Imperfect comprehension

Towards the Dynamic Art of Partial Comprehension (Part #6)

Obsessive quest for comprehension and control: The argument emphasizes the point that current concerns with "total information awareness" may not be the most fruitful under the circumstances -- especially when the assumption is made that everything is being monitored appropriately, despite periodic indications that this is far from the case. The latest such example, at the time of writing, is the apparent failure to monitor a US soldier who "cracked" and the failure to monitor a known escapee from Kandahar prison -- both of whom massacred innocents, the former in Kandahar the latter in France. It is curious that major democracies should be evolving into a condition of control freakery -- mocked by them in the case of the former Soviet bloc.

The nervous need to grasp for explanatory closure is not suggestive of collective, self-assured maturity -- rather the contrary, namely of societies petrified by their own shadows (potentially to be understood in a psychoanalytical sense). As implied above, assumption of closure with total control precludes future discovery and development. It is a characteristic of silo thinking and reduces the capacity to envisage and respond to surprises.

The challenge is central to consideration of large computer systems. It was the theme of 6th IWPC International Workshop Program Comprehension (1998), notably in the paper by (K. Erdos, Partial comprehension of complex programs (enough to perform maintenance)). A more recent clarification of the issue inidcates:

Partial comprehension is a necessity in the evolution and maintenance of very large software systems. The programmers form not only partial comprehension of the code, but also partial comprehension of the application domain. To describe the comprehension process, we introduce ontology fragments and investigate how programmers form, use and extend them before and during concept location; concept location is a prerequisite of code changes. We conducted case studies of concept location in two large systems, Eclipse and Mozilla, that both have more than 50,000 methods. Using grep search and ontology fragments, the programmers were able to locate the concepts after inspecting on average less than 10 methods and operating with ontology fragments of around 14 concepts, a very small fraction of the total. (Maksym Petrenko, et al., Partial Domain Comprehension in Software Evolution and Maintenance, 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, 2008).

Of particular interest therefore is consideration of a "unification theory" in this light (Ron Cottam, Nils Langloh, Willy Ranson and Emilie Cottam, Humble Unification Theory: Partial Comprehension in a Quasi-Particulate Universe, 1995):

It is possible to represent the dynamic nature of the understanding of our surroundings in a way which is similar to the scientific description of reactionary phenomena, with regions of stability corresponding to general acceptance of currently formulated perceptions, and regions of instability which give birth to the evolution of dramatic comprehensional phase changes in which previously stable perceptions are modified, replaced or annihilated.... We propose that comprehension itself can be looked upon as the localised result of a "survival"-type computation, and consequently that it can be treated as a quasi-particle, similarly to all other (real) localised entities. Quasi-particle emergence and stabilisation in this scheme consistently depend on "local" criteria, as for electron-positron emergence in "free space". If this description is valid, we should expect to see the "materialisation" somewhere in large-scale neural computational structures of extremely localised high-level perceptional representations of environmental features. It may be that there is an intimate link between this expectation and the emergence of semi-autonomous activity "bubbles" in continuum neural field theory modeling of the brain.

Imperfect implementation of strategic initiatives: It is curious that the approach to strategic initiatives worldwide focuses in advance on their appropriate completion in the light of the idealistic vision of their promoters. The reality of many projects is a degree of partial completion, if not virtually total failure (EU-funded projects in Palestine destroyed by Israel, European Voice, 22 March 2012).

The above argument suggests a degree of merit to a focus on the art of partial implementation -- of imperfect implementation -- as the nature of the reality with which people may be expected to live, after the promoters have "moved on". As phrased with respect to Iraq by Jim Molan (Generals, statesmen, bureaucrats and 'strategy', The Interpreter, 16 August 2011): There is a certain inevitability that these issues of strategic imperfection will not be addressed until the wolf is at the door.

It is appropriate to note that economists have been obliged to give consideration to "imperfection" in the models of perfect markets (Strategic Trade Policy: modelling imperfection, Center for Economic Policy Research, 1990). Information "imperfections" have been explored as opportunities (Onno Truijens and Ard Huizing, The Strategic Potential of Information Imperfections). They have even been praised by Neil Bendle (In Praise of Imperfection, Knowledge Quarterly, 17 December 2010):

Bankers often strive for the perfect metric. This beguiling vision is paradoxically a problem for the adoption of metrics. Rejection of all metrics sometimes follows, as people realize that the metric didn't solve all of their problems.... But here's something that might. I'd like to provide a final and far less intuitive reason for continuing to use metrics: the very imperfectness of their nature can prove invaluable in aiding communication.

Most measurements have flaws. But these imperfections are the very sparks that ignite discussion, expose underlying assumptions and help to align strategy and tactics.... Even imperfect metrics hold tremendous power to bring assumptions to the surface and facilitate healthy, productive communication.

(Uncritical Strategic Dependence on Little-known Metrics, 2009)