May 4, 2021

Incompetents flow rather than evaluate. In fact they despise evaluating, because they are incapable of doing so. Yet they have themselves convinced that evaluating is a debased standard. They assume that the impossibility of them evaluating properly is a universal problem—an inescapable part of evaluating—rather than a deficiency of their own.

Then a secondary problem develops: Any attempt to evaluate, or someone else evaluating, exposes their incompetence.

So incompetents oppose evaluating, and the result is endless errors being created and uncorrected. A major example is the recent aircraft carrier that only has one elevator for moving airplanes to the surface, where it was supposed to have eight, because designers tried to use magnetic lifts, while there is no such thing as a magnetic lift. Wouldn't the slightest bit of evaluating have told them that? It shows not an oversight problem but a dogmatically imposed standard of not evaluating.

Not criticizing is one element of not evaluating. Not criticizing doesn't mean supporting everything that comes along; it means not using a method that evaluates. Attack, attack, attack is what replaces criticism. The difference is evaluation vs. prejudicial assumptions. Prejudice cannot be replaced with knowledge without evaluation.

The problem requires a hard look at what evaluation is. The alternative—prejudicial assumption—is too rudimentary to require much study. It's infantile.

Evaluation means systematic study of the factors involved. Complex processes require a lot of study. The demands are often greater than can be met. To eliminate the whole process is doomed to failure.

This is why Steve Jobs had to have very unusual qualifications to create the smart phone. He had to shoehorn in a highly complex process into a social milieu which does not evaluate complex processes. In fact, he was shoved out of his own company until it went bankrupt and let him back in. After he showed how to create a smart phone, something similar could be replicated forever after without much evaluation.

The absence of evaluation is largely a replicating process. Something must already exist to be replicated. Forging new ground requires innovative persons such as Steve Jobs.

Scientific research has been a visible example since its peak in the 1960s. For each scientist forging new ground, dozens of projects would replicate something similar. A procedure for studying a protein could be replicated for hundreds of proteins. Such replicating allowed a lot of incompetent scientists to be called scientists, while they were more similar to technologists.

Science shows the difference in the most extreme way due to science having the most demanding requirements in extending basic knowledge into unknown areas. A few scientists find new ways to make measurements which increase basic knowledge, while replicators go through the routines with few demands required.

So the science bureaucrats attempted to institute the replicating version of science by requiring scientists to do their research at a desk rather than in a laboratory. Grant applicants were supposed to describe the procedures and then fill in the blanks with numbers in the laboratory. There is no research to that process; it's a replicating process only. It's how engineering works, which caused incompetents to assume it should work for science. But science and engineering are about opposites in that regard. An engineer uses formulas without questioning where they came from; a scientist must question everything in designing something that hasn't existed before.

The same mentality exists socially as flowing with forces rather than questioning them. Power flows with forces; knowledge does not. There are endless problems created or uncorrected in flowing with forces. Only evaluation can correct the errors or solve the problems.