Tavia mused thusly:

But what about the well-above-average mind (assuming for the sake of discussion that Avon is one such)? Certainly in my field, the ability to understand complex systems in their totality is rather useful.

I don't think people *do* understand them in their totality; that's why I mentioned subsystems. Consider, as a neutral example, a nearby town or city. You[*] might know it like the back of your hand, but when you think of it, you think of individual parts, and how to get from one to another. You don't think of the whole lot at once, in detail. And a town planner, who reroutes roads around buildings to give better traffic flow, can screw things up in exactly the same way as a programmer, when, say, that tiny through-road gets flooded.

[*} Generic "You" above. :-)

Somehow I don't see Avon as the Nth Century equivalent of a database programmer.

Me neither. I certainly see him as someone who has both an uncommon skill, and an uncommon mental approach. I don't find it feasible that he does some of the things presented in the programme, though - going through Zen, learning about how the whole of the Liberator works, understanding Dorien's teleport, etc. Priming Orac to blow if compromised, on the other hand, is much simpler. A certain set of conditions occurring in a specific subsystem would be enough. It's the equivalent of modern firewalls: this behaviour's ok, that's not.

steve