One of my long-standing and counter-intuitive rules of engagement in internet-enabled interactive-media – comments, forums, social media generally – is that moderation isn’t about “censorship” it’s about slowing down dangerous, counter-productive, explosive, degenerate activity. Moderation as in nuclear reactor moderator rods, slowing down the particle flux between the reactive “fuel”, preventing runaway chain-reaction “going critical”.
Counter-intuitive to the perceived immediate democratisation of the web; where we/anyone is enabled and allowed to communicate anything at the flick of a thumb. It’s the speed and ubiquity that is killing us – little room for listening & thinking before reacting in the memetic race for attention. Dysmemics ensures catchy crap beats nuanced quality.
Enlightened (human) moderators of previous generation forums, bulletin-boards and email-exploders typically made provision for free-unlimited and posts-per-day-limited channels.
I’ve been using the unlikely named “Discord” forum tool for some time in various communities (see below). It’s very flexible and powerful – some people run entire projects and programmes on it – and, obviously dependent on the actual humans and human relationships involved, it provides a great experience. I say unlikely named, and indeed the language and graphics in the user interfaces is kinda “down with the kids” too, originally created and used by gamers and hackers, so first impressions mitigate against it being used for serious grown-up projects, but the way it works is a joy to behold. Sadly of course, being very flexible and powerful, nefarious people also run their nefarious projects on it.
But that’s humans for you. The tool is functionally well designed.
So well designed, I notice it has a “Slow Mode” feature built-in, which can be switched-on if conversational chain-reactions risk going critical – more heat & noise than light & enlightenment. Be interesting to see if we get a case where we need it, but good to know it’s there.
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Discord?
If you don’t know Discord – this is me and my personal Discord DM channel, and we can take it from there with joining mutual group “servers”? If you’re already on Discord, you’ll already know how to find me 🙂 And, if you’re really interested, the exemplary server that uses every project management feature and every group forum bell & whistle is the “Active Inference Institute” run by Daniel Friedman.
For some reason, not quite sure why, I’ve binge-re-watched the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad over about a month.
A long concentrated dose of pure evil and depraved bloody violence has it’s own cathartic draining effect, but it remains a marvellously constructed morality-play drama, characters and plot lines. It was good to get all the vividly remembered scenes stitched back together in some semblance of order. Hank remains the only “hero” here, he dies for Walt’s sins. The structure with the out-of-timeline preview scenes at the front of each episode makes a lot more sense second time around – whole theses to be – have been – written about that.
However, since I first saw BB I have, of course, watched the whole of “Better Call Saul” and “El Camino” – the spin-offs based around Saul Goodman and Jesse Pinkman, the two (males) who survived BB with their lives – so lots of the temporally confused scenes are in fact shared across the whole collection.
Which sadly means I’ll probably have to re-watch BCS again too! Rats!
Saul jokingly mentions “Cinnabon” during the final episode of BB – a remark whose significance cannot even be noticed first time through. The significance to me is it takes me back to “the holiday season” – half a year, September to January in the southern US – and the sickly pervasive smell of cinnamon and sweet vanilla with everything. Just typing the words is enough. And the reverse is true. The slightest whiff of cinnamon and the whole series comes flooding back – debilitating! Which probably answers my first question – why was I rewatching it? A subconscious olfactory trigger no doubt. Hurdle overcome.
Anyway, I only intended to post one thing in this writing hiatus, the music, the song from the final scene. Already well documented of course, but I had to Google to re-find that it was a 1971 song by Badfinger. “My Baby Blue” sounding like it was written for the 2008 script.
[I should say that clip is edited, maybe to avoid the spoiler that he discovers the source of his own blood, and the reason he collapses and dies, hoist by his own petard during the original scene. Will have to find a more representative clip …
Best comment @Carelock on YouTube:
I like to think Vince Gilligan was riding in an RV one day and Baby Blue by Badfinger came on and he just built a show around it…
Highly creative either way?
So I should add, it was the creative process that really had me intrigued – I am trying to write after all. Huge amounts of the whole five series worth of story-line must have been conceived in some detail before any of the asynchronous preview scenes could have been created and included in earlier episodes?]
Just an excuse to share the link to “Bifurcated Rivets” (Lindsay Marshall’s blog at Newcastle Uni). What “Web Logging” used to be about, sharing interesting links to rabbit holes in the WWW, with minimal commentary – (as originally conceived by Jorn Barger’s RobotWisdom).
I am actually writing – essentially evolving my PhD proposal into the thesis it was intended to become, whether I’m actually doing it as a formal PhD or not. The technical “half” of my literary project.
I am very conscious – in that PhD proposal – that my take on the application of Systems Thinking is pretty much “Life, the Universe and Everything” – from metaphysics to the physical science of the cosmos via the scale of our human experience – beyond what a casual reader might attribute to those two words. I flipped to using Systems Thinking as the umbrella term for my research topic having spent most of the last 25 years of Psybertron using some variation of Cybernetics / Psybernetics, but I’ve not changed what I intend as the topic. My professional work experience space was always distinct from my research space, though real life experiences from the former were driving my interest in the latter. And increasingly, the last two decades of the day job were concerned with systemic ontologies for business operations of industrial and other organisations, increasingly informed by my earlier business Masters. Distinct but clearly convergent.
