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"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place." -----H. L. MenckenI know, I know, I've made a pretty good career of not apologizing for anything, ever, so why start now? Ah, I feel so Nietzche-esque. I have fought the unsubtlety so much that I became unsubtle. The horror! The horror! I'm sure I don't need to explain very much.
Everyone who was perceptive at all saw me quit the auspice of Harpy last night, and really, I hadn't meant for them to see it quite that clearly, but I was distracted by a knotty problem in linguistic representation and value consideration that I describe below. Hence, despite my after-the-fact efforts, the "firing" was done in a very obvious manner. Approved by a Primogen who owe me an impressive list of boons (most of them do - not all, but most, and the ones who don't owe me are smart enough to want to cooperate), coordinated (in a clumsy way) by a Seneschal who I not only maintained in her Station through a change in power but who I (and Hades) arranged to have her Station in the first place (and who, everyone knows, can't put two and two together without Hades' permission), announced by a "Prince" openly acknowledged as a bad joke of mine, and leading to the appointment of a well-known "project" of the clan of which I am Primogen. Ugh. When you put it all together, it looks more like I'm a Gangrel in the utter non-subtle-ness of the deal.
Awful, just awful.
APOLOGY COMES HERE ------> For that, I'm very sorry. Some of you deserve better. Not most of you, but some of you do. <----------- THAT WAS THE APOLOGY, SUCH AS IT WAS. YOU MAY NOW RETURN TO YOUR LIVES, SUCH AS THEY ARE.
Everyone who was not perceptive at all might have believed it, of course. To them, I can only reiterate that it doesn't matter what you believe. It matters what you buy. This isn't a watching game, this is a betting game. The problem I mentioned earlier is one that arose during my work on SPIN, a "spin doctor" program modelled after LANGLEY (the compulsive conspiracy theorist expert system I described a few months ago.) SPIN is meant to be able to put a "positive" or "negative" spin on factual events for parties to those factual events. Unfortunately, it has been a complete failure, and right now I'm tearing the code apart to find exactly where the failure lies.
The first possibility is that it lies in the representational substructure. Under this analysis LANGLEY is successful because it is noninterpretive. It merely finds holes in stories and plugs them without regard to the actual likelihood of the result, merely ranking the results by explanatory power. SPIN requires a degree of representationality, since it must "cover the facts" on two axes, not just one. Further, both axes are clearly interpretable. SPIN has to produce believable stories and it has to know which stories are "beneficial" to which sides.
The second possibility is more limited, in that the three-level feedback architecture which I am using to represent "beneficial" is flawed or not sufficiently broad to allow SPIN to come to some kind of conclusion. This explanation has the advantage of making LANGLEY more significant - on the other hand, we shouldn't ascribe properties to it that it clearly doesn't have. I'll let you know how things progress. I'm sure you're on the edge of your seats.
Dr. Thomas A. Craydon
"It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself." ---Thomas Jefferson
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