Complexity and Info Overload

Complexity and Info Overload. Recent draft paper (in pdf) by Heylighen for The Information Society.
Covers – Ephemeralisation, Value judgements in identifying progress, Competitive selection and evolution, Friction, entropy and “send three and fourpence”, Several paradoxes in speed and efficiency of “miscommunication”, Chaos, and much more. (Two separate papers in fact – one on the symptoms, another on tackling the effects.)

You get what you pay for.

I’ve given up on the Tiscali take-over of my ukgateway.net domestic webspace, which is a pity ‘cos it went so smoothly at first. This site is now hosted on commercial space, ironically also hosted at Tiscali. If you haven’t noticed the status remark in the header above, please re-tune to www.psybertron.org. What was it Ev said, in “The end of the free” ?, “People will in fact pay for what they value”. Onward and upward.

Hippie-dom / Sixties / Revolution / Drug culture

Some strange thoughts on tie-up between anti-establishment / conspiracy theory views, the “freedom” of sixties popular culture, together with the “conspiracy of silence” Galbraith / DeLorean / Argyris / Emperors’s suit of clothes view of “rationalisation”, and Jorn’s choice of seeing and denial in the following quote from his “Thoughts on the sixties” ….. “Between 65 and 68, a huge transformation affected millions of people in the world, very deeply, allowing them to see problems that had been totally denied before.” The Kesey / Heller / Pirsig drivers cannot be independant of this. Jorn’s biographical music / culture / politics pages are an interesting starting point to follow-up some of this stuff. Strange that whilst I can find no explicit link between Jorn’s political / cultural viewpoints and his literature-based interest in “AI”, both aspects are independantly very strong in his published thoughts, whereas my thesis starts from the point that this link is in fact a key part of human knowledge. (See Jorn’s Biographical Page and follow the footnote musical and literary biography links via Richard Stone to Ken Kesey, Haight-Ashbury and the rest of the sixties drug-culture – Jorn is a couple of years ahead of me agewise, but there is a spooky parallel between his musical influences auto-biog and my own.)

Several philosophers, and writers of metaphysical bent, have made use of mind-altering drugs to see things as they “really are”. It seems clear that breaking with accepted norms “as rationalised” by the immediate society, however this is achieved, is part of the knowledge / enlightenment jigsaw puzzle. At some level this is almost trivial / obvious, but it seems a key mechanism to understand.

Site Still Down

Tiscali have still not succeeded in setting up new ftp account (!!!) since their server migration 5 or 6 weeks ago. This is a temporary publish arrangement, not sure if all updated pages will now link correctly, but here goes, better than a 6 week old Blog ! (I have alternative arrangements now in hand – watch this space.)

Blogging in Business

Link from Blogger. The above is a chapter of a book from “blogroots” on the business potential of blogging or klogging. Includes quotes from interview with John Robb. (See earlier klogging threads.)

Blogroots are Meg Hourihan (megnut), Matt Haughey (wholelottanothing) , and Paul Bausch (onfocus). All part of the original team that created Blogger.

Need to investigate “trackback” from Moveable Type. Apparently creates a reverse link from a URL ? Pete Holiday is trialling a remote trackback suitable for non MT bloggers like me.

Capitalism Without Conscience

Common Dreams via Robot Wisdom. Another one spot on the mark. Interesting that the hand-wringing fall-out from 9/11/FBI, Enron / Andersens / WorldCom should spark this re-emergence of the blindingly obvious facts. If you insist on rational models (like accounting) you should not be surprised that the rationalisation of the irrational creates misinformation and misguided business decisions – this is the Galbraith / Argyris / DeLorean thread at work – I must sound like a cracked record.

Of course ! – “blindingly obvious” is a clue in itself – so blinding that ignorance of it looks like a deliberate conspiracy in hindsight ? – hadn’t spotted this angle before. Many a true word spoken in aphorisms. How can you not see the blindingly obvious ? is a non-sequitor. Standard metaphorical jargon is often closer to the truth than the reality for which it is a metaphor – another recurring theme.

Interesting corollary I’ve been meaning to follow-up – the article includes quotes concerning Adam Smith’s writing of “The Theory of Moral Sentiments.” before “The Wealth of Nations.”, that the order they were written is significant. Pirsig’s levels of values / Maslow’s hierarchy of needs all relevant here. I have a strong thread on “knowledge” being an emergent property of humans interacting and, in looking for the reverse relationship of what drives human nature / common sense / no-brainer actions to be the way they are, I have been drawn towards Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” analogy. Could there be more to this than analogy I wonder ?

Business Systems Don’t Work

Salon via Robot Wisdom. Another one to add to the thread, like the one on complexity of business solutions spotted earlier by Leon. Great work if you can get it. Business is so complex that systems are unlikely to model them very well, but being so complex, it’s unlikely anyone will notice that they don’t actually work. (Interesting that Jorn considers the claim “appalling” whereas it’s actually my starting point that this state of affairs exists.)