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One in a long series. Just collecting the links.

Since I’ve just started reading Bennett, Dennett, Hacker and Searle’s “Neuroscience & Philosophy” I thought I’d post a link to the coincidence in the earlier post today, as a current reminder to myself to post some review notes.

My most considered reading of Bennett & Hacker was back in 2009. There I speculated on Dennett’s potential response, since Dennett was a clear target of that book. Wittgenstein’s importance means he’s in the background of many of these discussions, and just this morning I picked-up the Rob Minto reference to Wittgenstein in the post below. Rob’s tutor was Hacker, which led me to follow my own links back to my earlier reading of Hacker and Bennett and add this in a post-note there.

[I recently found that Dennett did respond and now obtained Bennett, Dennett, Hacker & Searle – “Neuroscience and Philosophy” A cover blurb quote from Akeel Bilgrami of Columbia Uni suggests:

“If you can get sworn and unrestrained philosophical enemies such as Dennett and Searle to join forces against you, you must be … the controversialists of our time.”

Fascinating. That was pretty much my take on Bennett and Hacker – controversial by design, with (hopefully) deliberate misreading of the scientific position on a philosophy of mind.]

Loop closed for now, until I have some notes on the Dennett response. Certainly looks, on the basis of a quick scan, like Dennett’s rebuttal is along the lines I imagined, and my own reading of Bennett and Hacker. Hopefully we can move on from attack and rebuttal to some common sense progress.

Just checked Dennett is still OK since his major surgery in 2006.

[Told] by friends and relatives that they had prayed for him, he resisted the urge to ask them, “Did you also sacrifice a goat?”

Interesting piece in WSJ, linked by Johan on FB. Global east-west power struggle to avoid dependence on US dominated proprietary software.

And now the full and final commission report to the president on the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, including the Chapter 4 on the blow-out failure itself, reviewed previously.

Finally, to the American people, we reiterate that extracting the energy resources to fuel our cars, heat and light our homes, and power our businesses can be a dangerous enterprise. Our national reliance on fossil fuels is likely to continue for some time�”and all of us reap benefits from the risks taken by the men and women working in energy exploration. We owe it to them to ensure that their working environment is as safe as possible. We dedicate this effort to the 11 of our fellow citizens who lost their lives in the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

I have to say, my general feeling, is the quality of the investigation and reporting seems excellent. I sincerely hope the findings and recommendations – technical and rhetorical – are fully understood and actioned accordingly, avoiding knee-jerk “never again” simplistications.

As the Board that investigated the loss of the Columbia space shuttle noted, “complex systems almost always fail in complex ways.” Though it is tempting to single out one crucial misstep or point the finger at one bad actor as the cause of the Deepwater Horizonexplosion, any such explanation provides a dangerously incomplete picture of what happened�”encouraging the very kind of complacency that led to the accident in the first place.  Consistent with the President’s request, this report takes an expansive view.

And as a little context, beyond this drilling operation, and beyond BP:

Since 2001, the Gulf of Mexico workforce�”35,000 people, working on 90 big drilling rigs and 3,500 production platforms�”had suffered 1,550 injuries, 60 deaths, and 948 fires and explosions.

[Post Note : Just assembling a collection of all my blog links on this subject:
11th Jan 2011 this post https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3699
10th Jan 2011 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3694
6th Jan 2011 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3689
2nd Nov 2010 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3598
30th Sep 2010 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3548
8th Sep 2010 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3534
10th Jun 2010 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3426
28th Apr 2010 https://www.psybertron.org/?p=3312

Remember, despite blaming no single failure above:

… the failures at Macondo can be traced back to
underlying failures of management and communication.

Must collate a coherent summary report of my main proposals – the communication of information supporting management decisions at all levels, particularly the criticality of information in context driving the escalation of levels of management to be informed and involved in those decisions.]

OMG, I was joking when I said Martyr was the best word for Assange, and now it looks like he literally wants to be one. “Fears death” my arse.

This post shouldn’t appear via dlvr.it  on either Facebook or LinkedIn.

Thanks to Johnnie Moore for this “Overland” piece on Wikileaks and power politics.

Interesting NY-Times piece by William Gibson from back in August. (Thanks to Edward at Nixon McInnes)

“I ACTUALLY think most people don’t want Google to answer their questions,” said the search giant’s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, in a recent and controversial interview. “They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next.” Do we really desire Google to tell us what we should be doing next? I believe that we do, though with some rather complicated qualifiers.

Me too. In fact this whole epistemological knowledge-modelling quest has been about the fact that information is always interpreted in the context of a purpose, and that purpose is about making some decision to act, where deciding to act may of course include deciding to further communicate information or ask another question. The answer as a piece of information is never an end in itself.

Complicated qualifiers ? Tell me about it. In just the previous post I yet again used the phrase “life is just complicated enough”. In fact this leads into the Nils Brunsson “decision-rationality equals action-irrationality” paradox too, the management-hypocrisy or scientistic-neurosis angle.

Interesting piece by Gibson, really pointing out the downside of too much transparency and permanent connectivity in media whose business-architecture we as individuals are not as much in control of, as we might think we are. Add these to the downsides pointed out by Jonathan Zittrain in the earlier post. The media technologies are ever newer, but the human social issues are “nothing new under the sun”.

