Letter from Finchley

Published by peter on 2013-04-11 in History, Obituaries and Politics. 0 Comments

The influence of Mrs Margaret Thatcher on British economic and cultural life is shown now, at her death, by the pages and pages and pages of newsprint devoted to her in every British newspaper, all day every day since her death.  Even the Gruaniard has joined in the chorus, although sometimes singing from the hymnal of another denomination, but still with pages and pages of text and images.  It is like the mass media psychosis that hit Britain the week after the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
The praise heaped on Saint Margaret has stretched credulity to the limit.   Like some modern-day Bolivar, she apparently single-handedly liberated Eastern Europe from Communism, which if true would surely be news to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR (1989 membership), the Central Committee of the CzechoSlovak Communist Party (April 1968 membership), the Central Committee of the United Workers Party of Poland (1956 and 1989 memberships), and the millions of brave citizens of Berlin, Leipzig, Budapest, Gdansk, Prague, Warsaw, Bucharest, Moscow, and throughout the region, who actually did, through argument and protest and strike and resistance, liberate their countries from tyranny.   Part of the justification given for her role in the freedom of Eastern Europe is the fact of her early meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, before his elevation to the General Secretary-ship of the CPSU, after which meeting she proclaimed that she could do business with him.  But why would this endorsement have helped him rise?  Surely such a public statement from one of the nation’s nuclear-armed enemies potentially lost him votes in the race to be General Secretary.
And, by a certain class of people, she was then, and still is, seen as the Simon Bolivar of Britain.  Yes, like all politicians, she represented a particular economic class and indeed she represented their interests very effectively.  (It was not, by the way, the class of her parents or of her upbringing, but it was the class of her husband.)   But statesmanship requires a politician to decide in the national interest, not in the interests of a particular class.  With just one possible exception, I cannot think of a single major decision she took in which she decided in favour of the nation against the interests of her own sectional base.    The one exception was the decision to defend the Falkland Islands following invasion by the Argentinian military junta in 1982.
One could – and she did – defend such sectional decision-making on ideological grounds,  for example, using the so-called theories of trickle-down economics, of metaphysical entities (eg, invisible hands), and of magical thinking and  psychokinesis (eg, frictionless adjustment to free trade) that constitute the parallel, reality-free, universe that is neoclassical economics.  In other words, she argued that although the decisions she took seemed to favour one group over another, in reality all would benefit, although perhaps not all would benefit immediately.   But all economic policies have both winners and losers.   Mrs Thatcher rarely evinced any public sympathy for the losers of her policies, and her contempt for those who lost was always obvious.
Her last major enacted policy – towards the end of her 11 years in power – was the Poll Tax, which punished society’s losers with a most unfair and regressive tax, at the same time as giving manifest and immediate benefit to her sectional base.  This was not a policy of someone governing in the national interest.  This was not a policy of someone having personal compassion for the downtrodden, the ill, the unlucky, the old, and the unfortunate in our society.  This was not policy – and her dogged insistence on maintaining it against all evidence that it was not working epideictically reinforces this – that showed her approaching the challenges of governing in a reasoned or pragmatic way, with an open and rational mind, intent on balancing competing interests, or of finding the best solution for the country as a whole.
Norm is correct to castigate those who have publicly rejoiced at her death.  Such rejoicing is quite understandable, even though wrong.   Mrs Thatcher’s condescension, contempt, and antipathy for those who suffered from her policies or from life in general was evident to everyone, all along.  She herself said there was no such thing as society.   She herself said that anyone using public transport over the age of 35 was a failure in life.   It is no wonder that the worst riots in Britain in the 20th century happened under Mrs Thatcher.  It is no wonder that her party has no longer any support to speak of in Scotland (ground zero for the Poll Tax), and no wonder that support for Scottish independence is now so strong.  It is no wonder that punk and reggae developed in overt opposition to her.  Linton Kwesi Johnson named his famous song for her, conflating her with Inglan.   It is no wonder that people are organizing street parties in the cities of Britain to celebrate her departure.
In contrast to most of the reporting engulfing us now, here are two responses to show the historians of the future that not all of us alive at this moment welcome the sudden attempt at canonization.  The first is from a Guardian editorial on Tuesday 9 April 2013:

In the last analysis, though, her stock in trade was division. By instinct, inclination and effect she was a polariser. She glorified both individualism and the nation state, but lacked much feeling for the communities and bonds that knit them together. When she spoke, as she often did, about “our people”, she did not mean the people of Britain; she meant people who thought like her and shared her prejudices. She abhorred disorder, decadence and bad behaviour but she was the empress ruler of a process of social and cultural atomism that has fostered all of them, and still does.”

