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Alan Perlis

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64: Often it is means that justify ends: Goals advance technique and technique survives even when goal structures crumble.

 
Alan Perlis

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No technique is possible when men are free. ... Technique requires predictability and, no less, exactness of prediction. It is necessary, then, that technique prevail over the human being. ... The individual must be fashioned by techniques ... in order to wipe out the blots his personal determination introduces into the perfect design of the organization.

 
Jacques Ellul
 

As your Bujutsu [Martial Technique] training approaches perfection you will be able to detect the suki [opening/weakness] [in your enemy's technique], even before he can, and as if to satisfy some deficiency in him, you can fill the suki with your technique.

 
Morihei Ueshiba
 

The manager treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness ... The therapist also treats ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern also is with technique, with effectiveness ... Neither manager nor therapist, in their roles as manager and therapist, do or are able to engage in moral debate. They ... purport to restrict themselves to the realms in which rational agreement in possible—that is, ... to the realm of fact, the realm of means, the realm of measurable effectiveness.

 
Alasdair MacIntyre
 

My technique is laughable at times. I have developed a style of my own, I suppose, which creeps around [...] I don't have to have too much technique for it. I've developed the parts of my technique that are useful to me. I'll never be a very fast guitar player. I don't really know what to say about my style. There's always a melodic intent in there.

 
David Gilmour
 

A principal characteristic of technique … is its refusal to tolerate moral judgments. It is absolutely independent of them and eliminates them from its domain. Technique never observes the distinction between moral and immoral use. It tends on the contrary, to create a completely independent technical morality.
Here, then, is one of the elements of weakness of this point of view. It does not perceive technique's rigorous autonomy with respect to morals; it does not see that the infusion of some more or less vague sentiment of human welfare cannot alter it. Not even the moral conversion of the technicians could make a difference. At best, they would cease to be good technicians. This attitude supposes further that technique evolves with some end in view, and that this end is human good. Technique is totally irrelevant to this notion and pursues no end, professed or unprofessed.

 
Jacques Ellul
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