Oh, and thanks to David Gurteen for tweeting the link to this Steve Denning piece, also about Google, warning how too openly social teams may be poorer at delivering on projects.
(Note to self – The Real Hierarchy – HBR, wayback.)

I mentioned Mary Parker-Follett to Euan Semple in a comment on one of the posts linked below. Rather than pollute Euan’s blog with some tangential detail, I thought I’d write a longer post here and simply trackback to Euan’s blog.

Preamble

My agenda takes in some mystical & pragmatic, monist metaphysics, which can seem a million miles from agendas to do with organizational behaviour and business integration in these times of explosive growth in internet connectivity and social media. That is we live in times where every individual and organization has immediate, ubiquitous, mediated and un-mediated connectivity – McLuhan’s global village writ large. And we’re talking about “organizations” of any kind from family and social groups, clubs, societies, tribes, businesses, states, institutions, nations, their authorities, managements and governance on any local to global level. These are constituencies of “us” growing in scale and in overlapping multiplicity. Organizational behaviour has always been basically some kind of social anthropology – how we humans interact and how those interactions are based on what we believe about the world and each other’s actions, communications, motivations and beliefs, within those many constituencies we inhabit. Social media are as old as society itself.

So what’s new ? The immediacy, speed and ubiquity of the communication medium. And that’s all. But, as David Gurteen tweeted recently:

“There is more to life than increasing its speed” – Mahatma Gandhi

And, picking up on another recent David Gurteen link – to a quote from Jonathan Zittrain – that immediacy, speed and ubiquity has succeeded in removing any time and space between “too soon to know, and too late to do anything about it”. So we are still humans, our behaviours are still anthropology, but our “game theory” for the best response to any situation is increasingly pre-emptive and reactive, with little opportunity to validate and reflect. Instant wisdom required. Unless you have the courage to take a stand and moderate the processes with a little time and space, we may continue to believe we are being rationally objective in making scientifically sound “evidence-based” decisions based on best available information. But without that moderation or inter-mediation, the objectivity of that information, and the moral clarity(*) of the motives of those delivering it, must at least be doubtful.

Our own objectivity becomes highly overrated, or at least illusory. I risked mentioning “mystical” in the opening paragraph, because it is almost heretical to argue even slightly against scientifically-sound objective rationality. But the illusory nature of our objectivity is not a new concept either. [Insert a million philosophical footnotes to Plato.]

At this point the story diverges as many ways as our agendas dictate. “That’s subjectivity and relativism for you”, the scientists scream 😉 . Now, we’re not talking metaphysics, moral philosophy, evolutionary psychology or philosophy of science here; we could be, but we’re not. There is a thread of thought that is common to many pragmatic paths we could take here. That is, where objectivity is poorly grounded, the alternative is NOT subjectivity. That just substitutes one set of doubtful entities and causal motivations for another. The real alternative is integration between subjects and objects. Relationalism rather than relativism.

Mary Parker-Follett

So to close out the pre-amble and get to the point – Mary Parker-Follett; I came to this subject from the business management / organizational behaviour angle, not some mystical, metaphysical, philosophical, ethical or epistemological trip.

Mary Parker-Follett was a management consultant before there were people known as management consultants with MBA’s back in the 1920’s / 30’s. She was widely-published, widely-travelled and lectured with reputation and credibility at the time, but fell into oblivion until Peter Drucker cited her as the giant on whose shoulders any decent modern management consultant stands. Cited also by Charles Handy, Tom Peters, Warren Bennis and others. Her speciality was arriving at agreements and actioning decisions where there was complexity and/or conflict. Avoiding characterising problems simplistically as Outcome-A vs Outcome-B, Us vs Them, Subject vs Object, and recognising the true value of seeking integration of common interests, by encouraging positive interaction between participants and reducing the focus on distinct objects, objectives and objections.

Win-win as we’d say these days. An ever more relevant approach as more and more issues get reduced to voting in real-time for or against one or other strong position / opinion. (eg: Julian Assange is a freedom-fighter / hero / criminal and government institutions are immoral / confused / defenders of freedoms. Speak truth, freely to power; fine. Don’t start with the explicit presumption that power is immoral, or you’ll get the response you deserve. Or alternatively see Slavoj Zizek’s “Empty Wheelbarrow” take on the “War on Terrorism”. Do me a favour.) Life’s just complicated enough not to be forced to choose in a false-dichotomy between two unthinkable downsides.

Another of her messages is that integration is never a complete solution or end in itself. “Unity does not exist, only the process of unifying”. Integration is more a verb than an object. And so on.

Anyway, I discovered MPF long after I’d done my management education, and long after I’d started the “What, Why and How do we Know?” epistemic & ethical philosophy trip. I read and posted my summary of her work that effectively summarised her “practical philosophy” in quotes of her own statements of principles, after seeing the Peter Drucker citation, and the fit was obvious.

MPF on Wikipedia,
MPF Foundation Summary,
These days there is also an MPF Network on Ning.
Join-up if she interests you.

(*) Moral Clarity … I’m not suggesting people are generally immoral or incompetent. Far from it. In my experience, young or old, parental or childlike, naive or experienced, objective or subjective, people are 99% morally driven and as intelligent and thoughtful as they can be in the decisions they take. Hacktivists and Presidents alike. It’s simply that the more detached and inter-mediated we are by technology alone, the less sure any of us can be about how much trust we can actually place in the content of our logic; our moral logic.