As with Systems Thinking, Cybernetics is no less ambiguous to the casual reader. Knowing that Wiener intended Cybernetics to mean individual and collective human decision-making in our cosmic ecosystem – decision-theory – doesn’t change the fact that people hear mechanistic command, feedback and control when they see the word Cybernetics or encounter it’s derivative in electronic, algorithmic Cyberspace.
Similarly in my professional sphere, I was happy to label the whole as Systems Engineering of one form or another. Engineering is simply humans using ingenuity physical or mental, hard or soft, to make better stuff happen – whether it’s bashing metal, masonry and wires into shape or whether it’s about herding cats (ie organising & managing human activities). How do we decide what’s the best thing(s) to do to make that better stuff happen? The System(s) in question being literally anything, considered in terms of functional relations between parts and wholes.
The switch of language from Systems Engineering to Systems Thinking actually happened in that professional sphere. I’ve mentioned previously that the three smartest ex-colleagues I’d ever worked with were in (separate) INCOSE Systems Engineering (nuclear) contexts and it was they that were flipping the terminology from Engineering to Thinking for me. It was perfectly natural for me to replace all of Cybernetics / Psybernetics / OR / Systems-Engineering with Systems Thinking. [Deflationary Compression as shorthand.]
So, being conscious of the ambiguity in my terminology, a conventional starting point for pulling the writing together was some definitions to distinguish between my uses of terms. I say conventional because other parts of my thesis warn against rules and definitions being anything more definitive than #goodfences / #guardrails or guidance for the wise. Nevertheless I’ve been consulting standard definitions, if only to raise that warning about how I’m using them.
I’ve previously mentioned recent Systems Thinking publications by Mike Jackson and by Ramage & Shipp. Neither really gave me a working definition more satisfactory than my own. Both are essentially – very good but quite different – summaries of the co-evolution of the many related topics and methodologies. In conclusion there being many possible ideas (with different names) to choose from contingently, in context, using pragmatism beyond any formulaic methodology. And as I’ve noted others concerned with the same set of management / governance / organisational issues – Dave Snowden and Jean Boulton (say) – shun the word System almost entirely, preferring to talk about complexity, even if from quite different perspectives. And, as Janet Singer pointed out if we needed reminding, that language & choice of words can never unambiguously pin down our topic(s) anyway. It’s why I start with #GoodFences. Any definition, any distinction between two words or things, is a matter of pragmatic convention, to be respected but not taken as fixed in any fundamentally definitive way – whether declared in advance or recorded in hindsight in dictionaries. What really matters about them are the properties we use to make such distinctions and relationships – which is ultimately circular anyway as we shift our attention from definitions of things, to definitions of their chosen properties. But again, no less useful, pragmatically. Circularity is actually a bonus, rather than a problem. Strange Loops, one level removed from our objects of interest, give us evolution.
[The other two, referenced previously, were Viktor Agroskin and Anatoly Levenchuck: Viktor largely for his linguistic mental ability in sharing and helping us understand complex ideas being translated in real-time in his head in multi-lingual collaborative conversations; Anatoly for his introducing me to Systems Engineering as a topic originally and latterly to his version of my own #GoodFences warning – that definitions in the wrong place are the coffin of creative evolution. “Hold your definition” I’d already absorbed from Dennett much earlier in a purely philosophical context, and frankly after 30 years of industrial systems engineering this was the ultimate confluence between the abstract philosophical and real-world practical domains.]
Interestingly TABGST doesn’t per se define systems thinking, and indeed Ch1 “Framing and Taming Complexity” starts with “Systems Thinking as a mindset and skillset that can help us engage and manage complexity” and thereafter the content of Ch1 falls under “Complexity and Systems Thinking”. In my own working definition “Systems Thinking is a response to Complexity” so no argument there. The key here is going to be the separate words, Systems and Thinking as well as their conjunction. Complexity is simply the abstract noun form of the adjective “complex” – interestingly also not defined in TABGST.
Thinking is mental, so for me the skillsets are mental skillsets and mindsets – world-views, ways of thinking and viewing or conceptually modelling the world mentally. Hence for me then, ST is such a worldview that considers (views / models) the complex world in terms of systems. Nothing more, and nothing less either.
Interestingly TABGST Ch1 proceeds with “concerns” that “illustrate” a whole collection of “domains, across life and society” rather than any attempt at formal scope definition. Everything but the Universe. Science of the physical universe is the only domain excluded, or rather simply not listed, not considered. That’s a choice to focus on engineered systems of organisation and governance of human activities in the wider world. The charitable comment is that such fundamental physical systems are taken for granted as underlying the whole here. In my definition the scope also includes systems comprising one proton and one electron or one brain and trillions of neurons, or one galaxy and trillions of stars. Science already – taking a systemic view – treats these as systems anyway, so I’ve no reason to exclude them. The world ecosystem involves the natural as well as the “built” (human engineered) environment, both mentally and physically and the agent relationship between.
Which simply leaves the word system itself – what do we mean by considering the world in terms of systems. TABGST uses the ISO15288 definition for the systems of the engineered environment: “combination of interacting elements organised to achieve one or more stated purposes”
Interacting elements is fine – shorthand for my seeing the world in terms of “functional related whole and part things / elements“. No problem here.
