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The fallacy of this observation is easy to demonstrate. You interact with dozen established businesses during a day. You got a coffee at Starbucks, you fuel up

by lordmax 14y ago

The fallacy of this observation is easy to demonstrate. You interact with dozen established businesses during a day. You got a coffee at Starbucks, you fuel up your car at a gas station, got a dinner at a restaurant. So how much of that experience was driven by "stochastic processes, full of unexpected random behaviors"? Instead of cup of coffee you got a clown with a machine gun singing a serenade? How many surprises you got a gas station? That certainly would be the best place to get surprised at, especially if it involves fire. Thats the whole point of business operations to take into account objective reality "full of unexpected random behaviors", find a formal system that will hide these complexities from the customer, and present him with easy, predictable and repeatable experience. Every time you get into Starbucks you get a cup of coffee, not a random outcome. Joel talked at length http://bit.ly/33fK5T http://bit.ly/33fK5T how many little details are hidden in these corporate systems to produce what seemed like much simpler outcome for us on customer side. Mistakes happen, employes are never ideal, yet that doesn't prevent creating formal systems how business operate, far from it. Its only differentiates good startups growing into good businesses. They are the ones who figure out correct way of formalizing their systems so they can grow and hire more employees, scale nationally etc. (btw for a person who actually knows and practically uses math these observations would be self evident, yet perhaps less so for a typical comment troll )

super_mario 14y ago
You haven't actually demonstrated any fallacies here. You need to prove your claim that business is a formal logical deductive system. Note that this is a well defined mathematical concept. We know precisely what we are talking about when we say that. You then need to show that business decisions/operation are sentences/statements in this formal system. Then you need to show that these formal systems that describe a business include Peano axioms for Godel's theorem to even apply. All this to show what we freaking already know trivially. Business are not complete :D. There are other business ideas that are "orthogonal" to what any business does.
- lordmax 14y ago
  considering that business deductions would start with definition of money and operations over money that should take care of Peano axioms inclusion. Take Joel article as example, and i can find countless others. When biz becomes big enough, the only way to retain manageability of operations is to create either explicit guidelines for their workforce to follow (precisely like "invented strong AI using people pushing bits of paper as their computing model" - although i would replace AI with wetware robot) or implicit conventions that form so called "corporate culture" yet these "conventions" are nevertheless is very clear logical deductions in whatever basic formal system that business established. There is obvious weakness that i do not have full documentary access to any large enterprise to formally prove to you "yes, their 5000 pages of corporate guidelines, instruction manuals, employee handbooks and divisional policies are a formal system with no contradictory statements". McKinsey can do it, i can not. Take it as inherited weakness of popular blogging. Don't think that still degrades the article to "waste of time". Another example of very explicit formal system: in another discussion, one of my correspondents points out how pre-crash hedge funds were effectively formal systems that KNEW about incoming crash, but logical following all the rules of systems they found themselves employed at were preventing them from doing anything to prevent such a crash: <blockquote> when the collapse was coming was that all the smart people at the banks knew what was up, but didn't have a way to express it inside the firm. "Let's say I'm wrong: the ten guys at my desk make $100m each for the bank this year betting that the bubble doesn't burst, and I'm the guy who called them all idiots and then lost $25m shorting their positions. You think I keep my job long enough that when the bubble pops the year after, I'm around to say I told you so? Or in contrast, the bubble does pop, and each of the ten guys at my desk lost $500m and my shorts made the bank $2b. You think they're going to give me a $20m bonus for showing that they should have known sooner that they were bankrupting the company? Not only do they figure out a way to fuck me, but there's no bonuses that year anyway if all the traders were wrong." </blockquote> How can anybody argue this is NOT a formal system? They have the their axioms, a finite list of rules how bonuses calculated, how performance is awarded, what action dictionary each trader has, and the deductions above are just "immediate consequence" as Godel would say of previous theorems of performance compensation. > All this to show what we freaking already know trivially. > Business are not complete :D. There are other business ideas that are "orthogonal" to what any business does. sounds like you live on different planet. If everybody "knew trivially" that Taleb would be a celebrity way BEFORE 2008, not after. Crisis wouldn't happen. seriously - any day you open browser and find BS like this AGAIN and AGAIN "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044372020457800... "OMG! 75% of start up fail!!! Bad VCs hiding their dead! Be smart - invest in good VCs! They have the right system!", "Use this smart hedge fund - that the new system, not that hedge fund, they had bad system!". Biz word is absolutely chockfull of idiots looking for a "system", looking for mechanized recipe to follow to find "success".

