Systems of government are not to be judged for their prophetic ability to choose and install good leaders and policies, but for their ability to remove bad ones that are already there.
David Deutsch, inspired by Karl Popper
Many technical and natural processes follow the conjecture and criticism or analysis-by-synthesis principle when unfolding:
- Evolution creates new mutations (conjectures) that are then tested in the harsh reality (criticism). The conjectures that are the best fit to their environment survive and procreate.
- Human perception guesses what it hears or sees and performs constant error correction on that guess until the sensor signal matches the expected sensor signal (active inference).
- When training artificial neural networks, the network predicts an output for each input. If the output doens’t match the ground truth (training data), then an error signal is generated and the parameters of the artificial neural network are adjusted to reduce the error the next time the network is fed the same input.
- Reconstruction of an MRI image is based on a generative model of the image generation process that is used to iteratively, through better and better “guesses”, arrive at a representation of the anatomy that the MR signals represent.
- Scientific progress after the enlightenment has followed a process of conjecture and criticism. Only those conjectures that match reality are kept.
- System development is an iterative process where having elicited a set of system requirements, a design is conjectured and then analyzed for its ability to satisfy the system requirements.
- Transfer of knowledge from one person to another, e.g., during a lecture, is a process where the learner creates a series of conjectures that they test against the lecturer’s explanaitions; knowledge is not transferred, it’s learned anew by each new person exposed to it.
The basic truth is that it is impossible to derive a solution that requires the creation of new knowledge from existing knowledge. It is as impossible to derive the optimal system design from the system requirements as it is to derive the optimal government for a country from the citizens’ requirements. The only way to make progress is to through iterations of conjecture and criticism.
The American political system will be judged on November 7, 2028 on its ability to remove Donald Trump.