That seductive abstract

As mentioned in the earlier list, abstraction has a lot of modern appeal thanks, in part, to computation. It's also very seductive in the drive for minimum costs or for the most lean effort or any other quest for the optimal.

Yet, an experienced engineer will tell you that no amount of modeling prowess replaces the thing-in-itself. That is, even an advanced 'second world' (or call it holodeck) experience is not reality. Just like a simulator experience is not the real thing.

So, how does this problem play in the stacked deck that we see with CAD and CAE (CAx to some) in the context of a complicated product? Well, given a product with new material, process, and configuration, are we to believe that the analytics are so strong so as to push us to think that we can ignore risks that may be inherent (will be discussed further)?

One thing of importance here will be quasi-empiricism versus a focus on foundations. The latter seems to take hold when the less 'hard' come to fore (finance, etc.).

Stay tuned, as this topic will keep reappearing.

Slogan: a new product, even though engineered by computer, is a hypothesis that needs to be proven (not hyped).

Remarks:

01/17/2013 -- Grounding due to fire.

11/02/2010 -- This post is 3 years old. Originally, the context dealt with engineering. But, finance soon came to fore with its importance to capitalism. We need to redo money, essentially.

09/02/2009 -- Lean assumes a current framework which can be improved. That the process is still effective during the change can be checked easily. However, if it is not still effective or we do not have a stable framework, then we were, by necessity, in the undecidable state.

05/27/2009 -- That we have topsy-turvy needs to be addressed more fully in both an epistemologic and an operational sense.

01/23/2009 -- At the time of this post, engineering was the main focus. Then, other areas become of interest due to overlaps in the problems: map-territory, computation and being, and much more. There will be more integrating posts to bring some cohesion, such as leveraging and fiction.

Modified: 01/17/2013