The second is an impassioned speech from Glenda Jackson MP, given in the House of Commons yesterday, about the pain Mrs Thatcher’s policies wrought.  The speech was given against and over the top of much noise and shouting from the Yahoo Henrys who still, apparently, sit on the Conservative Party Benches.  I say thee, Yay, Ms. Jackson, Yay!

Brass in Perth

Published by peter on 2013-04-03 in Music. 0 Comments

Brisbane Excelsior Brass Band have won the 2013 A-Grade Australian National Band Championships, held in Perth, WA, last week.  Congratulations to all!

According to this band contest archive,  Excelsior have previously won the national championship in 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2010.  Some members of the band performed last year in a concert in Tyalgum, NSW, which I reported here, and in a concert two years ago in Bundamba to celebrate 125 years of the Salvation Army in Ipswich, Qld.

What do mathematicians do?

Published by peter on 2013-04-01 in Human intelligence and Mathematics. 0 Comments

Over at the AMS Graduate Student Blog, Jean Joseph wonders what it is that mathematicians do, asking if what they do is to solve problems:

After I heard someone ask about what a mathematician does, I myself wonder what it means to do mathematics if all what one can answer is that mathematicians do mathematics. Solving problems have been considered by some as the main activity of a mathematician, which might then be the answer to the question. But, could reading and writing about mathematics or crafting a new theory be considered as serious mathematical activities or mere extracurricular activities?”

Not all mathematics is problem-solving, as we’ve discussed here before, and I think it would be a great shame if the idea were to take hold that all that mathematicians did was to solve problems.  As Joseph says, this view does not account for lots of activities that we know mathematicians engage in which are not anywhere near to problem-solving, such as creating theories, defining concepts, writing expositions, teaching, etc.
I view mathematics (and the related disciplines in the pure mathematical universe) as the rigorous study of structure and relationship.   What mathematicians do, then, is to rigorously study structure and relationship.  They do this by creating, sharing and jointly manipulating abstract mental models, seeking always to understand the properties and inter-relations of these models.
Some of these models may arise from, or be applied to, particular domains or particular problems, but mathematicians (at least, pure mathematicians) are typically chiefly interested in the abstract models themselves and their formal properties, rather than the applications.  In some parts of mathematics (eg, algebra) written documents such as research papers and textbooks provide accurate descriptions of these mental models.  In other parts (eg, geometry), the written documents can only approximate the mental models.     As mathematician William Thurston once said:

There were published theorems that were generally known to be false, or where the proofs were generally known to be incomplete. Mathematical knowledge and understanding were embedded in the minds and in the social fabric of the community of people thinking about a particular topic. This knowledge was supported by written documents, but the written documents were not really primary.
I think this pattern varies quite a bit from field to field. I was interested in geometric areas of mathematics, where it is often pretty hard to have a document that reflects well the way people actually think. In more algebraic or symbolic fields, this is not necessarily so, and I have the impression that in some areas documents are much closer to carrying the life of the field. But in any field, there is a strong social standard of validity and truth.
. . .
When people are doing mathematics, the flow of ideas and the social standard of validity is much more reliable than formal documents. People are usually not very good in checking formal correctness of proofs, but they are quite good at detecting potential weaknesses or flaws in proofs.”

The ALP

Published by peter on 2013-03-29 in History and Politics. 0 Comments

The colonial political parties of the labour movement which preceded the Australian Labor Party date from 1891.  The first Labour MPs were elected that year to the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (aka “the Bear Pit”), winning 35 of 141 seats.  The first Labour government anywhere in the world was in Queensland in 1899, where the administration of Anderson Dawson held office for 7 days.   Federally, the first Labour Government was in 1904, under Chris Watson, a minority government that lasted just 4 months.  The party adopted the US spelling of “Labor” in 1912, in admiration of the US labor movement.
An American journalist and historian of Australia, C. Hartley Grattan (1902-1980), once wrote this about the Party (cited in Button 2012, page 145 large print edition):

It has struggled with every handicap to which political parties are heir.  It has been burdened with careerists, turncoats, hypocrites, outright scoundrels, stuffy functionaries devoid of sense and imagination, bellowing enemies of critical intelligence, irritatingly self-righteous clowns bent on enforcing suburban points of view, pussy-footers, demagogues, stooges for hostile outside groups and interests, aged and decaying hacks and ordinary blatherskites.  Every political party falls heir to these.  But it has outlived them all and still stands for something:  it stands for a social democratic Australia.”

