Moving into the second week of being without a functioning laptop capable of my research and writing needs. Amazing how dependent you get on switching between sources, channels, tools and apps, that just can’t be done with a one-screen phone and two thumbs. Nothing lost content-wise hopefully – all in the cloud and backed-up – just the loss of working configurations.
Working today on an old slow Windows-10 machine, last configured (not for me) over 5 years ago, so not just slow performance-wise but every task requiring updates, installs and new log-ins and passwords and configurations and reboots and … aarrgghh!!
So this will probably be my only catch-up post – rambling across several topics – until I get repaired or replacement kit. So, in no particular order (will add some internal links):
- Less is More – Rules & Responsibilities
- R.I.P. Todd Snider
- Panarchy / Adaptive Cycle – Open Adaptive Systems
- Neil Hannon / Divine Comedy
- Miscellaneous inc Big History / Long Now
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Less is More
When dealing with the reality of human complexity, there is a fractal amount of detail at the working level where the diminishing returns on knowing more detail at finer granularity and the wisdom of knowing about which details matter, conversely also risks missing small but nevertheless significant details which might lead to actual chaos beyond the complexity. More wisdom, less detail. But the choice of which detail isn’t one-dimensional. As well as the four familiar dimensions of real space-time at the here-and-now working level, there are the choices of multiple levels and dimensions of abstraction.
The devil may be in the detail but the angels are in the abstractions, as ever.
I’ve been having these thoughts every day the assisted dying bill has been in the news, with both chambers of the house debating details of checks and balances for foreseeable exceptional cases. Obviously, the motivation to find more and more exceptions, let alone how to address them, depends on the general favourability or otherwise of the basic principle, and like many knotty issues it’s easy to be polarised for or against. Anyone against is incentivised to exaggerate the dogs breakfast in order to kill the bill. For me this bill would be two sentences. (1) Anyone facing low quality of remaining life, including their attorneys, should be entitled to ask for help ending that life. (2) The individual decision should be with the ethics committee of the relevant caring professionals.
Challenged, doubtful cases would generate case-law.
We can’t substitute actual trust for more detail.
Next.
The reason I was prompted to post anything – this rambling post – today, is thanks to this “Global Story” documentary broadcast on the BBC World Service last night.
It’s about Pearlman, the lobbyist who tried to sink the first CoP Climate deal, and the ongoing machinations of achieving consensus at the UN level thereafter. As my general rules of discourse say, there can be no real consensus without good faith – what-aboutery and sea-lioning (and pedantry) are always bad-faith – rational processes as cover for ideological or dubious motives.
And related via “Less is More”- Barry Schwarz IAI.tv talk shared by @AnitaLeirfall – Too much choice makes us less free | Barry Schwartz :
“A core value of Western liberal democracy is freedom, and we tend to assume that the more choice we have, the freer we are. But that’s a dangerous illusion.” #freedom #choice #philosophy
Also related @DocStokk on complex real-life being “more than” human rights and freedoms. (PayWalled at The Times). I said ‘Been at the core of my thesis for a couple of decades. Despite “woke”, freedoms as in human rights, have become too focussed at the “I/me/they” individual level, with “we” only at the tribal level instead of the collective humanity level.’
We have collective responsibilities as well as individual freedoms.
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RIP Todd Snider
I’ve never seen such quantity of outpourings of grief at the loss of Todd Snider. Still ten or more new ones daily, a week later on the social and music media channels I follow. As well as the memories of the many fellow-artists he’s worked with, he was the human kind of singer-songwriter you feel you know even if you never met him personally. I’ve mentioned here seeing and listening to him 3 or 4 times previously. As well as being under-60, the circumstances of his unexpected death were also particularly shocking – dying from pneumonia back home in Nashville a week or so after being refused medical treatment(!), and body-cam of being arrested(!), following an assault(*) on tour in Salt Lake City(!) – what the? (* Sounding maybe more like some self-inflicted “accident” – but the reality of the injury and ill-health are plain to see and hear.)
I’ve mentioned the value in the poetry of our singer-songwriters more generally many times before. Roy Harper, Graham Parker, Elvis Costello, Nick Cave and Shane MacGowan alongside Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen – anything with a folk-blues-rock backbone, and especially the Americana country-folk variant – Neil Young and John Prine, Tom Waites, Bruce Springsteen and Loudon Wainwright and the three guys we came across when we lived close to Nashville (2005-2009); Tommy Womack, Will Kimbrough and Todd Snider. Still have his “East Nashville Skyline” on CD in the car to this day.
We lost one of the good guys.
