I have now started reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s incresingly relevant book from 1976, ’Computer Power and Human Reason: From Jugdment to Calculation’.

I expected to like it but 23 pages in I can already say I love it. On page 23 he quotes Hanna Arendt about recent makers and executors of policty in the Pentagon:

”They were not just intelligent, but prided themselves on being ’rational’… They were eager to find formulas, preferably expressed in a pseudo-mathematical language, that would unify the most disparate phenomena with which reality presented them; that is, they were eager to discover laws by which to explain and predict political and historical facts as though they were as necessary, and thus as reliable, as the physicists once believed natural phenomena to be… [They] did not judge; they calculated… an utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality [became] the leitmotif of the decision making.”