Reference:
James Button [2012]: Speechless:  A Year in my Father’s Business.  Melbourne, Australia:  Melbourne University Press.
POSTSCRIPT (2013-03-30):  And here is a perceptive analysis of the current situation of the ALP by Guy Rundle, writing for Crikey magazine (HT).    I had not previously viewed the ALP’s Right-wing factions as being the descendants of the Catholic social movement, while the Centre-Left and Left factions may be seen descendants of Protestant Fabians and Marxists.

Political talk

Published by peter on 2013-03-29 in Obama speeches, Oratory, Philosophy of Language and Politics. 0 Comments

James Button, one-time speech-writer to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, wrote this in his recent book:

When Rudd spoke at the Department’s Christmas party, he had sketched a triangle in the air that distilled the work of producing a policy or speech into a three-point plan:  where are we now; where do we want to go and why; how are we going to get there?  The second point – where do we want to go and why – expressed our values, Rudd said. It was a simple way to structure a speech and I often used it when writing speeches in the year to come.” (Button 2012, page 55, large print edition).

Reading this I was reminded how inadequate I had found the analysis of political speech propounded by anthropologist Michael Silverstein in his short book on political talk (Silverstein 2003).   He seems to view political speech as mere information transfer, and the utterances made therefore as essentially being propositions – statements about the world that are either true or false.   Perhaps these propositions may be covered in rhetorical glitter, or presented incrementally, or subtly, or cleverly, but propositions they remain.   I know of no politician, and I can think of none, who speaks that way.   All political speeches (at least in the languages known to me) are calls to action of one form or another.   These actions may be undertaken by the speaker or their political party – “If elected, I will do XYZ” – or they may be actions which the current elected officials should be doing  – “Our Government should be doing XYZ.”     Implicit in such calls is always another call, to an action by the listener:  “Vote for me”.    Even lists of past achievements, which Button mentions Rudd was fond of giving, are implicit or explicit entreaties for votes.
Of course, such calls to action may, of necessity, be supported by elaborate propositional statements about the world as it is, or as it could be or should be, as Rudd’s structure shows.   And such propositions may be believed or not, by listeners.  But people called to action do not evaluate the calls they hear the way they would propositions.  It makes no sense, for instance, to talk about the “truth” or “falsity” of an action, or even of a call to action.   Instead, we assess such calls on the basis of the sincerity or commitment of the speaker, on the appropriateness or feasibility or ease or legality of the action, on the consequences of the proposed action, on its costs and benefits, its likelihood of success, its potential side effects, on how it compares to any alternative actions, on the extent to which others will support it also, etc.
What has always struck me about Barack Obama’s speeches, particularly those during his first run for President in 2007-2008,  is how often he makes calls-to-action for actions to be undertaken by his listeners:  He would say “We should do X”, but actually mean, “You-all should do X”, since the action is often not something he can do alone, or even at all.  “Yes we can!” was of this form, since he is saying, “Yes, we can take back the government from the Republicans, by us all voting.”    From past political speeches I have read or seen, it seems to me that only JFK, MLK and RFK regularly spoke in this way, although I am sure there must have been other politicians who did.  This approach and the associated language comes directly from Obama’s work as a community organizer: success in that role consists in persuading people to work together on their own joint behalf.  Having spent lots of time in the company of foreign aid workers in Africa, this voice and these idioms were very familiar to me when I first heard Obama speak.
Rudd’s three-part structure matches closely to the formalism proposed by Atkinson et al. [2005] for making proposals for action in multi-party dialogs over action, a structure that supports rational critique and assessment of the proposed action, along the dimensions mentioned above.
References:
K. Atkinson, T. Bench-Capon and P. McBurney [2005]: A dialogue-game protocol for multi-agent argument over proposals for action.   Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 11 (2): 153-171.
James Button [2012]: Speechless:  A Year in my Father’s Business.  Melbourne, Australia:  Melbourne University Press.
Michael Silverstein [2003]:   Talking Politics:  The Substance of Style from Abe to “W”.  Chicago, IL, USA:  Prickly Paradigm Press.

