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Strange set of connections materialised whilst I was reading Barbara Tuchman’s “The March of Folly”, hope you’re following this …

I’m reading Tuchman’s March of Folly, because I recalled (incorrectly) Charles Handy recommending it as the best management text book ever written, making all the others redundant. (In fact it was Warren Bennis’ recommendation, Handy’s was Mary Parker Follett’s “Prophet of Management”. Folly / Follett see.)

Anyway Handy was (is) one of my favourite management gurus, folksy style, contemporary of Roald Dahl in Shell in the Dutch East Indies I guess, but I digress; most people will know Handy through his BBC Radio 4 “Thought for the Day” slot. (Odd that I identify with Handy, a lay preacher, when one of the MoQ’ers I seem to have most in common with is Rev Sam Norton.) Handy, together with Tom Peters, I also associate with the management gurus of the 80’s pushing excellence through corporate cultures, and making quality management links to Pirsig’s ZMM, the origin of the MoQ.

Anyway another MoQ’er I have a lot of time for is Dave Buchannan, whose MoQ Conference paper “Fun With Blaspheny” drew on the work of Joe Campbell, in particular “The Masks of God”, in outlining an Orphic myhological screenplay for ZMM and the MoQ. (Incidentally I’ve just received the Jean Cocteau Orphic Trilogy DVD set, and watched the first two “Blood of a Poet” and “Orpheus” so far. At least the second one has a recognisable Orphic plot. Anyway the third one “Testament to Orpheus” was recommended by Pirsig after being moved by David’s paper, but I digress again.)

Joe Campbell’s “Masks of God” was referenced by Pirsig in Lila, his sequal to ZMM, in which he develops his MoQ.

The spooky connection ? Tuchman’s “March of Folly” opens, preceeding it’s introduction, with a quote taken from Joe Campbell’s 1969 foreward to “Masks of God” –

“And I can see no reason why anyone should suppose that in the future the same motifs already heard will not be sounding still …
… put to use by reasonable men to reasonable ends,
… or by madmen to nonsense and disaster.”

So add Joe Campbell and Mary Parker-Follett to my reading list.

Barbara Tuchman’s “March of Folly” is a good read so far; her style made me laugh out loud several times, particularly reading the “Renaissance Popes 1470 to 1530” section, the general depravity leading to the sack of Rome and confirming the Lutheran protestant secession, by way of the Medicis and Borgias, not forgetting Savonarola’s bonfires of the vanities again. Being a major patron of the arts is one thing, but your motives for being so matter. The gist of the book is that govermental (managerial) incompetence knows no bounds, and is a case of folly (cock-up rather than conspiracy) despite ample evidence and means of higher quality actions in the long term self-interest of the institutions governed. Hence the fit with my thesis / manifesto.

Oh well, time to pack-up ready for the trip home. Only a brief stop at Changi this time, so probably no further posts until back in Reading during Monday. Bye folks.

Younger son did 5 (five) a-level (UK high school) exams and got his results yesterday. Got 4 grade A’s and a B, and was only 4 marks in a few hundred away from an A in the B subject as well. Absolutely fantastic, the undoubted effort paid off.

However, the B was in the subject in which his conditional offer from his first choice university required the only A, and so he can’t have his place, no exceptions. Rather than accept his second choice yet, he’s requesting a re-mark in the B paper(s). Go for it. Fingers crossed for a couple more weeks.

As I was with Tebbit in the preceeding post, sadly I see Mo Mowlem has passed away.

I’m reminded from the links in the story she, like I, supported Claire Short after her resignation over the Iraq invasion, which strangely due to its timing created exactly the opposite reaction to Robin Cook’s. Cook put his principles first, Short put loyalty and duties first initially before succumbing to her principles and was accused of political expediency for her troubles. As the Mo Mowlem piece says, quoting Tony Blair, “[Mo] was a natural politician, could read a situation and analyse and assess it as fast as anyone.” Your words Tony; think on.

All casualties of war in their own ways.

Old Norman tells it like it is again. Ordinarily this would so politically incorrect and divisive had not Salman Rushdie already paved the way.

In preparation for writing some synthesis of Davids Deutsch and Chalmers’ work, I was updating my earliest links to quantum information (Deutsch and Josephson), and see that Deutsch’s QuBit Centre for Quantum Computation home page is now a Blog.

Intriguing, after my summary of Deutsch’s four main threads in the Fabric of Reality as
* Popper (Epistemology),
* Dawkins (Evolution),
* Everett / Wheeler (Quantum Universe), and
* Turing (Universal Computing)
I remarked that in that book, there was little if any reference to Deutsch’s Quantum Information work, and even less in Chalmers’ book.