by lordmax 14y ago

super_mario 14y ago

You haven't actually demonstrated any fallacies here. You need to prove your claim that business is a formal logical deductive system. Note that this is a well defined mathematical concept. We know precisely what we are talking about when we say that. You then need to show that business decisions/operation are sentences/statements in this formal system. Then you need to show that these formal systems that describe a business include Peano axioms for Godel's theorem to even apply. All this to show what we freaking already know trivially. Business are not complete :D. There are other business ideas that are "orthogonal" to what any business does.

lordmax 14y ago
considering that business deductions would start with definition of money and operations over money that should take care of Peano axioms inclusion. Take Joel article as example, and i can find countless others. When biz becomes big enough, the only way to retain manageability of operations is to create either explicit guidelines for their workforce to follow (precisely like "invented strong AI using people pushing bits of paper as their computing model" - although i would replace AI with wetware robot) or implicit conventions that form so called "corporate culture" yet these "conventions" are nevertheless is very clear logical deductions in whatever basic formal system that business established. There is obvious weakness that i do not have full documentary access to any large enterprise to formally prove to you "yes, their 5000 pages of corporate guidelines, instruction manuals, employee handbooks and divisional policies are a formal system with no contradictory statements". McKinsey can do it, i can not. Take it as inherited weakness of popular blogging. Don't think that still degrades the article to "waste of time". Another example of very explicit formal system: in another discussion, one of my correspondents points out how pre-crash hedge funds were effectively formal systems that KNEW about incoming crash, but logical following all the rules of systems they found themselves employed at were preventing them from doing anything to prevent such a crash: <blockquote> when the collapse was coming was that all the smart people at the banks knew what was up, but didn't have a way to express it inside the firm. "Let's say I'm wrong: the ten guys at my desk make $100m each for the bank this year betting that the bubble doesn't burst, and I'm the guy who called them all idiots and then lost $25m shorting their positions. You think I keep my job long enough that when the bubble pops the year after, I'm around to say I told you so? Or in contrast, the bubble does pop, and each of the ten guys at my desk lost $500m and my shorts made the bank $2b. You think they're going to give me a $20m bonus for showing that they should have known sooner that they were bankrupting the company? Not only do they figure out a way to fuck me, but there's no bonuses that year anyway if all the traders were wrong." </blockquote> How can anybody argue this is NOT a formal system? They have the their axioms, a finite list of rules how bonuses calculated, how performance is awarded, what action dictionary each trader has, and the deductions above are just "immediate consequence" as Godel would say of previous theorems of performance compensation. > All this to show what we freaking already know trivially. > Business are not complete :D. There are other business ideas that are "orthogonal" to what any business does. sounds like you live on different planet. If everybody "knew trivially" that Taleb would be a celebrity way BEFORE 2008, not after. Crisis wouldn't happen. seriously - any day you open browser and find BS like this AGAIN and AGAIN "http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044372020457800... "OMG! 75% of start up fail!!! Bad VCs hiding their dead! Be smart - invest in good VCs! They have the right system!", "Use this smart hedge fund - that the new system, not that hedge fund, they had bad system!". Biz word is absolutely chockfull of idiots looking for a "system", looking for mechanized recipe to follow to find "success".