Decision-making style

Published by peter on 2013-03-23 in Decision theory and Politics. 0 Comments

This week’s leadership-challenge-that-wasn’t in the Federal Parliamentary Caucus of the Australian Labor Party saw the likely end of Kevin Rudd’s political career.   At the last moment he bottled it, having calculated that he did not have the numbers to win a vote of his caucus colleagues and so deciding not to stand.  Ms Gillard was re-elected leader of the FPLP unopposed.       Why Rudd failed to win caucus support is explained clearly in subsequent commentary by one of his former speech-writers, James Button:

The trick to government, Paul Keating once said, is to pick three big things and do them well. But Rudd opened a hundred policy fronts, and focused on very few of them. He centralised decision-making in his office yet could not make difficult decisions. He called climate change the greatest moral challenge of our time, then walked away from introducing an emissions trading scheme. He set a template for governing that Labor must move beyond.
On Thursday, for the third time in three years, a large majority of Rudd’s caucus colleagues made it clear that they did not want him as leader. Yet for years Rudd seemed as if he would never be content until he returned as leader. On Friday he said that he would never again seek the leadership of the party. He must keep his word, or else the impasse will destabilise and derail the party until he leaves Parliament.
Since losing the prime ministership, Rudd never understood that for his prospects to change within the government he had to openly acknowledge, at least in part, that there were sensible reasons why Gillard and her supporters toppled him in 2010. Then, as hard as it would have been, he had to get behind Gillard, just as Bill Hayden put aside his great bitterness and got behind Bob Hawke and joined his ministry after losing the Labor leadership to him in 1983.
Yes, Rudd’s execution was murky and brutal and should have been done differently, perhaps with a delegation of senior ministers going to Rudd first to say change or go. Yes, the consequences have been catastrophic for Gillard and for the ALP. ”Blood will have blood,” as Dennis Glover, a former Gillard speechwriter who also wrote speeches for Rudd, said in a newspaper on Thursday.
But why did it happen? Why did so many Labor MPs resolve to vote against Rudd that he didn’t dare stand? Why was he thrashed in his 2012 challenge? Why have his numbers not significantly moved, despite all the government’s woes?
Because – it must be said again – Rudd was a poor prime minister. To his credit, he led the government’s brave and decisive response to the global financial crisis. His apology speech changed Australia and will be remembered for years to come. But beyond that he has few achievements, and the way he governed brought him down.
At the time of his 2012 challenge, seven ministers went public with fierce criticisms of Rudd’s governing style. When most of them made it clear they would not serve again in a Rudd cabinet, many commentators wrote this up as slander and character assassination of Rudd, or as one of those vicious but mysterious internal brawls that afflict the Labor Party from time to time. They missed the essential points: that the criticisms came from a diverse and representative set of ministers, and they had substance.
If the word of these seven ministers is not enough, consider the reporting of Rudd’s treatment of colleagues by Fairfax journalist David Marr in his 2010 Quarterly Essay, Power Trip. Or the words of Glover, who wrote last year that as a ”member of the Gang of Four Hundred or So (advisers and speechwriters) I can assure you that the chaos and frustration described by Gillard supporters during February’s failed leadership challenge rang very, very true with about 375 of us.”
Consider the reporting of Rudd’s downfall by ABC journalist Barrie Cassidy in his book, Party Thieves. Never had numbers tumbled so quickly, Cassidy wrote. ”That’s because Rudd himself drove them. His own behaviour had caused deep-seated resentment to take root.” Leaders had survived slumps before and would again. But ”Rudd was treated differently because he was different: autocratic, exclusive, disrespectful and at times flat-out abusive”. Former Labor minister Barry Cohen told Cassidy: ”If Rudd was a better bloke he would still be leader. But he pissed everybody off.”
These accounts tallied with my own observations when I worked as a speechwriter for Rudd in 2009. While my own experience of Rudd was both poor and brief, I worked with many people – 40 or more – who worked closely with him. Their accounts were always the same. While Rudd was charming to the outside world, behind closed doors he treated people with rudeness and contempt. At first I kept waiting for my colleagues to give me another side of Rudd: that he could be difficult but was at heart a good bloke. Yet apart from some conversations in which people praised his handling of the global financial crisis, no one ever did.
Since he lost power, is there any sign that Rudd has reflected on his time in office, accepted that he made mistakes, that he held deep and unaccountable grudges and treated people terribly?
Did he reflect on the rages he would fly into when people gave him advice he didn’t want, how he would put those people into what his staff called ”the freezer”, sometimes not speaking to them for months or more? Did he reflect on the way he governed in a near permanent state of crisis, how his reluctance to make decisions until the very last moment coupled with a refusal to take unwelcome advice led his government into chaos by the middle of 2010, when his obsessive focus on his health reforms left the government utterly unprepared to deal with the challenges of the emissions trading scheme, the budget, the Henry tax review and the mining tax? To date there is no sign that he has learnt from the failures of his time as prime minister.