I see in the side-bar on his site, the four threads are re-characterised (more correctly IMHO) as
* Popper,
* Dawkins,
* Quantum Computation (Information) and
* Virtual Reality.

I see also that Peter Marcer’s BCS “New Era” @ CASYS 2005 happened last week in Liege, and that invited speakers included Brian Josephson. Excellent, must get papers / proceedings.

Gary Neville says
“Any repeat of England’s 4-1 defeat in Denmark would see them fail to qualify for the World Cup.”
Doh!

I’m very close to finishing “The Conscious Mind – In Search of a Fundamental Theory” by David Chalmers. Everything except his review of Quantum Physics, over which I skimmed ahead to get a feel for the scope he’s addressing. I find myself in a very strange state, skimming some sections forwards and backwards, returning to read some sections very carefully. I can hardly believe it but everything I’ve been researching for four years is just slotting into place before my eyes. Spine tingling.

The bit I just did not expect to find in Chalmers, because I’ve not seen anyone quote or argue the aspect with him in papers or conferences, is “Information” (after Shannon). Information as something more fundamental than consciousness itself. Which is significant because Information was in fact my subject when I came into this space, and I’ve already bought the idea from quantum information work, that information is more fundamental than physics, and suspected it must underly both physics and consciousness or, effectively, a physics embracing information underlies everything including consciousness.

David is very careful with his argumentation – really impressive in fact – painfully distinguishing speculations from tiny fragments of evidence, recognising intuitions and suspending disbelief where unproven too, all in a synthetic way, and building cases that are hard to refute despite few individual “knockdown cases”. Very much aligned with Deutsch’s stuff, as I said already, when it comes to the limitations of logic in building a quality explanation or formal argument.

Everything is here. Quality. Physics. Logic. Life. Consciousness.
From Dave Deutsch via Dave Chalmers to Dave Bowman’s final words.
“Oh my god, it’s full of information.”

So rather than another long-winded dump of incoherent thoughts and impressions, it’s time I tried to put a thesis together. I’ve felt I should do this many times before, but the problem has always been the breadth of what needs to be covered, and however narrow an aspect I chose to focus on in a potential paper, there were always boundary conditions that couldn’t avoid undeveloped (and hence incoherent) reference to more of the other aspects. In truth, I spotted this with Deutsch’s Fabric of Reality, where his synthesis of four arguments each suffering an explanatory gap in their common sense acceptance, nevertheless seemed to hang together as a whole. I’ve just gotta do it.

Don’t hold your breath. It may be worth the wait, but don’t forget that the patron saint of the universal church of the interactive network is St Douglas (of the whooshing deadline) Adams.

Bessemer Venture Partners list some of their more notable goofs.
[via Johnnie Moore] [via Adrian Trenholm].

The opposite of hype says Johnnie; It’s a compelling read says Adrian (and it is, they sure let some big ones get away, not least Google, whatever the moral of the story). Which is of course that perhaps even in marketing, a self-deprecating honesty pays in preference to begging credulity over claims, exagerated if only by presentation in their best light. Another case of less is more.

[BTW that reminds me, not quite the same angle, but playing against the macho-sexist Australian beer stereotype, what was that ad I saw for a beer sponsoring the rugby, where the opposing teams aim to impress by removing the beer tops with various parts of their anatomy, only to be trumped by the obligatory pretty model below the waist-high bar level, if you get my drift. Sorry but it worked for me, though as Sylvia often points out, memorable ad but I’m damned if I can remember the name of the product. There’s probably a name for that in the business is there Johnnie ?]

NY Times piece by Rachel Donadio. [via Georganna].

As a “born again” reader of literary fiction (though it has to be said my reading list is stuffed with learned texts at the moment) I find this interesting. Outlets for fictional writing, not just books / novels, but literary journals too, are reporting that the market is dominated by “factual” work these days. Two observations – even the factual stuff has a bias to the long-form narrative they say, and given that it is indeed advertised as non-fiction, I hope it’s obvious that doesn’t make it factual in any sense of “truth” whatever its rhetorical qualities. The bummer with rhetorical quality is distinguishing between reasonable truths and speculative, conspiracy-theory, pseudo-scientific, life-style mumbo jumbo. Being market driven, as the article points out, this kind of narrative apparent non-fiction can appeal most easily to what people want to hear, rather than stuff that makes them personally uncomfortable. At least with fiction you know where you stand – if it appeals as an essentially true natural history, it’s probably because of some more intrinsic, aesthetic, instinctual qualities, rather than an explicit logic or reasoning.

Quality beats skin-deep “truth”.