What Ends Well Begins Well

So this is my first attempt at blogging, releasing the inner thoughts of my mind carelessly to all of humanity. So what thing that I think highly profound that someday I will look back on with profound embarrassment at its oversimplicity will I begin with. There is this thought in my mind. The idea that understanding is no longer important and how wrong this is. This all begins with my working for industry at the beginning of the millenium. I was hired to work on a project that was killed the moment I arrived, but the idea of the project was to combine massive amounts of thoughtless experiment with various artificial intelligence and search algorithms with the idea that the answer would be produced purely by massive data plus AI. With a level of hubris common to aspiring middle managers in large corporations he stated "Understanding is obsolete!" . More broadly this is referred to as big data. This is typical of the human urge to take short cuts, to look for a simple answer based on buzzards that leads to rapid rise in a meaningless heirarchy. In truth this represents the large computer/experimental apparatus small brain approach. the truth, the hard path that really leads to progress is the small computer/experimental apparatus large brain approach: trying to really understand what is happening. To do this means working from the ground up, using what Daniel Dennett refers to as the "Cranes rather than skyhooks" approach building an emergent picture from simple models from the ground up that eventually connects to other emergent pictures. to use computational work with real thinking behind to really understand what is happening, and this be able to control and rationally design. This is, though, just a microcosm of how life is in general, the hard approach, really figuring things out, being so much more rewarding than the easy answer, that only temporarily impresses those playing the same easy game.