Psybertron Asks

[via Apothecary] [Via MetaFilter] A classic Stephen Jay Gould essay, The Creation Myths of Cooperstown. Gould compares the real and mythical origins of baseball, as a metaphor for the general human preference for creation myths over messier evolutionary reality. IMOW Causality arising as emergence from complex layers (of what may be underlying scientific simplicity) of reality invariably get expressed in convenient metaphors. The trick is not to forget that real life and language is 99% metaphor. [Metaphors as compression, Lakoff etc.]

Drive to Decentralisation and Autonomy – Interesting post from Jim McGee’s Musings. This loose-tight management issue is as old as the hills. (Ref Charles Handy, or Tom Peters and many before.) What is interesting is that the rise in open decentralised “peer-to-peer” arrangements / social software really is a drive towards more effective and efficient creativity in business. My main thesis in fact. I think I’ll take look at the referenced book by Bob Keidel.

Jan Alyne’s Blogging Research – Brazillian student requests research input from bloggers. [via Seb].

Knowledge is Dialogue – Interesting post from Jerry Ash, with thread including Denham Grey and myself.
Liked this “Nobody ever came up with a great idea all by themselves.” – Thomas Edison.
Denham says – in a conversation – It is not the terms, but the distinctions & meaning that are important. Can’t disagree, almost a truism. I included the George Bernard Shaw quote earlier that “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has happened.” One phrase I use almost daily with colleagues, at the interface between business / technology domains, is “Why use one word when a sentence will do.” Essentially people at either side of a dialogue need to be very comfortable with each others context of understanding before reducing any novel, complex, indistinct, or otherwise ill-defined concept , to a jargon term. Inventing jargon and acronyms is a deadly recipe for mis-communication. Jargon should be allowed condense out of mutual dialogue.

(I have a nasty habit, an affectation perhaps when communicating orally – which I now understand – of putting key words in many of my communications in “scare quotes” – which is shorthand for saying “I think I know what I mean when I use this expression, but I know it’s possible you don’t understand the same thing, so if we’re not sure, then assume the rest of the communication is void and invalid. So when responding please feed this term back to me in your own words. Closed responses like yes I agree or no I disagree are invalid.”)

Dialogue ? Conversation ? or, if you prefer, Storytelling ? David Gurteen’s review of Extraordinary Minds by Howard Gardner “the architect of the leading story — must ever be in contact with human beings, trying out the story, making adjustment, monitoring their reactions, and repeating the cycle indefinitely.” Gardner says of Gandhi.

Mind Culture Co-Evolution [From AsWeKnowIt.] Paul Kelly is hosting some interesting material from two ex professors of his. Including a review of “The End of Science: Facing the Limits of Knowledge in the Twilight of the Scientific Age (Benzon 1996)”. The introduction to Benzon’s Mind Culture Co-Evolution includes “Cultural evolution ….. shows up in the waves theory of Alvin Toffler, in memetics, an intellectual stew which began simmering when biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term “meme” to designate the cultural parallel to the biologist’s gene, and most recently in Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which takes its inspiration from game theory.”

I guess my view of “memetics” is thoroughly post Dawkins, post Blackmore – more current perceived wisdom – so I still have a lot of time for the concept, that’s the power of memetics, memes mutate and evolve and as a meme, memetics is no different. Anyway, interesting here to see waves and game theory in the same breath. One of my threads on changes in the world in general arises from technological change as the main driver for economic change, and the various Kondratiev Wave views of cycles of change, more recently referred to as cycles in the predominant TEP or “Techno-Economic Paradigm”. My response to this 15 years ago (in complete ignorance of memetics) was to see these cycles as human – learning, exploiting, forgetting cycles 3 times 25 year generations equals approximately 80 year waves in Kondratiev terms. Exploiting and forgetting I was never entirely happy with, and I guess with a game theory view I would now characterise the three generations as (1) the spread of awareness of “technology” capability, (2) the development of exploitative strategies, (3) the saturation of self-defeating strategies. The relatively fixed 80 year cycles perceived by Kondratiev are no longer necessarily relevant given the power of communication technologies to spread awareness of possibilities and strategies “at the speed of light”, but as I said in chapter 3 of my 1991 dissertation, I’m not so sure. Knowledge perhaps remains human, whatever the technology.

Anyway, this is just an intial thought sparked by a glance at the Mind Culture Co-Evolution stuff. Worth a deeper read no doubt. The retreat from Hyper-Rationalism [and here re Dawkins] or exclusive Logical Positivism is the most obvious thread in here.

Hmmm – wonder if I should publish my “Circle of Life” metaphor ? One of the problems with memes (and so much of the “behaviour” of genes in general) is that they are a metaphor.

A Human Face on Computing – Several links collected by One Trick CyberPony – amusing and creative (Rivets should see this.)

Been short on blogging access time recently, but been reading more Nietzsche in preference to several other unfinished tomes. Reading Ecco Homo, it’s a scream, and dug out Zarathustra for a second attempt.

Microsoft on Blogging – Mary Jo Foley at Microsoft Watch says …
When you add up its growing list of Weblog-related initiatives, Microsoft is poised to try to capitalize on Weblogmania.
Microsoft’s been hinting publicly and privately that it’s bullish on blogging.
During a recent keynote address, Chairman Bill Gates called out blogs as “important.”
See “Blogging’s On BillG’s Radar Screen“

Someone (George Bernard Shaw apparently ?) said [Quote] The communication problem is the illusion that it has taken place. [Unquote]. In checking this out I also came across a whole screed of apposite Albert Einstein quotes … [Quote] Imagination is more important than knowledge. [Unquote] and [Quote] The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is at all comprehensible.[Unquote] and [Quote] Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.[Unquote] and [Quote] Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.[Unquote] and [Quote] The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.[Unquote] and [Quote] The only difference is that there is no cat.[Unquote] and [Quote] If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts.[Unquote] and [Quote] The [new technology] has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.[Unquote] and finally [Quote] Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.[Unquote]. Source : The Quotations Page.

Just a quick progress note – day job precludes extensive analysis – Finished Nietzsche’s Beyond Good & Evil, and re-started Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror on Nature.

So much Nietzsche rings true, and his arrogant self-assured style is breathtaking. Mysogeny – OK got me there – well let’s put it down to the chauvinism of his time, his arrogance, two rejected marriage proposals, an upbringing in an all female household including a very meddlesome sister … and hopefully a small dose of playful irony – so the guy wasn’t perfect. Nazi – I don’t think so on this evidence – just about every “race” nation and people comes in for no-holds-barred critical analysis. Jews he’s sympathetic to and warns against extreme reactions. Us Brits (the English actually) he has spot on. His own Germany fares no better. Anyway I digress.

Rorty is back on track – as I suspected his impenetrable jargon laden opening chapter was deliberate – to show the language of modern philosophies against the obligatory history of thought from Aristotle at the rest. I wonder how many other readers he lost with this ploy. Got the “glassy soul” / mirror analogy from Measure for Measure. Anyway I’m happy now. Duty calls.