--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
We're not a
> bunch of
> knuckle-dragging dolts, fer chrissake. A lot of this
> is misanthropy
> disguised as politics.
Doug. You are right BUT...you are referring to particularly gifted americans. I suspect the upper 10 to 15 percent (intellectually speaking) americans are just as good as the upper 10-15 percent from any other country. It's those in the middle that I think are lacking. There is NO DOUBT in my mind that the AVERAGE student coming out of a French Lycee (or the equivalent of any other european school) has mastered much more than the AVERAGE American counterpart coming out of High School.
===== The real world gives the subset of what is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The "constraint" is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsice to the thing but are relational between observer and thing.
W. Ross Ashby
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