I have now started reading Joseph Weizenbaum’s increasingly relevant book from 1976, ’Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation’.
I expected to like it but 23 pages in I can already say I love it. On page 23 he quotes Hannah Arendt about recent makers and executors of policy 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.”