“Organised to achieve” and “stated purposes” is pretty much limited to the engineered environment of intentional human (individual and social) activity. But that’s just that we have different scopes in mind. For me organisation and purpose are more things that arise / evolve within such a systems view of the complex whole, so no need to limit the view to human agency, which itself needs systemic grounds for explanation.
Systems Thinking is – considering the world in terms of systems, where Systems are – anything considered in terms of functional relationships between elements. Whilst applicable to literally anything it is the pragmatically recommended approach when dealing with complex and/or chaotic situations.
Anyway, we could continue down the definitional rabbit hole, and ask ourselves what we mean by words and stuff, things and elements, wholes and parts, functions and relations, organisation and purpose, etc but as already noted, it’s a fools errand, there is no end to definition beyond your pragmatic choice of ontology.
Which is why my project is more about metaphysical underpinnings of such ontological choice(s). And it’s why my choice is to remain at least one level conceptually removed from specific / individual real-world application. An abstraction as a framework or meta-model / ecosystem about Life, the Universe and Everything, against which models can be judged and tested, but not the model of it. It does mean my ontology also includes meaning and knowledge (epistemology of what can be known as well as what is). As ever I’m not creating anything original. I’m simply recommending pragmatic choices – at this more abstract philosophical level. One of those recommendations is that we don’t be precious about particular choices of words that inevitably come with baggage of previous limited successes of imperfect or misguided uses. We know we can do better.
Although people reject being pigeonholed in camps – it is interesting to note those people that prefer to talk about systems and those that prefer to talk about complexity and those who, like myself (and Rob, Viktor and Anatoly) simply choose either to talk about the other. Systems thinking is how to deal with the complexities of reality. (Sure there are ordered, closed systems that are neither chaotic nor complex and are simply more or less complicated, but they’re much less interesting , much less in need of abstract theory and already readily addressed by formal methods.)
Anyway, I think I have my starting definitions for systems and systems thinking.
(As well as my standing caveat that all definitions, like rules, are for guidance of the wise and the obedience of fools. Wisdom is my real “beyond science” topic.)
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Coda
So, my real target is not so much that choice between systems and complexity – but the choice to call the whole “science” – to not recognise that there is more than science in our complex world. Complexity vs complexity-science for example. Distinctions between words chosen are always #GoodFences.
An aside here, but I was also tempted to watch this Dave Snowden / Nora Bateson conversation, partly because of my penance towards having maybe failed to sufficiently consider the various Bateson contributions, and partly because Dave has been part of the more than sciencedialogue.
Right from the outset, as is his style, Dave crashes both fences – systems vs complexity and science vs more than science.
“Complexity is a science” and “Systems are not a subset of complexity”
Sure, systems are not a subset of complexity, that would be a category error, the relationship is more subtle. And, there is a science of complexity, but the complex stuff arising – complexity itself – isn’t all science, even if the arising can be explained scientifically (it can) the nature, content and behaviour of the stuff arisen can’t. [See also Dave’s 2003 science quote of Pirsig – qualified by tradition and method.] Whole-part relations and Class / Set / Sub-set-membership are of course the taxonomic foundations of ontology(ies). I’m tempted to note here not just my long-standing “Tabletop” example from Doug Hofstadter, but also a very recent reference in another place to “Grandma’s Big Box of Buttons” by Dr. JT Kostman. Taxonomy-based ontology is an entirely naturally-learned creative human process, necessary to deal with our complex world – more deflationary compression.
We mostly corresponded by email over the years, sharing links etc, but there are several references in the Psybertron blog too. We share a lot of common sources and general agreement on the subject matter but we’ve not corresponded for a few years, partly (a) because one mis-perceived difference between us that he was nevertheless biased towards good-old-fashioned rationality and critical thinking (patently not true) and partly (b) because my own focus shifted to “systems thinking as a response to complexity” in constructing my philosophical framework(s) above (and partly the distraction of Pirsig’s #ZMM50th).
Reformation
For both of us however, “Wisdom” is consolidated as the word of choice – short-hand for our subject matter – the missing ingredient for a world better than the predicament we currently find ourselves in. Most recently Lee has called his project to achieve this a new global “Reformation” to educate ourselves (learning beats teaching, etc.)
It’s a “two-page” summary with updated links to the key lessons from the Wikiversity resource he has created. A recommended read, it’s excellent, notwithstanding the comments I make below, almost all of which are about alignment with my own work, some of which I’d captured in an initial response on LinkedIn:
Wisdom
Despite the fact that “critical thinking” is still prominent in the introduction and the graphic headline text, his introduction concludes with “more wisdom” and “greater integrity”, and the first bullet of the first preparatory section mentions wisdom twice – proposing “living wisely” and adopting “wise practices”.
No doubt that wisdom is front and centre.
Integrity
Significant that integrity makes the summary. Generally most would interpret this as something like “consistently incorruptible honesty” in the words and actions of people, but actually integrity is even more fundamental than that from the systems integration perspective.
