Last month Sandia National Laboratories published an unlikely account of the thought of C.S. Peirce (1839-1914), the American pragmatist philosopher. See “Peirce, Pragmatism, and the Right Way of Thinking” (pdf) by Philip L. Campbell of the Sandia Networked Systems Survivability and Assurance Department, Sandia Report SAND2011-5583, August 2011.
What is the connection between Peirce’s philosophy and the national security mission of Sandia, or of the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, which sponsored the paper? The author did not reply to an email inquiry from Secrecy News on that point yesterday. But the paper states that “In practical terms, we can use Peirce’s lectures to build a model of how we make decisions.” (p. 12)
The potential implication of these evidence gaps becomes more consequential when you look at how institutions actually make decisions day to day.
Every new institution inherits something – existing incentives, existing staff, decades of prior investment that shaped what’s possible.
This is not the first time Google has agreed to censor imagery at the behest of governments, but be warned: obfuscation at this broad level poses a direct threat to the public’s ability to monitor and scrutinize government operations.
America’s affordability problem is bigger than home prices and rents. The best housing policies make it easier to build homes, and recognize how housing connects to other domains.