Xanadu suffered from the same disease as the world building hobby of amateur writers.
In the absence of adversarial dynamics, anything you dream up seems possible. But reality is bound by predator-prey dynamics that sap the free energy from any high energy configuration. Good writers and good engineers understand that your design must settle into some low energy configuration, otherwise it won't be feasible or competitive.
"Worse-is-better", as the original author puts it, is an ambiguous position at best:
"You might think that by the year 2000 I would have settled what I think of worse is better - after over a decade of thinking and speaking about it, through periods of clarity and periods of muck, and through periods of multi-mindedness on the issues. But, at OOPSLA 2000, I was scheduled to be on a panel entitled "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" And in preparation for this panel, the organizer, Martine Devos, asked me to write a position paper, which I did, called "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" In this short paper, I came out against worse is better. But a month or so later, I wrote a second one, called "Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!" which was in favor of it. I still can’t decide."
Undecidability at play I guess. We can't precompute every possible future and know which algoriths terminate. We must search, and a local minimum might be in fact high energy after all. Better and worse are judgement calls, and "the right thing" depends on your choice of definitions.
Congruence with reality always wins and reality appears to be made of distributed intelligence, despite the hard problem of the mind precluding a final answer.
In the absence of adversarial dynamics, anything you dream up seems possible. But reality is bound by predator-prey dynamics that sap the free energy from any high energy configuration. Good writers and good engineers understand that your design must settle into some low energy configuration, otherwise it won't be feasible or competitive.
"Worse-is-better", as the original author puts it, is an ambiguous position at best:
"You might think that by the year 2000 I would have settled what I think of worse is better - after over a decade of thinking and speaking about it, through periods of clarity and periods of muck, and through periods of multi-mindedness on the issues. But, at OOPSLA 2000, I was scheduled to be on a panel entitled "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" And in preparation for this panel, the organizer, Martine Devos, asked me to write a position paper, which I did, called "Back to the Future: Is Worse (Still) Better?" In this short paper, I came out against worse is better. But a month or so later, I wrote a second one, called "Back to the Future: Worse (Still) is Better!" which was in favor of it. I still can’t decide."
https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
Undecidability at play I guess. We can't precompute every possible future and know which algoriths terminate. We must search, and a local minimum might be in fact high energy after all. Better and worse are judgement calls, and "the right thing" depends on your choice of definitions.
Congruence with reality always wins and reality appears to be made of distributed intelligence, despite the hard problem of the mind precluding a final answer.