Political Heat (Chicago 1995)

Political Heat (Chicago 1995). New Yorker (via Jorn again – how does he find them ?) review of book by Malcolm Gladwell. A complete set of rationalisations of poor decisions leading to many deaths, and the “political” reality and “act-of-god” justifications used. Interesting blend of science / engineering calculations in sizing power supplies and air-con units, vs the “complexity” of weather forecasting vs the political aspects of decision making, together with the “random” chance outcomes of who does and doesn’t survive. Review based anecdotally around July 1995 Chicago heat-wave disaster, but drawing on references to many earlier, mainly natural / extreme weather related, disasters. Interesting angle on behaviour at extreme cases in complex systems being the true determinant of “good performance”, rather than long-term steady-state averages. I was beginning to wonder why disasters like Enron, 9/11 etc were becoming an emerging theme of this research – morbid fascination / ambulance chasing or a natural consequence of looking at complex behaviour ? In fact it is quiet literally “Catastrophe Theory” all the significant minutiae are hidden or suppressed until the chaotic outcome reaches some cusp, whereupon we have a catastrophe on our hands. Blindingly obvious again – “ambulance chasing” a euphemism from the “Many a true word” thread.
[And a further review from Salon, also via Jorn.]

The Story so Far

. Just posted a first draft (barest outline actually) thesis / essay / paper on the threads emerging from this effort. Accessible from my Work in Progress page too. The threads identified are (1) Values & Levels, (2) Rationalisation, (3) Emergence, (4) Many-a-true-word. Bookmarks to this draft should avoid my continuing need to repeat myself in the K-Blog itself everytime I find a relevant link. Encouraging that Heylighen’s draft paper on complexity and overload (below) should turn up so recently too. I wish I had the personal bandwidth to do justice to this research.

Buy, Lie and Sell High

Salon interview (via Jorn) with D. Quinn Mills author and professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, by Paul Roberts. Enron et al “evidence, not of the irrational exuberance of ordinary investors, but of a complete ethical collapse”. Also includes a reference to the McNealy (Fools Paradise for CEO’s) link blogged below, concerning complex IT systems products which don’t work.

Complexity and Info Overload

Complexity and Info Overload. Recent draft paper (in pdf) by Heylighen for The Information Society.
Covers – Ephemeralisation, Value judgements in identifying progress, Competitive selection and evolution, Friction, entropy and “send three and fourpence”, Several paradoxes in speed and efficiency of “miscommunication”, Chaos, and much more. (Two separate papers in fact – one on the symptoms, another on tackling the effects.)

You get what you pay for.

I’ve given up on the Tiscali take-over of my ukgateway.net domestic webspace, which is a pity ‘cos it went so smoothly at first. This site is now hosted on commercial space, ironically also hosted at Tiscali. If you haven’t noticed the status remark in the header above, please re-tune to www.psybertron.org. What was it Ev said, in “The end of the free” ?, “People will in fact pay for what they value”. Onward and upward.

Hippie-dom / Sixties / Revolution / Drug culture

Some strange thoughts on tie-up between anti-establishment / conspiracy theory views, the “freedom” of sixties popular culture, together with the “conspiracy of silence” Galbraith / DeLorean / Argyris / Emperors’s suit of clothes view of “rationalisation”, and Jorn’s choice of seeing and denial in the following quote from his “Thoughts on the sixties” ….. “Between 65 and 68, a huge transformation affected millions of people in the world, very deeply, allowing them to see problems that had been totally denied before.” The Kesey / Heller / Pirsig drivers cannot be independant of this. Jorn’s biographical music / culture / politics pages are an interesting starting point to follow-up some of this stuff. Strange that whilst I can find no explicit link between Jorn’s political / cultural viewpoints and his literature-based interest in “AI”, both aspects are independantly very strong in his published thoughts, whereas my thesis starts from the point that this link is in fact a key part of human knowledge. (See Jorn’s Biographical Page and follow the footnote musical and literary biography links via Richard Stone to Ken Kesey, Haight-Ashbury and the rest of the sixties drug-culture – Jorn is a couple of years ahead of me agewise, but there is a spooky parallel between his musical influences auto-biog and my own.)

Several philosophers, and writers of metaphysical bent, have made use of mind-altering drugs to see things as they “really are”. It seems clear that breaking with accepted norms “as rationalised” by the immediate society, however this is achieved, is part of the knowledge / enlightenment jigsaw puzzle. At some level this is almost trivial / obvious, but it seems a key mechanism to understand.

Site Still Down

Tiscali have still not succeeded in setting up new ftp account (!!!) since their server migration 5 or 6 weeks ago. This is a temporary publish arrangement, not sure if all updated pages will now link correctly, but here goes, better than a 6 week old Blog ! (I have alternative arrangements now in hand – watch this space.)