The Excluded Middle: An Engineering Look at the World

Why the Excluded Middle?

The title comes from something I first heard from Lotfi Zadeh, an extraordinary engineering professor at UC Berkeley who is the creator of the field of fuzzy logic.  Lotfi, who has forgotten more math than most of engineers will ever know, was looking at complex problems that were not addressed by conventional means, where methods either took binary logic (yes or no, 1 or 0) or some sort of esoteric impractical method.  In creating fuzzy logic, he was trying to find a way to access “the excluded middle” between the pure yes and pure no, where practical solutions might actually exist.  Now, I am a veteran of what I call the “Fuzzy Logic Wars” where proponents of this methodology claimed all sorts of magical properties that would make Albus Dumbledore scream, “You’re freakin’ kidding me, right?”  This doesn’t mean that the concept doesn’t have validity.  Just that it was overplayed.

The excluded middle opens up whenever folks decide that ideology is more important than what works.

As an engineer by training, I have grown into being an engineer in mind and heart.  Engineers look for practical solutions to real problems, not perfect ideology.  When I see a lot of rantings about this and that, I see some sort of push for perfect ideology, that one statement can encompass the universe.  This is BS, pure and simple.  I have learned that very few practical systems in engineering are at an extreme. Instead, we engineers push for excellence but leave ourselves margins for the stuff we can’t control or predict, because we know there will always be some of that.  (For some of my technical writing on just that kind of stuff, you can go to my regular web page to see that I’m not just making this up for the blog. It’s how I do my day job and how I invent useful stuff.)

More to the point, it is easier to talk about things that are all  “yes” or all “no”.  This is why Nazis, galactic armies of clones or robots, and killer sharks or space aliens make for good cinema:  there is no nuance.  It’s pretty easy to pick sides.  In the movie,  Independence Day, when Bill Pullman’s President Thomas J. Whitmore tries to find a compromise with the alien invader, the alien responds that there will be no compromise. President Whitmore then asks, “What are we supposed to do?” to which the alien’s Laconic reply is, “Die.”  It’s no wonder that we want to cheer when President Whitmore says, “Nuke ’em!”  and from that point, it’s all  out.  No confusion, no nuance, no “What is their point of view?”  Sons of bitches must die.  Yeah!!!  The terrorists/thieves that are always causing Bruce Willis to run around in his undershirt in Die Hard N . Who cares.  Bruce gets to take them out.
Understanding the bell shaped curve is really, really useful at this point.  I’ll talk about specifics of this curve in another post, but there is a reason why this is part of the logo for this blog. Stuff is almost never all 0 or all 1 in real life, there is a lot of squishy middle, a lot of nuances.  There is always a bit of in the middle, but there are a lot of times when we are so far to one edge of the curve that we really know, for all intents and purposes.    Often, we don’t know going in. Sometimes we  do.  We need to be able to talk about the things in that excluded, squishy middle where there is nuance, where it’s not all 0 or 1, but there are pieces of the truth in both views and we have to sort out which view has more pieces of the truth.

The middle gets excluded because it is a lot harder to talk about, when we acknowledge some truth in a portion of  what each extreme position says.  That being said, we know that that’s where most of the action is.  That is where reasonable people talk and figure out what will work.  It’s got some history (what has been done in the past and what part of it worked and failed).  It’s got some science (what can we say definitively and what is still muddy, and how definitive is definitive).  It’s got some social studies (how do we want to live and treat each other).  It’s got some business (how do we make money so that we can live comfortably).  And none of it is perfect, and what was true 5 years ago might not be true
today, but most likely it is.

So, while many mathematicians look for the optimum, ideal, or perfect solution, (as do some engineers who fancy themselves mathematicians), engineers in the real world look for practical simple stuff that is hard to bust.  We live for “the excluded middle”, and that is where I believe a lot of life’s solutions exist.

Optimality sucks, but excellence rocks.  This is what I will talk about.