Honesty and good faith – virtue – are a given, but consistency is over-rated (see Brunsson on the positive value of “hypocrisy”). From a “systems thinking” view of everything – as a complex web of functional interactions – it cannot all be equally true and consistent all of the time, they’re always in an state of flux – whether at glacial / evolutionary pace, or the pace of day-to-day human activity and everything in between. So, the web of stuff is generally always full of inconsistencies. The real need is the joined-up “holistic” systems thinking – seeing functionally integrated wholes in systems terms of their parts and ecosystems – so that current gaps and inconsistencies are visible, intelligible, manageable and improvable. Managed inconsistency beats artificially – dishonestly – constrained consistency.
Every living being, every system—natural or human-made—exists in a vast network of relationships and flows. The Earth is not a collection of isolated entities but a deeply intertwined system where changes in one area inevitably ripple through many others. Understanding these interconnections is essential for sustaining life and ensuring the well-being of future generations.
That … using the word “system” twice … is all I mean by “systems thinking” 🙂
Information & Belief
More common ground for us. Information is fundamental to my philosophical framework, metaphysical even. And reformation includes concern for journalism, media & social media standards – prominently recurring here too. True belief is of course fundamental to my epistemological “knowledge” agenda – what does it mean to (believe you) know anything? Something which involves systems of belief & value as well as explicit concepts of evidence, logic and proof. (Even “good religion”(*) – or sacred naturalism in my terms.)
Governance
Governance has been explicit to my Cybernetic focus on systems – aka Psybernetic to emphasise the original human intentional aspect of Wiener’s term – well beyond feedback, command & control allusions. Cybernetics literally means governance. Not surprisingly governance conceptually has constantly circled round for me to government practically and politically – organisationally, locally, nationally and supra-nationally.
Lee’s two-page summary doesn’t currently mention democracy, but for the same reason I do mention it. Not only is it clearly “broken” in the 21st C and fixing it a fundamental part of any reformation project – for both of us. The estates, institutions and processes of democracy may be broken and under attack from many misinformed, misguided directions. As Churchill said – it’s the worst form of government apart from all the others – so there isn’t much alternative to working out the best way to improve and defend it.
My own (UK) emphasis has been institutional arrangements that maintain democracy between elections, so that elections are less focal, campaigns a less dominant & less frequent part of the whole, and that we have “properly proportional” electoral systems that better avoid the tyrannies of both majorities and minorities. Also, extending the bicameral basics to “differently appointed” second houses & heads of state as well as to additional local / topical “people’s” assemblies or standing forums.
Lee elsewhere has interest in similar aspects of other (US) electoral system reforms:
I think the only difference between us is, as I noted earlier, that I’m happy to continue at the conceptual level – the frameworks and characteristics that make for good systems & models of knowledge & governance – whereas Lee is focussed on education of the specific options & choices of processes & models available. I think Lee’s choices fit my frameworks, we appear complementary.
Coda
The remaining “problem” is a fact for all human endeavours and that is the imperfection of language; that communication is a “game” in the true sense. We all choose to emphasise different preferred words, their usage and their intended interpretations, even where our intentions remain closely aligned. Although the word Wisdom – partly because it’s so ill-defined – has found traction in most dialogues, choices of language around (say) systems and complexity remain problematic – quite strongly held critical differences killing creative dialogue.
Practice intentional evolution. We can do this!
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(*) Zen Coda
When it comes to value & belief systems Lee mentions the concept of good religion but doesn’t mention any specific philosophical or theological world-views in his two-page “Reformation” summary. I noted above that the closest thing to religion (secular, non-ideological-dogmatic religion) I would ascribe to myself is Sacred Naturalism (aka Natural Theology) (even Humanism is this kind of religion although most humanists would rail against the suggestion.) However, of course, my own systems-thinking metaphysical philosophy has evolved from Taoist / Zen Buddhist thinking triggered by Nobel-prize-winning physicist Brian Josephson triggering my reading Robert Pirsig’s ZMM. And the rest is history from my perspective.
Stockton Callinghas become a regular annual multi-venue music festival, with a focus on providing support for North East bands, offered many short set opportunities. Saturday this Easter weekend is the 3rd I’ve attended. Going to post thoughts in reverse order from the top – the day didn’t quite go to plan thanks to Northern Rail cancellations – so a bit of a random, hurried selection of who to watch, where, once I’d checked-in at The Arc – and didn’t see any of the official headliners – spent the latter half of the evening in The Georgian.
Avalanche Partywere the band I was there to see, again. Energy-packed stampeding beast of a performance as we’ve come to expect, this home gig effectively the finale of their album-promotional European tour. As others commented, the sound has suffered recently. Hurried – short-sets / short-turnarounds – sound check seems to be about the band being able to hear what they need through their monitors, fair enough, but with the audience experience set at everything turned-up to eleven. Lost something of the dynamic interest in the varied instrumentation between guitar, keyboard, sax and multiple vocals. Hard to pick any one of them out of the wall of sound so the live experience ends up a bit monotonous, even when you recognise the opening riffs and choruses. Fortunatelythe album “Der Traum Uber Alles“ benefits from top notch engineering and mixing – à la QOTSA – at Joshua Tree’s Rancho De La Luna Studio.
