From the WTF file
Congress to look into 'deeply flawed' BCS system
HOUSTON -- Calling the Bowl Championship Series "deeply flawed," the chairman of a congressional committee has called a hearing on the controversial system used to determine college football's national champion.
ESPN
Hey, I have an idea. Why doesn't Congress look into another 'deeply flawed' system--healthcare?
HOUSTON -- Calling the Bowl Championship Series "deeply flawed," the chairman of a congressional committee has called a hearing on the controversial system used to determine college football's national champion.
ESPN
Hey, I have an idea. Why doesn't Congress look into another 'deeply flawed' system--healthcare?
posted by torporindy at 12/03/2005
2 Comments:
Or how about "Governing." Now that'd be something, wouldn't it? What if all of our elected officials dropped their petty partisan behaviors and actually did something good for once, like fix the fundamentally flawed institutions we call the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. Our elected leaders are so out of touch with what really matters to tax payers that it's not even funny or amusing anymore.
Oh, it's worse than most people imagine.
The flaw in our method of governance is both ancient and subtle.
3750 years ago, an arrogant and narcissistic character by the name of Hammurabi imagined that all would be right with human society if we just had the right set of laws set down in stone for all to see (and obey).
Now Hammurabi was hardly a mathematician. And in any event, Chaos Theory would not be discovered for another 3650 years, any. So how was Hammurabi to know that the notion of 'Law and Order' was grounded on an erroneous and untenable belief?
Today, thanks to modern mathematics, systems theory, cybernetics, and feedback control theory, we know better.
Today, we know that if you want to craft a functional governor for an arbitrary system, the governor must approximate the function-inverse of the derivative of the system model.
Today, we have some pretty good system models of human socio-cultural dynamics, including contributions from sociology, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, and drama theory.
And today, we know that rule-based methods of social regulation are woefully off the mark. They are ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst.
The Rule of Law doesn't give us Law and Order. It gives us Hammurabism and Drama.
After all, the popular NBC series, Law and Order, is now in endless reruns on the TNT Cable Network, where the advertising slogan is 'We Know Drama'.
Alas, most carbon units (aka Homo Schleppians) are no better at modern math than Hammurabi of Babylonia, and thus still believe in the myth of Law and Order.
Ironically, most of our functionality is now delegated to silicon. We've managed to package all manner of functional reasoning into silicon technology. Silicon technology far outstrips carbon units when it comes to hosting functional reasoning and functional methods of governance and regulation.
But the myth of Law and Order hasn't quite crumbled yet.
More likely, Western Civilization will crumble before the belief in Law and Order will fall by the wayside.
Whereupon the Age of Functional Reasoning might safely emerge, led not by some charismatic carbon unit, but by some silicon-based calculus that guides the ship of state as smoothly as an autopilot guides a Cruise Missile, a Boeing 747, or an SUV.
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