Saturday, March 16, 2024

Avoiding decision problems

I was kind of the influence behind Chaaaaak's paper on words.hk regarding "decision problem avoidance" ( https://repository.eduhk.hk/en/publications/building-cantonese-dictionaries-using-crowdsourcing-strategies-th ).  We discovered that for the purposes of documenting language usage, fitting reality into predefined boxes didn't work too well.

Back then I was still learning the fundamental concepts of distributed computing, and stumbled across Leslie Lamport's work, one of which was (unrelated to distributed computing) what he called the "Buridan's Principle", which states that a discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time. The argument (or proof, or whatever) Lamport used was very interesting, I'm not entirely convinced the proof is correct, but the conclusion (the principle) is not to be doubted because it is true.

I spent a while philosophizing on decision problems -- which not only encompassed the ones normally seen in computer science, but also the less conventional ones as well (eg. 愛就係選擇,選擇就係捨棄). Which naturally led to me seeing the process of squeezing language usage into predefined categories as the same problem... and knowing how true Buridan's Principle is, especially when applied to a crowd (sourced project), avoiding such problems was key to good design of the database framework.

And I guess I kind of left it at that.

Until recently when I am dealing with issues on dualism. (In ALL its meanings.)

It struck me that the root of dualism is the decision process. The decision causes duality. Decision problems cause the problems with duality. When we don't decide, we don't have problems, so to speak.

And once we realize this, it collapses all the weird and interesting problems in logic to nothing.


I'm still grappling how to do things in practice with such a worldview, and how far one can go in normal life without engaging in decision processes... and I suspect it converges with some traditional wisdom passed to us from an era where such things were still known.

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