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Open Adaptive Systems Theory
Just a placeholder for this post from Jim Stewartson, where he presents a Figure-8 diagram that I see as mapping onto the generative / degenerate (r-K-Ω-α) cycles of “The Adaptive Cycle” after Daniel Christian Wahl and the “Panarchy” of Gunderson & Hollings, which themselves map on to the various cycles of life of Hinduism and Buddhism as well as the industrial / econo-technology cycles of Kondratiev and Kuhn etc. (For me all of this falls under “Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking“.)
BUT Stewartson presents it thus, with a chaos-theory “attractor”:
A LEMNISCATE (∞) is a mathematical figure-eight curve that represents a system cycling between states.
AN ATTRACTOR is a pattern toward which a complex system naturally settles, even as it moves through turbulence.
(Which obviously also kinda maps on to Dave Snowden’s Cynefin stuff?)
My view of these things is that they’re useful descriptively of how things typically happen, maybe even diagnostically useful of a situation you are investigating, but not themselves predicters or decision-makers of consequences of available actions, causal or emergent. (Hence why the Cynefin stuff is participatory rather than methodological or formulaic. Predictably Unpredictable?)
But if there really is an attractor … ?
More reading and thought needed.
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Neil Hannon and The Divine Comedy
I’ve not been doing music reviews for a while – simply adding notes to earlier review pages, and I can’t believe I didn’t mention Neil Hannon amongst the folk-blues-rock-based / Americana poets above. Obviously, because he’s more “chamber pop” but still a fine poet.
We saw him/them at York Barbican last month. Excellent.
Noticed just the other day that Sarah Ditum is also a long-term fan and had written a review in The Critic.
(A link there also to an earlier during-Covid gig at the London Barbican. Think we’ve seen them 2 or 3 times since then. If you don’t know his work, these two reviews give you a good sympathetic flavour.)
Seeing two other local bands in gigs, both at the KU in Stockton. Middle Management supporting The Benefits this weekend and The Dossers headlining next weekend. Mentioned both previously, but haven’t the bandwidth to do reviews justice.
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Miscellaneous
Long Now / Big History? – Interesting edition of BBC Radio4 “Free Thinking” with Matthew Sweet. Infuriating failure to mention existing Long Now or Big History initiatives in this session on how the history (and futures) of human activity need to be seen in ecological, geological and cosmological time. OUR worldview may inevitably be human-centred, so it does matter to humanity enormously, BUT the world itself isn’t. Sadly, that latter point has given rise to OOO (Object Oriented Ontology), a dreadful name for an important point – that any true ontology is about interactions between objects, and we as subjects are just one example object. But putting “Object” in the name has put the focus on these and LOST the focus on their interactions and the fact that these are dynamic. The real ontological “objects” are in fact “processes” and the things we call objects are emergent consequences. So close, but no cigar! #PartOfTheProblem
Why AI Won’t Kill US – by Francis Heylighen (an old Pirsigian source).
A conversation started with David Pierce (another Pirsigian). Started last year with him questioning / trying to understand my agenda-based on my “Zero to Pirsig” paper summarising my intellectual journey (over 20 years ago btw) and reconnecting a few days ago. Started with him retweeting this Poincaré quote “It is through logic that we prove, but through intuition that we discover” – and me responding “Although, generally we also have to accept what cannot be proven with logic (now or possibly ever) and proceed to act on the basis of the intuition.” Long story short – summarised in comments here – he shared his “Ethics of Mathematics” paper – which I don’t fully get yet, but which includes Pirsig quoting Poincaré “He didn’t verify the idea [that had just come to him], he said, he just went on with a conversation on the bus; but he felt a perfect certainty. Later he verified the result at his leisure.” to which I added my Pirsig quote – the “later at leisure” is key. As Pirsig also said “science is 20:20 hindsight” whereas 99% of here and now reality is something “more than science” – the current focus “exercising” my agenda. It’s that “Predictably Unpredictable?” again. Ask away David 🙂 (And feeling – “affect” – more fundamental than logic is Solms / McGilchrist. Logic is one useful response to feeling. Exactly the same conversation last night with Steve, and a new “old email” contact with Bob.)
Assembly Theory – A YouTube short shared by Lee Cronin who, with Sara Amari, has coined “Assembly Theory” – specifically a usefully predictable relationship between life and chemical structures. Capturing it here because whenever I hear it I want to ask how does it differ from “Constructor Theory” (after Deutsch & Marletto)? Clearer now – Assembly Theory is very specifically about chemistry, whereas Constructor Theory is a much more generic concept in physics.
The Lysenko Effect – The Politics of Science, by Nils Roll-Hansen, ideology before science AND ethics. New ref for me from @USSRtoEurope. Another one for a British Library visit methinks. “The corruption of Soviet biology resulted not just from Stalin’s direct intervention, but from a deeper “wishful-thinking syndrome” where scientific objectivity was compromised by ideological and economic pressures for immediate, tangible results. He challenges the simplistic view of Lysenko as a mere pseudoscientist backed by a tyrant.”
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