Home Counties were the best act on the day. Fantastic energetic delivery and presence from the front pair and the conventional guitars, keyboard, bass and drums augmented by the male lead and the bassist doubling-up on synths. Heavy delivery with synth sub-bass lines and an 80’s disco twist compounded by the male lead looking like a cross between the young Marc Almond and Dave Gahan back in the day. Found myself standing in front of the rhythm guitarist who seemed to leading much of the choppy drive and direction. Very entertaining all round. Hope to see them again.
Swannekwere the biggest surprise of the day. A laid-back jazzy-soul collective led by Findlay Hewitson didn’t auger well for my usual tastes. Electric piano, tenor sax and cello used sparingly and effectively (take note AP), but it was the vocals that wowed. Mollie Birmingham (a name which Google struggles with) accompanied by a reggae / ska / toaster vocalist for the first couple of numbers, soaring and gravelly by turns, she commanded attention from audience and apologetic photographers throughout, couldn’t get enough of her. Courageous therefore for the band to finish on an instrumental to showcase their musicians. One to watch, they were actually promoted by the local “BBC Introducing”. Will seek out again.
Before these a mixed-bag. I only just caught the last number and a half of SISTER MADDS – heavy and probably fun, but for me she was trying a bit too hard to act the bad girl. CASINO a bit too laid back funky soul with little else to commend performance-wise. Suspect from their audience there may be more in their songs? WALDO’S GIFT – weird to say the least, even their drummer had to admit, doing his best to engage the audience. No songs, all instrumental numbers led by their nerdy-persona virtuoso guitarist(*) and an impressive board-full of effects and loops. Notable to me that Carl, the lead guitar of Middle Management, was there in the audience to appreciate him (though they weren’t on the bill) and that Waldo’s bassist and drummer were chilling – as I was – in The Kopper Keg after Avalanche Party.
(*) Not a bad thing in itself – I’m off to see Joe Satriani & Steve Vai next month.
Part of the “problem with the problem” we’re dealing with – a meta-problem – is that we’re talking about “life, the universe and everything” and therefore “talking about everything all at once”. It takes effort and good-faith to avoid such dialogue seriously straining and breaking the limits of language, and it makes destructive-critique and disagreement much easier than creative-agreement – a topic in its own right for my writing project(s).
Also, talking about literally everything, we’re also talking about all types (classes, categories, forms) of everything at several levels of abstraction, every-meta-thing(s) as well as every-particular-thing(s).
And, once we’ve accepted science isn’t everything, then the ground we stand on, our chosen metaphysics, cannot simply be physical science. Metaphysics isn’t very fashionable in the 21st C, but these kinds of meta-talking about everything in the abstract are the bread-and-butter of philosophy.
Whatever ground we stand on and however explicitly we expose our metaphysics, we are creating our ontology, a meta-model of that everything, all those things and meta-things that may exist in the world and all their properties, processes and relations, and an epistemology of all that we can know about this “everything”, what everything means and thus every other branch of philosophy too. We’re talking about everything on many levels & dimensions.
(In my own metaphysics, my epistemology and my ontology are so closely tied that I’ve been calling it an epistemological-ontology … but I don’t want to talk here about that meta-model of everything – everything all at once.)
So, as I say I just want to mention one point here:
The Word “Systems”
In the previous post I already alluded to the fact that Seddon was limiting himself to the complication of particular systems. Named systems – human and technology – that were part of particular organisations and operations.
Boulton’s focus (like mine) is complexity – Embracing Complexity / The Dao of Complexity – and her interest (like mine) is well beyond the organisational management perspective of that previous dialogue. But she used the word “system” in this phrase: “when things don’t stabilise into so-called systems as when they do, and what makes them unravel”. She too is using system in the particular – so-called, things, they, them.
For me, as I’ve expressed many times but this is my first exchange with Boulton, systems is actually “Systems Thinking (and Doing)” as a response to real-world complexity. I’m using systems at the meta (as well as the particular) levels, simply viewing that “everything” in terms of their functional ontology. Seeing everything in the world in terms of their dynamic relations with other part & whole & eco-system things at any level on any dimension. A choice of how to view the (whole) world. Part of our metaphysical choice.
For me Systems is simply a response to Complexity, a useful way of viewing it all in all its complexity, not an alternate competing view.
In this systems view all such systems are always dynamic, patterns in flux on any & all levels & dimensions, evolving, and like everything else in the natural world, some such particular systems hang-around – emerge, stabilise, some by human choice, some by the active processes of life – reify-long-enough to be usefully given a name – speciation by any other name. But they’re all viewable as systems, even if they don’t.
Complexity camp or Systems camp, we can all use both words without pitting one against the other?
Yes, despite appearances, I really am progressing the writing at last. Essentially, what little reading I am still doing is simply proving to be confirmation and reinforcement, adding new references, so lots of drafts, mental and physical, have already taken their shape.
I wrote-up the Iain McGilchrist / Oxford trip, but haven’t done so for the John Seddon / Mike Jackson Hull lecture nor for the British Library visits. So below, this is just a round-up of those.
John Seddon – gave this year’s annual Mike Jackson lecture at Hull Uni / Centre for Systems Studies (CSS) last Thursday, 10th April.
