.R.Hoare in Ercoli, P., Bauer, F. L., Aron, J. D., & Hoare, C. A. R. (1970). Software Engineering Techniques: Report on a Conference Sponsored by the NATO Science Committee, Rome, Italy, 27th to 31 October 1969. (J. N. Buxton & B. Randell, Eds.). Retrieved from http://homepages.cs.ncl.ac.uk/brian.randell/NATO/nato1969.PDF.

Aldous_Huxley

Control and Consent

“If you are going to control a population for any length of time you must have some measure of consent.”
  • Source: Aldous Huxley (1962). Lecture at UC Berkeley. Partial recorded audio in the YouTube video entitled Love Your Servitude - Aldous Huxley & George Orwell published 2021-02 on the After Skool channel.

Keywords: Control_quotes Population_quotes Time_quotes Consent_quotes

Bernardo_Kastrup

Global Alignment

“It is impossible for physicists to identify global alignments... For although physicists can test individual events in the laboratory and verify that, when taken in isolation, the events are random, they wouldn’t be able to discern a global pattern within the complexity of the physical world at large; there are just too many ‘dice’ to keep track of under controlled laboratory conditions.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 52. Chapter 4.

Irreducible Patterns

“If there are such irreducible macroscopic patterns, they — unlike cause and effect — may not entail relationships of strict necessity, but tendencies, affinities or dispositions instead... We cannot expect to pin down the corresponding events on the basis of empirical regularities and counterfactual dependences. Not only may these events not be consistently repeatable, the global patterns they reflect may be excluded from experiments by our very efforts to isolate the experimental setup and control its conditions. We cannot induce these acausal events at will. The best we can do is to pay attention to the world around us, in the hope of noticing one of them as it spontaneously unfolds... Next to causality, the physical world organizes itself along archetypal correspondences of meaning, which break down the barrier between world and psyche.”
  • Source: From “Decoding Jung's Metaphysics: The Archetypal Semantics of an Experiential Universe”. Written by Bernardo Kastrup. Published by IFF Books, Washington DC. Kindle Edition. Page 53. Chapter 4.

Ernest_Nagel

Explanations

“It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is the distinctive goal of the sciences.”
  • Source: Ernest Nagel, The Structure of Science (1961), 4.

David_E_Nye

Technology Contested

“Technologies are contested terrains. World's fairs, spectacular lighting, and media events all have changed in response to shifting public tastes. Americans had divided reactions to the Apollo Space Program, and they created divergent narratives to understand computers, the electrification of society, and the meanings of energy sources. Technologies are contested, and a close reading of such events... reveals not hegemonic control but a welter of meanings. The public understands technology not as one-dimensional agents of change, but as both enabling and disabling innovations.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Introduction, page 3.

Worker Control Obsolete

“Highly computerized corporations simply do not attempt to separate information from skill, nor do they find it profitable to control workers in the same ways as before. Such practices and the kind of alienation they involved, belong to a previous epoch.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 10, page 171.

Unable To Control

“Human beings prove unable to control the technologies they unleash.”
  • Source: A book. Written by David E. Nye. Entitled 'Narratives and Spaces'. Published in 1997 by Univerity of Exeter Press, Exeter, UK. Hardback ISBN 0-85989-555-6. Paperback ISBN 0-85989-556-4. Chapter 11, page 188.

Alan_Perlis

Iterative Simulation Design

“1. A software system can best be designed if the testing is interlaced with the designing instead of being used after the design.
2. A simulation which matches the requirements contains the control which organizes the design of the system.
3. Through successive repetitions of this process of interlaced testing and design the model ultimately becomes the software system itself.
I think that it is the key of the approach that has been suggested, that there is no such question as testing things after the fact with simulation models, but that in effect the testing and the replacement of simulations with modules that are deeper and more detailed goes on with the simulation model controlling, as it were, the place and order in which these things are done.”

