A “Requirements Loop” is an evidence-supported explanation of How observed events in an environment have led or are leading to the creation and persistence of those requirements, How to change the environment in order to satisfy the requirements in the future, and How to measure the change in the environment, in order to evaluate the…
Figures 1 and 2 show cost versus time; Figure 1 shows long iterations, Figure 2 short iterations. We choose to do something at time zero, at the origin of the graph in the Figure, and when we do so, we do it under some assumptions that we made at that time. Dashed red lines convey…
Can “an artificial intelligence machine be an ‘inventor’ under the Patent Act”? According to the Memorandum Opinion filed on September 2, 2021, in the case 1:20-cv-00903, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requires that the inventor is one or more people [1]. An “AI machine” cannot be named an inventor on a patent that…
“Objective”, as in, for example, “what I’m saying is objective”, or “that statement is objective”, or “we need objective criteria when making these decisions”, is a complicated term. It takes a lot of effort to make sure it is understood as intended (or closely enough). It is therefore a costly word to use. Why is…
There is no single definition of the term “evidence”, and trying to make one isn’t the purpose of this text. But there are ways of telling if something might be evidence, and knowing when it clearly isn’t. Such knowledge helps you develop a taste, so to speak, in evidence. Isn’t that valuable, given how frequently you may be giving evidence to support your ideas, and how frequently others do the same to you?
Many people spent a lot of time, across centuries, trying to build good explanations, and trying to distinguish good from bad ones. While there is no consensus on what “explanation” is (always and everywhere), it is worth knowing what good explanations may have in common. It helps develop a taste in explanations, which is certainly helpful given how frequently you may need to explain something, and how often others offered explanations to you.
If competence shortens learning, then its value is proportional to the cost of learning, that is, of iterations that would have been needed to achieve the effects of competence, but without having access to it.
This short interview on my research on decision making and use of it in companies, was done in 2018 with fnrs.tv, part of the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique – FNRS, in Brussels. Each of my first two academic books led to the founding of a spin-off; see the books here.