In his 70’s with many decades of war stories under his belt as management consultant to leaders in commercial industry as well as assorted ministerial civil servants – health, prisons, etc. Pretty liberal with his opinions of named public people & politicians and their (very costly and ineffective) mistaken approaches to systems management systems. For him, his systems were all complicated but not complex, in the sense that he limited his interest to those management systems (procedures and tools) designed – made complicated – by humans, for a well defined purpose that could be seen as closed from any wider human or ecosystem complexities. Fair enough. Even then, most of his stories were of the “you get what you manage” variety. Systems designed to serve the needs of – fix the problems of – individual “customers” but which invariably ended-up managing the efficiencies of quantifiable compliance within the system itself, ultimately dominated by handling all the failure cases, especially via support and referral call-centres. The experts should be answering the phones, not hidden away behind multi-layered inexpert filtering processes. Hence “Vanguard” branded methodology / approach. (eg A good front-line triage nurse is the one with the experience, not the junior with a checklist.) So not rocket science, common sense for “closed – not complex – systems”(*), but boy could he talk, for a full 75 minutes before Mike Jackson as host could pause for 10 minutes of dialogue to close. (Dave Snowden also there, making copious notes. My focus is unashamedly the complex, the wider societal context of open systems, and his Cynefin approach is about assessing whether you are dealing with Simple / Complicated / Complex / Chaotic regimes to start with, and choosing methods & actions accordingly. I wasn’t really therefore the audience for Seddon’s focus on the Complicated.)
I mentioned in the footnotes to my recent Iain McGilchrist post, my own history with the British Library. I did have reading-room membership back in the days of my London-weekly-commute-working, but the BL had a massive cyber-attack back in 2023 from which they are only partially recovered. User records lost as well as losing the capability of ordering books via their electronic cataloguing. Like the US Library of Congress, in principle they have at least one copy of, every version of, everything ever published. For a book like McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism” there is only one Faber & Faber 1982 hardback edition and they had two copies catalogued, one in London and one in Boston Spa / Thorpe Arch nr Wetherby. However, the one in Yorkshire appeared to be lost (valuable, stolen?), so as well as re-registering in person, I had to make a second trip yesterday to see the London copy brought closer to home.
It proved to be worth it. Even though in 4 hours I could only selectively skim read and make notes and selected image copies, it was both fascinating in content and a wonderfully written read. [I’ll will of course, say more.] Two things arose.
Firstly, I was reminded that Coleridge’s “Biographia Literaria” is a recurring reference in so much of my reading. The archetypal source of the romantics, both British and German, that it’s been on my must-read list for some time. As I was in the Library and logged-in to their cataloguing I searched in order to request it for the reading room. Well, unlike McGilchrist, there are many, many published editions and versions of Coleridge, so just doing that selection is a piece of research in its own right. Long story short, using Amazon as well as the BL, I’ve ended-up with a Kindle copy of the 1817 edition. There were plenty of later used versions out there at reasonable prices too, unlike the sole $2000 dollar used copy of McGilchrist, and there are quite a few modern editions. Coleridge is well referenced by others, so I really need only a reference version myself – so with Kindle I get the added bonus of searchability for the context of of other people’s quotes. Job done.
Secondly, Jean Boulton – is embedded in my memory for some reason, despite checking mail and social-media records showing that I’ve only known of her for a matter of months? Some LinkedIn exchanges with Dave Snowden over the last year or two and a debate with Mike Jackson (I missed) back in February this year (hat tip to Ben Taylor). Anyway I bought a copy of her (2024) “Dao of Complexity” – “sense-making in turbulent times” – like every man and his dog these days – a veritable meme of memes. Can’t comment yet on the quality of her writing or arguments, but it is chock-full of so much of my own content and 21st C sources … no Pirsig and no Snowden, but lots of Maturana, Mazzucato, Temelkuran, McGilchrist, Rovelli and Whitehead … and Pragmatism and Mary Parker-Follett(!) We obviously have a lot in common. Wondering if it was the MPF connection where we’ve crossed paths before? [More later, below.]
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Post Notes:
The recording of the Jean Bolton and Mike Jackson conversation noted above (hat tip Ben Taylor again):
Remember when I first saw the talk advertised, bridling at that awful click-bait title – obviously they’re compatible – they’re co-dependent in fact. This is just about finding the right level of common description – through dialogue (as opposed to critique).
I already mentioned her book above – still that familiarity listening to her, presumably from the obvious common ground – weird feeling though. Mike’s book, I already reviewed (and also read and listened to him many more times), and I’ve summarised his position as essentially “pragmatism plus requisite variety (diversity)” … “There are more things in heaven and earth, etc.” Can’t argue.
She starts with “metaphysics” – unusual for a physicist – and this is recurring for me. Once a science-literate person accepts that “there is more than science“, recognising one’s metaphysics is an unavoidable necessity. “The ground on which we stand.” – Good. And recognising agenda / purpose, not simply detached objectivity, also unusual for a scientist – Good. “Ontological Resonance” between humanities and sciences – Good. “Reflective interaction” in any (eco)-system. Stable “patterns” emerge. Becoming more than being. “Things” are always evolving dynamically even if patterns are (at some level) relatively stable. “Intrinsic indeterminism” … “not frightening the horses” is an expression I often use too when it comes to communicating on a broad front. All very good, and well established in my own work. We diverge in that her agenda is still essentially management consulting in organisations (like Snowden)? – “organisational change strategy” is where I started this journey in my Masters back 1988/91- whereas my 21stC agenda is the human thinking and decision-making ecosystem in the widest “global” sense, for the good of the world – that shared metaphysical (meta-)model or framework, in my case. Neither of us are focussed on methods or specific / individual models. Stop reading / listening, and get on with the writing ….?