Through his wife, Rudd is currently the richest member of the Australian Commonwealth Parliament, and perhaps the  richest person ever to be an MP.    He is also fluent in Mandarin Chinese and famously intelligent, although perhaps not as bright as his predecessors as Labor leader, Gough Whitlam or Doc Evatt, or former ministers, Isaac Isaacs, Ted Theodore or Barry Jones.  It is possible, of course, to have a first-rate mind and a second-rate temperament.  An autocratic management style – unpopular within the Labor Party at any time, as Evatt and Whitlam both learnt – is even less appropriate when the Party lacks a majority in the House, and has to rely on a permanent, floating two-up game of ad hoc negotiations with Green and Independent MPs to pass legislation.

Progress in computing

Published by peter on 2013-03-20 in Computer Science, Computer technology and Mathematics. 0 Comments

Computer science typically proceeds by first doing something, and then thinking carefully about it:    Engineering usually precedes theory.    Some examples:

  • The first programmable device in modern times was the Jacquard Loom, a textile loom that could weave different patterns depending on the instruction cards fed into it.   This machine dates from the first decade of the 19th century, but we did not have a formal, mathematical theory of programming until the 1960s.
  • Charles Babbage designed various machines to undertake automated calculations in the first half of the 19th century, but we did not have a mathematical theory of computation until Alan Turing’s film-projector model a century later.
  • We’ve had a fully-functioning, scalable, global network enabling multiple, asynchronous, parallel, sequential and interleaved interactions since Arpanet four decades ago, but we still lack a fully-developed mathematical theory of interaction.   In particular, Turing’s film projectors seem inadequate to model interactive computational processes, such as those where new inputs arrive or partial outputs are delivered before processing is complete, or those processes which are infinitely divisible and decentralizable, or nearly so.
  • The first mathematical theory of communications (due to Claude Shannon) dates only from the 1940s, and that theory explicitly ignores the meaning of messages.   In the half-century since, computer scientists have used speech act theory from the philosophy of language to develop semantic theories of interactive communication.  Arguably, however, we still lack a good formal, semantically-rich account of dialogs and utterances  about actions.  Yet, smoke signals were used for communications in ancient China, in ancient Greece, and in medieval-era southern Africa.

An important consequence of this feature of the discipline is that theory and practice are strongly coupled and symbiotic.   We need practice to test and validate our theories, of course.   But our theories are not (in general) theories of something found in Nature, but theories of practice and of the objects and processes created by practice.  Favouring theory over practice risks creating a sterile, infeasible discipline out of touch with reality – a glass bead game such as string theory or pre-Crash mathematical economics.   Favouring practice over theory risks losing the benefits of intelligent thought and modeling about practice, and thus inhibiting our understanding about limits to practice.   Neither can exist very long or effectively without the other.

Combining actions

Published by peter on 2013-03-14 in Computer Science, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Logic and Planning. 0 Comments

How might two actions be combined?  Well, depending on the actions, we may be able to do one action and then the other, or we may be able do the other and then the one, or maybe not.  We call such a combination a sequence or concatenation of the two actions.  In some cases, we may be able to do the two actions in parallel, both at the same time.  We may have to start them simultaneously, or we may be able to start one before the other.  Or, we may have to ensure they finish together, or that they jointly meet some other intermediate synchronization targets.

