Rules

Any cooperative venture, which I hope to make this blog, needs some structure.

Structure determines function, at least partially.  The goals of this cooperative venture are open-ended, so we want the minimum structure consistent with progress.

There may well be a good set of rules that someone can bring to our attention, so we want these to be sufficiently malleable to incorporate improvements or a complete replacement.

This is an attempt to bring the precision of thinking in science and engineering to the problem of government.  Thus, we will apply the best scientific and engineering analysis criteria.

We judge the worth of comments by their accuracy and depth of citations, by the quality of their fundamental data and the kinds of inferences that can be made from that data, by their logic and adherence to rules of evidence for scientific, technological and historical disciplines.

Similar to other Open Source projects, I am writer, editor, benevolent dictator.  Until I find cooperators and learn to trust them, I do the merges from email and comments into posts in this blog.  I will endeavor to be as open in this as I can be, but will fail at that, please remind me.

I will not tolerate ideology of any kind.  Ideology == 'ideas and words before reality'.  This is the antithesis of everything that has produced our very wonderful civilization : we have not achieved progress in any of the areas that make our lives so wonderful by better sermons or speeches in the senate or even lectures by our best philosophers.  These are not, from the historical record, much improved over the last 200 years, yet improvements in individual lives have been dramatic in many ways.

We achieved our civilization by accumulating information about that very large and very complex reality that we all share, which we call knowledge.

We achieved our civilization by intellectual progress in comprehending and systematizing knowledge, which we call science, and by learning to apply those systematic understandings to better ourselves.  This is applied science in its many manifestations : medicine, engineering, management of organizations, military arts, government arts, advertising, ...

We achieved our modern life by disciplining our thinking and actions so that we better control the large-scale and further-distant future, which we call wisdom.  As individuals and organizations, we both choose and achieve our goals more wisely in our current civilization.

Very importantly, we achieved our civilization in the face of the huge limitation that we each can only understand a very small portion of humanity's accumulated knowledge, understanding and wisdom.  Thus, our civilization and its progress depend on coordinating individuals, and the scale of the interactions and the flows of information between entities that create and process information is both the challenge for the next stage of progress and the opportunity for new dimensions of civilization and new progress on all fronts.

Civility is useful, but we assume that all of us are flawed humans and sometimes are not as kind to others as we would desire them to be to us.  We all know that intellectual passion is a requirement for progress in understanding, and that all kinds of talents are unevenly distributed, and so we must expect that some major contributors to this effort will be ranging from moderate to extreme.  We forgive them in advance.