Mike’s agenda – really about helping people who have already been immersed in or subjected to the many different traditions of systems thinking (and complexity, and OR), sciences, theories and methods – a pragmatic route map out of the confusions of subject-matter complexity.
Both “in” their own journey’s in their own writings … me too. Systems view is more epistemological, Jean’s more ontological – mine already claimed as “an epistemological ontology” … so all good.
Yep, stop reading / listening, and get on with the writing.
(*) Post note – I agreed with Seddon’s common sense for these kind of “closed” systems back here in 2006, but that was before my own focus evolved to “complex systems thinking”. Not really had any more to do with Seddon since then. Ben Taylor previously critiqued the limitations of Seddon’s approach, and linked that in his comment to Barry F’s thoughts on Andy Wilkin’s LinkedIn report on Seddon’s Mike Jackson lecture, which I dismissed briskly above. A mechanistic thinker about closed systems, not a systems thinker. I think Barry’s comment about “nothing new” is kinda what’s driving my current agenda too. I damned with faint praise the wise words in Mike’s book last year, as really being a summary of all the extant approaches developed in this complex systems space, whose own recommendation I summarised as it’s all contingent so you can’t beat “pragmatism”. And in my trajectory, pragmatism as a philosophy comes down to the wisdom of how we judge what is good / better …
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Still to write-up … (above) McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism” …
As a Pirsigian originally, I’ve naturally seen Aristotle as part of the problem that systematising everything scientifically and logically has led inevitably to the dominance of science in the world of knowledge and applied knowledge in action. Extreme forms in that, say, anything seen as rhetorical is thus described pejoratively, or that seeing science as the only credible form of knowledge being a dogma known as scientism. It’s a no-brainer that Aristotle himself was obviously far more nuanced than that.
I’ve dipped into Aristotle often enough to follow-up the context of quotes by others, but I wouldn’t say I’d read more than 10% of Aristotle’s own writings. I’m familiar with his Organon, the systematic way he organises and categorises everything and every topic in the world, the lesson learned in the taxonomy of any number of ontologies since. Any given organon or ontology is or course “deemed”, it’s the consistent and comprehensive systematisation that represents the lasting pragmatic value. The fact that our post-Galilean word “science” derives from “scientia” is part of the problem too, that we’ve taken the term that signified knowledge of all kinds and turned it into the word for just the one kind.
The “best-available one-volume Aristotle” I have (~1500 pages) is “The Basic Works of Aristotle” constituted out of the definitive Oxford translations and in print as the Random House hard-back for over 80 years, as edited by Richard McKeon. He of course was the bogeyman, the professor or Chairman of the Ancient Greek philosophy course that Pirsig bumps up against in Chicago in his first book (ZMM). I have the 2001 Modern Library Classics paper-back version. As well as McKeon’s biographical notes on Aristotle and his original Preface to the whole volume, the 2001 edition includes an introduction by C.D.C. Reeve. Although thoroughly signposted by Aristotle in his own chapter and subject headings, there is sadly no alphabetical topic index in the individual books or the overall volume. Those 3 introductory sections by McKeon and Reeve are actually quite illuminating about what is or isn’t science in Aristotelian terms.
After labelling pretty much all of Aristotle’s topics as “sciences” theoretical, practical and productive – even theology, philosophy, ethics, arts and crafts (with rhetoric as one of those “arts”) – Reeve says this :
“Of these [sciences] the theoretical ones are the Aristotelian paradigm, since they provide us with knowledge of necessary universal truths. The extent to which ethics [and others] fit the paradigm is less clear. One reason for this is that a huge part of these [Ethics & Rhetoric] has to do [NOT] with universal principles of the sort one finds in physics, but with particular cases whose near infinite variety cannot easily be summed-up in formulae. [eg] The knowledge of what justice is may well be scientific knowledge, but to know what justice requires in a particular case one also needs equity, which is a combination of virtue and an eye [trained by experience]. Perhaps then we should think of the practical [and productive] sciences as having something like a theoretically scientific core, but as [NOT] being reducible to it.”
That latter sentence is pretty much the core of my own thesis these last 20+ years, even though I read it only yesterday. Fascinating.
My last visit to Oxford was a cold, dark, immediately post-Covid February three years ago, the same day Putin invaded Ukraine I recall, so it was a pleasure to visit again on these two bright and mild days in early-April.
Given this wasn’t a promotional “new book” publishing tour I had imagined the Friday session at which he was originally advertised simply as the speaker might be a call-to-action or an update lecture on “Where to next?” with his now well-established hemispheric social hypothesis agenda. That first session was in fact conducted as a conversational style interview with Charles Foster in the chair. Foster has written about and much referenced McGilchrist’s work – as he did at last year’s Annual Mike Jackson Lecture at the Hull Centre for Systems Studies. (Aside – I’m at this year’s MJ Lecture in Hull on Thursday this week.)
