3 ms·
By your logic we should also build bridges and tell people to drive over them and see if they collapse. There is a time and a place for analysis and trying to
by nathanb 14y ago
By your logic we should also build bridges and tell people to drive over them and see if they collapse.
There is a time and a place for analysis and trying to understand, a priori, the failure modes of a system. As the potential for loss increases, the importance of "pontification and postulations" (hopefully more of the latter than the former!) also increases.
- grovulent 14y agoOkay - well if you would grant me the generosity of assuming a little common sense in my perspective - any reasonable engineer would perform all possible testing in the building phase of a project. The point remains - in the real world there be a zillion variables that your tests almost certainly won't account for. I agree that there is room for a priori pontification - at the hypothesis formation stage of theory building, but that's about it. Except folks like denniger aren't forming hypotheses that can be tested at all. He's just waxing lyrical - tensing his ideological bow.