In some cases, we may be able to interleave them, doing part of one action, then part of the second, then part of the first again, what management consultants in telecommunications call multiplexing.   For many human physical activities – such as learning to play the piano or learning to play golf – interleaving is how parallel activities are first learnt and complex motor skills acquired:  first play a few bars of music on the piano with only the left hand, then the same bars with only the right, and keep practicing the hands on their own, and only after the two hands are each practiced individually do we try playing the piano with the two hands together.

Computer science, which I view as the science of delegation, knows a great deal about how actions may be combined, how they may be distributed across multiple actors, and what the meanings and consequences of these different combinations are likely to be. It is useful to have an exhaustive list of the possibilities. Let us suppose we have two actions, represented by A and B respectively. Then we may be able to do the following compound actions:

  • Sequence:  The execution of A followed by the execution of B, denoted A ; B
  • Iterate: A executed n times, denoted A ^ n  (This is sequential execution of a single action.)
  • Parallelize: Both A and B are executed together, denoted A & B
  • Interleave:  Action A is partly executed, followed by part-execution of B, followed by continued part-execution of A, etc, denoted A || B
  • Choose:  Either A is executed or B is executed but not both, denoted A v B
  • Combinations of the above:  For example, with interleaving, only one action is ever being executed at one time.  But it may be that the part-executions of A and B can overlap, so we have a combination of Parallel and Interleaved compositions of A and B.

Depending on the nature of the domain and the nature of the actions, not all of these compound actions may necessarily  be possible.  For instance, if action B has some pre-conditions before it can be executed, then the prior execution of A has to successfully achieve these pre-conditions in order for the sequence A ; B to be feasible.

This stuff may seem very nitty-gritty, but anyone who’s ever asked a teenager to do some task they don’t wish to do, will know all the variations in which a required task can be done after, or alongside, or intermittently with, or be replaced instead by, some other task the teen would prefer to do.    Machines, it turns out, are much like recalcitrant and literal-minded teenagers when it comes to commanding them to do stuff.

Taking a view vs. maximizing expected utility

Published by peter on 2013-03-13 in Decision theory, Forecasting, Planning, Probability theory and Uncertainty. 0 Comments

The standard or classical model in decision theory is called Maximum Expected Utility (MEU) theory, which I have excoriated here and here (and which Cosma Shalizi satirized here).   Its flaws and weaknesses for real decision-making have been pointed out by critics since its inception, six decades ago.  Despite this, the theory is still taught in economics classes and MBA programs as a normative model of decision-making.
A key feature of MEU is the decision-maker is required to identify ALL possible action options, and ALL consequential states of these options.   He or she then reasons ACROSS these consequences by adding together the utilites of the consquential states, weighted by the likelihood that each state will occur.
However, financial and business planners do something completely contrary to this in everyday financial and business modeling.   In developing a financial model for a major business decision or for a new venture, the collection of possible actions is usually infinite and the space of possible consequential states even more so.  Making human sense of the possible actions and the resulting consequential states is usually a key reason for undertaking the financial modeling activity, and so cannot be an input to the modeling.  Because of the explosion in the number states and in their internal complexity, business planners cannot articulate all the actions and all the states, nor even usually a subset of these beyond a mere handful.
Therefore, planners typically choose to model just 3 or 4 states – usually called cases or scenarios – with each of these combining a complex mix of (a) assumed actions, (b) assumed stakeholder responses and (c) environmental events and parameters.  The assumptions and parameter values are instantiated for each case, the model run, and  the outputs of the 3 or 4 cases compared with one another.  The process is usually repeated with different (but close) assumptions and parameter values, to gain a sense of the sensitivity of the model outputs to those assumptions.
Often the scenarios will be labeled “Best Case”, “Worst Case”, “Base Case”, etc to identify the broad underlying  principles that are used to make the relevant assumptions in each case.   Actually adopting a financial model for (say) a new venture means assuming that one of these cases is close enough to current reality and its likely future development in the domain under study- ie, that one case is realistic.   People in the finance world call this adoption of one case “taking a view” on the future.
Taking a view involves assuming (at least pro tem) that one trajectory (or one class of trajectories) describes the evolution of the states of some system.  Such betting on the future is the complete opposite cognitive behaviour to reasoning over all the possible states before choosing an action, which the protagonists of the MEU model insist we all do.   Yet the MEU model continues to be taught as a normative model for decision-making to MBA students who will spend their post-graduation life doing business planning by taking a view.