Michael_Polanyi

Scientific Method Elucidation

“Almost every major systematic error which has deluded men for thousands of years relied on practical experience. Horoscopes, incantations, oracles, magic, witchcraft, the cures of witch doctors and of medical practitioners before the advent of modern medicine, were all firmly established through the centuries in the eyes of the public by their supposed practical successes. The scientific method was devised precisely for the purpose of elucidating the nature of things under more carefully controlled conditions and by more rigorous criteria than are present in the situations created by practical problems.”
  • Source: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (1958), 183.

Hans_Reichenbach

Picture of Scientific Method

“The picture of scientific method drafted by modern philosophy is very different from traditional conceptions. Gone is the ideal of a universe whose course follows strict rules, a predetermined cosmos that unwinds itself like an unwinding clock. Gone is the ideal of the scientist who knows the absolute truth. The happenings of nature are like rolling dice rather than like revolving stars; they are controlled by probability laws, not by causality, and the scientist resembles a gambler more than a prophet. He can tell you only his best posits — he never knows beforehand whether they will come true. He is a better gambler, though, than the man at the green table, because his statistical methods are superior. And his goal is staked higher — the goal of foretelling the rolling dice of the cosmos. If he is asked why he follows his methods, with what title he makes his predictions, he cannot answer that he has an irrefutable knowledge of the future; he can only lay his best bets. But he can prove that they are best bets, that making them is the best he can do — and if a man does his best, what else can you ask of him?”
  • Source: Hans Reichenbach, The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951, 1973), 248-9. Collected in James Louis Jarrett and Sterling M. McMurrin (eds.), Contemporary Philosophy: A Book of Readings (1954), 376.

Franz_Selig

Specification Feedback

“External specifications at any level describe the software product in terms of the items controlled by and available to the user. The internal design describes the software product in terms of the program structures which realize the external specifications. It has to be understood that feedback between the design of the external and internal specifications is an essential part of a realistic and effective implementation process. Furthermore, this interaction must begin at the earliest stage of establishing the objectives, and continue until completion of the product.”

Claude_Shannon

Turing Machine

“We may think of a Turing machine as composed of three parts — a control element, a reading and writing head and an infinite tape.”
  • Source: From a book section entitled “A Universal Turing Machine with Two Internal States” by Claude Shannon, within the book “Automata Studies”, edited by C. E. Shannon and J. McCarthy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956. Pages 157-166. DOI 10.1515/9781400882618-007.

Alan_Turing

Digital Computer

“A digital computer can usually be regarded as consisting of three parts: One, store. Two, executive unit. Three, control.”
  • Source: From the paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” by Alan Turing. Published in 1936 in “Mind”, volume 49, number 236.

Matt_Warner

Outlaw Life

“That's what the outlaw life does to you. It ketches you in a net and deprives you of all control over circumstances.”
  • Source: Matt Warner in the book “Last of the Bandit Riders” Originally published in 1940, republished in 2000 by Big Mood Traders, ISBN 0-9656694-1-6. Chapter 23.

Gerald_Weinberg

Egoless Programming and John von Neumann

“Programming groups who have conquered the ego problem do exist and have existed from the earliest days of computing. John von Neumann himself was perhaps the first programmer to recognize his inadequacies with respect to examination of his own work. Those who knew him have said that he was constantly asserting what a lousy programmer he was, and that he incessantly pushed his programs on other people to read for errors and clumsiness. Yet the common image today of von Neumann is of the unparalleled computing genius — flawless in his every action. And indeed, there can be no doubt of von Neumann's genius. His very ability to realize his human limitations put him head and shoulders above the average programmer today. Average people can be trained to accept their humanity — their inability to function like a machine — and to value it and work with others so as to keep it under the kind of control needed if programming is to be successful.”
  • Source: Chapter 4. Weinberg, G. M. (2011). The Psychology of Computer Programming (Silver anniversary edition) | 1971. Weinberg & Weinberg.

