Marco,

Sadly this posting reflects the sorry state of philosophy in the world. It goes back to errors by Plato and Kant and is echoed through the voices of most of professional philosophy and the wannabees. Note that those ‘professionals’ have never been held accountable to reality like those that drive trucks, build houses, weave cloth, grow food, design and build computers and write business software. All these people understand and control what’s necessary to get the job done.

Specifically, the term ‘Pure Knowledge’ suffers from the presumption of omniscience fallacy, i.e. if you don’t know everything you can’t claim to know anything. Don’t be fooled by this common trap. Whenever you hear the words ‘pure’ or ‘perfect’, a red flag should popup in your head. You’re most likely being set up with this trap.

Omniscience is a contradiction in terms. It’s the product of two factors: 1) an unrealistic desire to never be wrong again; and 2) taking a real value “knowledge” which is specific in amount, and prefixing it with ‘all’ which introduces the contradiction in terms. Adding ‘ALL’ to a specific measure makes it meaningless - it’s just been made into nonsense. It’s the same error as if you treated infinity as a real number rather than a relationship - meaning more than anything you care to specify.

The same principle applies to all variations of qualities typically attributed to god(s): omniscient, omnipotence and omnipresence. Each is an attempt to take a valuable measure of human capability: knowledge, power and presence and deny the need to do the specific measuring. It’s an escape from the responsibility to think. It’s an attempt to have some mythical supernatural character relieve us of our most basic human responsibility.

Scrum, like all real world discipline demand the opposite of us.

To repeat, when ever someone implies you can’t know anything for sure because you can’t know everything, or the corollary, that you can’t have ‘true’ knowledge because we are using our senses, which distort the information that is only accessible to us through the senses, your BS DETECTION should be flashing red!

Obviously we *do* understand and manipulate reality effectively, otherwise would not have all that differentiates us from cavemen. Don’t let philosophical crap deceive you - even if your teachers and the rest of you society encourage that.

Humans deserve better - Ayn Rand, the novelist and philosopher has rethought and brought sense to the foundations of philosophy.

For a sane alternative, read Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by Ayn Rand, 2nd edition. Be sure to read the appendices in the 2nd edition. For a simpler introduction see her “Philosophy, Who Needs it?”. For information on the web see http://www.aynrand.org another great resource that I recommend highly is the introductory article in the first issue of a new journal at http://www.TheObjectiveStandard.com.

Agile and Scrum work because we can learn and know. We do that through the healthy and effective way we really learn - and that’s as good as it gets.

Jay Conne

Welcome to the May 18th edition of the Carnival of Agilists - providing you with a commented digest on what’s been said in the agile blogsphere during the last two weeks…

Team are usually (”The Wisdom of Team: Creating the High-Performance Organization” by Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith):

- small
- have agreed on an approach to the work
- have complimentary skills
- have interrelated or interdependent interim goal
- committed to a common purpose/goal
- make commitment about tasks to each other

The last two points in particular make a great difference and it takes a lot of time and effort to build a real team. The members of a workgroup usually have similar skills and independent goals.
But of course workgroups can work in a collaborative way: they share information, help each other and can make decision together even if everyone has his own individual goals and interests.