Chaos provides value both by telling certain engineers where not to look for solutions to their problems, and by getting their bosses off their back about it. That’s a significant value add, but short of what I was hoping for when I started looking into Chaos.
I don’t think it’s a value-add, because this sort of proof-by-intimidation abuse is how chaos theory gets used in many places, such as here on Lesswrong as well, not just engineers fighting their managers. Remember the proof that humans can’t get high scores playing pinball because ‘chaos theory’? It’s just an indiscriminate rhetorical weapon. It is not true in the case of playing pinball, it is probably not true of trebuchets in general (as opposed to cheap simple trebuchets constructed for contests or the Third World), and I would be surprised if all of those 6 successful manipulations were the valid exceptions. It is similar to the pervasive abuse of Godel or the Halting theorem; you doubtless could successfully convince some managers to not bother with things like typechecking or unit-tests or formal proofs because “Turing proved it is impossible to prove things about arbitrary programs” etc, but that is not a good thing, it is a bad thing.
I don’t think it’s a value-add, because this sort of proof-by-intimidation abuse is how chaos theory gets used in many places, such as here on Lesswrong as well, not just engineers fighting their managers. Remember the proof that humans can’t get high scores playing pinball because ‘chaos theory’? It’s just an indiscriminate rhetorical weapon. It is not true in the case of playing pinball, it is probably not true of trebuchets in general (as opposed to cheap simple trebuchets constructed for contests or the Third World), and I would be surprised if all of those 6 successful manipulations were the valid exceptions. It is similar to the pervasive abuse of Godel or the Halting theorem; you doubtless could successfully convince some managers to not bother with things like typechecking or unit-tests or formal proofs because “Turing proved it is impossible to prove things about arbitrary programs” etc, but that is not a good thing, it is a bad thing.