Friday, October 01, 2004

Seek not perfection...

One of the regular panelists at Loscon regularly makes the point that it doesn't whether or not our government is perfect. What's far more important is the error correction mechanisms in place.

The panelist programs computer games, and knows there's no such thing as a perfect system – at least not one with any complexity. Rather than trying to build a system with no flaws and no faults, you build one that can handle those flaws and faults in a graceful manner.

RatherGate has illustrated just how effective an error correction process can be, even when the underlying process demonstrates a grievous flaw.

Logic dictates that those of us who care about the integrity of the underlying process should examine what made the blogosphere such an effective error correction mechanism, and work to duplicate it elsewhere.

Of course, there are ever those who would light a single smoke bomb rather than curse the light.

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