More Nature v Nurture of Psychology – Shankar Vedantam writing in the Washington Post [via NIBBS] on the subject of evolutionary psychology – well sex actually, it sells newspapers apparently.
Author: Psybertron
Tom Peters is still at it
Tom Peters is still at it – The latest buzz on web innovation from Tom Peters [via Seb] [via Russell Beattie] [via Dave Weinberger].
Psychological Feedback Over The Web ?
Psychological Feedback Over The Web ? Interesting piece from Spike Hall’s blog, also picked-up by Oliver Wrede. I posted comments on both. Illustrates how important the psychological feedback aspects of knowledge communication are. Metaphorically, if you can’t see into the eyes of the people you’re interacting with, how do you detect understanding, uncertainty, emotion, intent etc. Without time to build-up a long relationship of understanding, what is the web equivalent of getting into someones head ? (Is there any chance for FOAF – Friend of a Friend – I blogged earlier that it seemed to include psychometric profiling stuff !)
Coincidentally, here’s a post from Jorn (with a link to his comp.ai SIMS proposal) about simulating the “neurotic” component of human interaction.
Monstrous Knowledge Management
Monstrous Knowledge Management – This article from Ton Zijlstra’s Interdependent Thoughts blog, similar to the post I made about the KM Bandwagon devaluing core intent of KM very rapidly, which prompted comment from Dave Pollard.
Also interestingly, Ton’s next post is on the drying-up of blog-like networks. I posted on reduced blogging rates here too, but think the main point has also been made many times. It doesn’t matter which medium is used for an interactive community of contacts, there is a limit to how many (150 max some say) organised only so many ways (5 to 10 categories say) in which any one human brain can manage and participate. The media will come and go – boards, blogs, wikis, whatever, the underlying modes of human interaction do not actually change. I think Dave Weinberger’s “Small Pieces, Loosely Joined” does however have some lessons about how the sheer connectivity of web-based technologies (whichever mode is in fashion) does bring some new challenges, The one drawback I keep raising is the negative effect of speed on development of ideas. [here] [here] [here].
As Ton puts it “how to allow for digestion and consolidation between spurts of discovery” – without the fashionable mode connecting the current group of peers moving on to the next fashion too soon. Staying power required.
East Meets West #2
As you know, I’ve just started reading Northrop [Previous] [ Previous] and already hooked because he is straight into the pragmatic effects of the Catch-22 of the recursive argument about how absolute can a metaphysics be that includes it’s own definition. [Quote] the basic paradox of our time [is that] “sound” theory tends to destroy the state of affairs it aims to achieve [Unquote] (His scare quotes, not mine). As good a statement of the Catch-22 as any I’ve heard.
Some interesting and directly Pirsig related points too …
Chapter 7 is all about culture and Greek science. The main references are McKeon, Hutchins and Adler, right from the opening para. (I skipped to Ch7 from Ch1 after stumbling across the references at the end !). Not only is it about these people, it’s about Hutchins switch from “legal realism” (dialectic with value based inputs) as Dean of Yale Law School to “what is needed is more adequate scientific grounded [Aristoletian] philosophy” as Dean of Chicago University. In fact he was looking for an objective “idea of the good”. A metaphyisics of quality perhaps ?
Interesting that a Pirsig [see timeline] who reads, and is thoroughly influenced by Northrop aged 20, on a troopship in 1948, is shocked (nay, incensed) to find out about McKeon and “the Hutchins mob” [after Rorty] at Chicago University, aged 33 during the summer of 1961, after he has been accepted there and interviewed by McKeon.
Urizen
No evidence Urizen has any common link with Zen ? Sparked off to look at Blake’s Urizen by the material on the home page of Brian Bauld, who hosts a copy of Geore Steiners “Uneasy Rider” New Yorker review of ZMM, amongst a lot of other gems.
The Wikipedia entry on Urizen says [Quote] In the complex mythology of William Blake, Urizen was the embodiment of reason and law. He is usually depicted as a bearded old man; he sometimes bears architect’s tools, to create and constrain the universe; or nets, with which he ensnares people in webs of law and conventional culture. [Unquote]
Webs ensnaring people with conventional culture – a recurring metaphor even then ?
East Meets West
Just received “The Meeting of East and West” by F.S.C. Northrop (MacMillan, 1946, 1st ed, 2nd impression) (just said that) and what a book. This is the volume that so influenced Pirsig on his troopship return from Korea in 1948. The book that turned a lateral drifter into pursuer of something important (ZMM25 p124). Anyway, I read the intro and first chapter before getting out of bed this morning.
Given that I got on this knowledge modelling lark from an ISO Information Standards angle, it’s spooky to find the entire volume prefaced with the quote from Chinese philosopher Mo-Tih “Where standards differ there will be opposition. But how can the standards in the world be unified?”
Given my obsession with the Catch-22 of my manifesto, it is even spookier for me to find the opening sentence is “Ours is a paradoxical world.” In fact I’ve already counted the word paradox 4 times in the first 6 pages. As I’ve been discussing with Matt Kundert recently, this paradox would be joke, non-existent meta-physically, if we were not so culturally hidebound by the linguistic metaphors of apparently rational decision making processes. As Northrop says, “The paradox appears in a purely verbal, but none-the-less important, form ….”
Of course this is a book written during and published immediately after WWII, so questions of world harmony were topical. Topical !? I keep saying nothing new under the sun – it was ever thus – and Northrop talks of “ever present” issues.
A very promising start.
Clicks Meets Used Bricks
Just received “The Meeting of East and West” by F.S.C. Northrop (MacMillan, 1946, 1st ed, 2nd impression) from MGBooks used bookstore @ URL:// 1013 Brice Road, Rockville, Maryland, 🙂 30 hours after confirming a standard flat-rate US-snail-mail order through Amazon’s used book service. I’m very impressed – with Marcy George, Amazon, the US Postal Service and whatever the “Royal Mail” local-loop is called these days.
OK, so speed is good too – see previous post – another of life’s little “paradoxes”.