Reply to Gam Vaesiya

By Trishantha Nanayakkara

(January 16, London, Sri Lanka Guardian) I wish to leave a brief note in response to the comment made by Gam Vaesiya, Ontario, Canada, on 14th January 2010, to my original article "Presidential election 2010, and the next armed uprising in Sri Lanka".

First I thank him for taking time to read and comment. As he correctly noted, this topic is a complicated one deserving the application of complicated chaotic models of many dimensions.

However, being engineers we prefer to deal with complicated chaotic systems with the simplest model we can think of. Maybe that is one difference between how an engineer and a political scientist looks at social dynamics. Moreover, I did not want to give a theoretical explanation to the armed uprisings in Sri Lanka. Rather, it is how I see why Sri Lanka has had three armed uprisings after independence, as a humble citizen.

Perhaps, this is why whole of Chinese cabinet is made up of engineers. They do things using simple models while others waste time looking for the most complicated model that exactly explains the reality. Reality itself is its best model in that sense.

Related links:

The fallacious logic of the article: "Presidential election 2010, and the next armed uprising in Sri Lanka"

Presidential election 2010, and the next armed uprising in Sri Lanka