Your essay on culling reminded me of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
He was the nerdiest nerd in America.
He was famous for his keen ability to quantify data and interpret the material studied
In any event, he was perhaps the most important architect of our failure in Vietnam
He believed that if we measured everything we could adjudge whether we were succeeding.
He had his minions turn out thousands of pages of data per week providing metrics on everything: Number of enemy grenades fired, bomb tonnage dropped, the number of enemy troops captured who were Buddhist, who were communist etc.
Most of all, he prized the kill count, or the number of enemy soldiers killed per week, per month etc.
He believed that a high kill count meant we were winning.
This was one of his biggest mistakes. His subordinates knew that he would be happy with a big kill count, and they therefore inflated the kill count by killing innocent civilians (And some people wonder why so many of us were so radical. There is a very high positive correlation between how much one knew and how much one hated American policies in Indochina. Its no accident that Ivy League students were the most fantastically, furiously radical --- Sorry for being an intellectual snot once again. )
Hegal said that every thesis has within it the seeds of its antithesis.
Robert McNamara's almost fetishistic adoration of metrics provoked its antithesis: The hippies, the yippies, the wild-eyed, fierce adoration of free spirited, unquantifiable life.
Your essay on culling reminded me of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.
He was the nerdiest nerd in America.
He was famous for his keen ability to quantify data and interpret the material studied
In any event, he was perhaps the most important architect of our failure in Vietnam
He believed that if we measured everything we could adjudge whether we were succeeding.
He had his minions turn out thousands of pages of data per week providing metrics on everything: Number of enemy grenades fired, bomb tonnage dropped, the number of enemy troops captured who were Buddhist, who were communist etc.
Most of all, he prized the kill count, or the number of enemy soldiers killed per week, per month etc.
He believed that a high kill count meant we were winning.
This was one of his biggest mistakes. His subordinates knew that he would be happy with a big kill count, and they therefore inflated the kill count by killing innocent civilians (And some people wonder why so many of us were so radical. There is a very high positive correlation between how much one knew and how much one hated American policies in Indochina. Its no accident that Ivy League students were the most fantastically, furiously radical --- Sorry for being an intellectual snot once again. )
Hegal said that every thesis has within it the seeds of its antithesis.
Robert McNamara's almost fetishistic adoration of metrics provoked its antithesis: The hippies, the yippies, the wild-eyed, fierce adoration of free spirited, unquantifiable life.