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Scientific Sense Podcast

Monday, January 21, 2013

Policy optimization

As the United States institute another policy regime, that may be a continuation but could equally prove to be different from status-quo, it is important to fully internalize the challenges ahead. With the planet hoarding over seven billion copies of homo-sapiens, sporting an organ – the brain, that is likely the pride of the Milky Way in this slice of space-time, the problems to solve are trivial. With a well behaved fusion furnace, the Sun, ideally situated at 150 Million Kilometers and the big brother, Jupiter, that efficiently sweeps the space debris, at five times that distance, Earth has gotten lucky. It quickly invented a method to accelerate entropy – life, that found many ways to evolve and grow to exponentially increase the original intent. It has culminated in a system, fully dominated by a singular species, able to think, travel and destroy at will. They have spread like wild fire, segmented themselves neatly into buckets of many dimensions – geography, belief and observable trivialities and even threaten to extinguish the whole idea.

Policy, then, is about constrained optimization. It has to consider the space – is it local or is it global, it has to consider the time, is it for now or later and it has to consider the scope, is it for me or for others? Who is in a position to make policy and who will adhere to them? Can policy change the promises made by the past or can it create yet to be understood effects in the future? Is policy good or bad or is it a mere waste of time? Can policy be based on what was written down in the past or should it be about future possibilities? Can policy be blind to ideas and where ideas originate from? Who is accountable for making polices and who may take accountability for them? Who moves, dies and start all over again because of policies and who counts, measures and reports the outcomes? Is the best policy the same in every space-time coordinate or should it differ and if so, could it accommodate differences in perceptions, ideas and culture?

It is a challenge for humanity.

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