“Nice”
I met David Spiegelhalter when he spoke at a salon hosted by my friends Manolis and Lucile Kellis in their home. His talk was a truly inspiring advocacy for a new academic discipline, which he calls “Problem Solving.”
After that meeting David and I corresponded about the importance of finding practical applications for the work of academia. I paraphrased something the distinguished Cambridge statistics professor had written earlier and asked whether I had gotten it right. In his reply he clarified it as:
"I don't believe that statistics exists as an independent academic discipline - it's an 'enabling technology' that is used to solve problems.
Good luck with this essay.”
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter
I replied with
Dear David,
A thought I'd like to share:
Problem solving is to philosophy as engineering is to science.
Wes
To which Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter replied:
nice!
David
Well that made my day.
OK, enough bragging (for now :))
In my blog I quoted the American politician Marco Rubio who had remarked that “We need more welders and less philosophers.”
I replied “We do need welders, and we need solvers of non-physical problems as well.”
It takes innate cognitive ability plus years of training and experience for a welder to become really skilled. Welders focus on solving practical problems that are involved in the very needed and important job of joining metals in the most challenging situations.We need philosophers too. However, philosophers who just study and teach the five-to-eight branches of philosophy and never get around to putting that knowledge to practical use give philosophy the reputation it has earned for being an irrelevant, academic, ivory tower escape from the needs of real life. If they were to take the next step, analyze real world problems and boldly offer solutions crafted from their knowledge, people like Marco Rubio would lose their disdain for the profession and would learn to look to it for solutions to difficult problems.
Socrates and his spokesperson Plato set out to solve practical problems of governance 2500 years ago. Apparently their ideas were adopted by 500 years later, when the Romans sought ways to avoid having another dictator as their next emperor. Result: the reigns of “the five good emperors” as they have come to be known. (Remaining problem: preventing a great emperor from appointing his less competent son as his successor.)
Optimocracy is a proposed solution to the problem of failing public governance. I hope you like it.
And I hope David Spiegelhalter likes it.
Another problem that I feel needs to be addressed is a marketing problem: Sir David Spiegelhalter has created something valuable that many more people should know about.
These days, large numbers of people knowing about something is associated with branding. Actually branding is just a newer word for what has been known for millennia: new ideas need catchy names, e.g. “Philosopher King.”
As I said to David Spiegelhalter, “Problem Solving” may be an accurate description of the discipline, but as a brand it is just terrible. (Full disclosure: he did not agree.)
We need a better name, a brand that means “Problem Solving,” something that identifies the application of the engineering mindset to problems we face in the domains of behavior and governance rather than domains of physical objects.
[new name] is to Philosophy as Engineering is to Science.
Suggestions welcome.