H_G_Wells

Competent Receiver

“This complex problem of the competent receiver is the underlying problem of most of our constructive politics. It is imperative that every voter should have some conception of the experiments in economic control that are in progress in Great Britain, the United States of America, Italy, Germany, Russia, and elsewhere. Such experiments are going to affect the whole of his or her life profoundly. So, too, are the experiments in monetary and financial organization. Many of the issues involved go further than general principles. They are quantitative issues.”
  • Source: Wells, H. G. (1938). World Brain chap. II (The Brain Organization of the Modern World). London, UK: Methuen and Co. Retrieved from http://www.gutenberg.org/

Shoshana_Zuboff

Authority is the Spiritual Dimension of Power

“Authority is the spiritual dimension of power because it depends upon faith in a system of meaning that decrees the necessity of the hierarchical order and so provides for the unity of imperative control. Authority requires collective participation in a system of meaning that extends beyond the immediate context, beyond those who command or obey, and reaches into the domain of transcendent values. Members of a hierarchical order are linked together through allegiance to or faith in a common belief system, and every action that ensures the smooth exercise of imperative control refers back to, and expresses the bonds one has with, some fundamental source of meaning.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 222. ISBN:0465032125.

Advent of the Smart Machine

“Should the advent of the smart machine be taken as an invitation to relax the demands upon human comprehension and critical judgment? Does the massive diffusion of computer technology throughout our workplaces necessarily entail an equally dramatic loss of meaningful employment opportunities? Must the new electronic milieu engender a world in which individuals have lost control over their daily work lives?”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 5 (Introduction). ISBN:0465032125.

Technology Management

“Even where control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and pressures. Only rarely is there a grand design concocted by an elite group ruthlessly grinding its way toward the fulfillment of some special and secret plan. Instead, there is a concentration of forces and consequences, which in turn develop their own momentum. Sometimes these lines of force run in predictably straight paths. At other times, they twist and spiral, turn corners, and flow to their opposite. Activities that seem to represent choices are often inert reproductions of accepted practice.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 389. ISBN:0465032125.

Technology Change

“To fully grasp the way in which a major new technology can change the world... it is necessary to consider both the manner in which it creates intrinsically new qualities of experience and the way in which new possibilities are engaged by the often-conflicting demands of social, political, and economic interests in order to produce a 'choice.' To concentrate only on intrinsic change and the texture of an emergent mentality is to ignore the real weight of history and the diversity of interests that pervade collective behavior. However, to narrow all discussion of technological change to the play of these interests overlooks the essential power of technology to reorder the rules of the game and thus our experience as players. Moreover, these two dimensions of technological change, the intrinsic and the contingent, need to be understood, not separately, but in relation to one another. The same innovation that abstracts work and increases its intellectual content, thus enhancing the learning of lower level employees... can also, within the context of the choices by which it is adapted, be experienced as a new source of divisiveness and control.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 389. ISBN:0465032125.

Highly Informated Database

“In the highly informated organization, the data base takes on a life of its own.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 393. ISBN:0465032125.

Information Panopticon Isolation

“In the information panopticon, managers... frequently tried to simplify their managerial tasks by displacing face-to-face engagement with techniques of surveillance and control. As a consequence, they became isolated from the realities of their organizations as they were increasingly insulated by an electronic text that in turn was even more vulnerable to workers' antagonisms.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 400. ISBN:0465032125.

Breed of American Worker

“There is a breed of American worker who cherishes the autonomy and sense of self-control afforded by his or her skills and protected by the union contract. When these workers contemplate the prospect of the socially integrated high-technology workplace, they feel despair. They anticipate a loss of their unique identities, of freedom and autonomy, and of well-defined rights and responsibilities. They fear that without the traditional sources of protection provided by their job descriptions and their contract, they will become prey to every capricious whim of their superiors. They understand that the managers' world requires the body as a political instrument for self-presentation and influence, but they know that these are talents they have not developed and toward which they feel more than a little distaste.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 404. ISBN:0465032125.

Automation Fantasy

“Some managers experience a sense of relief at the prospect of being freed from this dependency. Their enthusiasm reveals an underlying but potent fantasy, one in which perfect control through total automaticity allows them to avoid the messiness and potential conflict of real human interaction.”
  • Source: Zuboff, S. (1988). In The Age Of The Smart Machine: The Future Of Work And Power. New York, NY: Basic Books, p. 268. ISBN:0465032125.