Disappointingly for me, the content was almost entirely a summary of his work to date, which I already know very well. The poor amplified acoustics of the Sheldonian and the obvious fact that Iain was in a hurry to get away afterwards, didn’t add to the experience.
Can only assume from his introduction to the Saturday session that the reason he was in a hurry Friday was to meet for the first time his Saturday guest. This was more interesting for me, with tables-turned. Iain was introducing us to the work of Catalan philosopher Jordi Pigem with whom he had established by correspondence, had a parallel and complementary agenda about the world being led astray by our left-brain dominant use of 24/7 comms technology. Pretty much my own agenda in fact, so it was interesting to hear someone voicing the same issues and ideas. Sadly for now, Pigem is published only in Catalan and Spanish.
Apart from the obvious ancient wisdom “the problem (eg. motorcycle) you are working on is yourself” angle, tending your own garden, changing the world one person – yourself – at a time, my anticipated question for the Friday session was actually asked by someone at this session. “What is the suggested strategy for getting Iain’s message for a better future out there in widespread practice?” Any wiser answer came there none. Everyone should read and act on Iain’s thesis for themselves. Essentially the same “hopeful pessimist” message from the Friday session.
Anyway, I enjoyed the two bright, mild days in Oxford walking the streets, at least 5 miles, between landmark pubs and specialist second-hand bookshops, pausing again at the recommended “Art Café” for both breakfast and lunch. Christ Church College Green is close to both the “Head of the River” and “St. Peter’s Books”, the first place I stopped to search for Iain McGilchrist’s “Against Criticism”. It’s an out of print first book of his that I’ve mentioned before and was actually referenced multiple times in the Friday session. Not to be found anywhere, despite that. [Amazon UK] [Amazon US] [Book Finder](*)[British Library](*)
But I did learn some things new to me:
Last time we were there, “The Eagle and Child” (aka “Bird & Baby”) was boarded-up with a planning permission notice pinned to the front door. This time it was fully shrouded in 3 storeys of scaffolding and sheeting as the work was clearly now taking place. The other “Inklings-adjacent” pub, “The Lamb and Flag” across the road was open however and had an Inklings-themed beer.
Having walked north out of the centre, I continued to pay my first visit to No.2 Polstead Road, the long-term family home of T.E. Lawrence, as a child and as a student in Oxford as well as an archaeologist and a first world war army officer. What might have been, had Lawrence had lived to meet the Inklings on his way in and out of the university (although by later in his short life he was leading a solitary existence out at Clouds Hill, Dorset)? Not much to see besides the blue plaque, much more in the Ashmolean of course.
The Bodleian is not so much a library as a collection of specialist libraries. As well as the “old school” libraries and the Sheldonian already mentioned, there’s the huge modern Weston Library which was set-up together with Blackwells as the centre of activities and books for the OxLitFest itself. A kid in a sweetshop, but they’d never heard of “Against Criticism” either.
And not quite finally, the venue for Iain’s Saturday session was the Oxford Martin School, which boasted some very impressive multi-disciplinary “mission statements” towards “finding solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges”. Why else were we here?
And finally having been at the Bodleian/Blackwell LitFest and having visited a handful of used book shops, I couldn’t fail to buy some books, even though I couldn’t find the one I was looking for.
Bronowski’s book on Blake “A Man Without a Mask” I already have a copy and have mentioned before, but this copy had an original first edition dust cover(!) I mentioned earlier Bronowski having taught at Hull University when I attended the previous Mike Jackson lecture.
Barfield’s was one I hadn’t been aware of before, it’s a collection of previously published essays and talks, published in 1966 but originally delivered between 1944 and 1961. His main works are de-rigueur for Pirsig scholars – “Poetic Diction“, “History in English Words” and “Saving the Appearances” – but this collection does as it says on the cover, with Goethe as the archetype of all the Romantics, and has much explanation of the importance Barfield placed on Rudolf Steiner and his Anthroposophy, something interesting thought-wise if perhaps a bit scarily “cultish” as a form of teaching practice in the 21st C. Clearly Barfield was responding to sceptical criticism of his relationship with Steiner and had to explain himself.
Successfully re-registered(**) in person at the British Library (Boston Spa / Thorpe Arch facility nr Wetherby in Yorkshire). Iain’s “Against Criticism” shows-up with catalogued copies existing in both London and Yorkshire. Because any book (up to six a day) may be in either location, generally there’s 48 hours notice to get them to the local reading room. Since there were two copies, one at each, in principle if it’s in one of the manually accessible stores, the librarian can get it for you while you wait.
It was, so they did. Except, the one in Boston Spa is “Lost / Missing” from the shelf, so I’ll have to wait until my next visit for the London copy. Given the only second hand copy I could find at Book Finder or Abe Books was priced over $2000, I wonder what missing actually means?
[(**) I say successfully re-registered because , as you may be aware, the British Library suffered a massive denial-of-service cyber-hacking attack which they are still only partly recovered from 2 years later. Some of the manual services are still better / faster than the electronic ones 🙂 Anyway I was previously registered in that period when I was weekly commuting to work in London – all records lost / inaccessible. A fresh start.]
