Sorry, Henry, I wasn't drawing accolades, but rather emphasizing the
value common human bonds, even under otherwise rough exteriors... (01)
Back to the survey, understanding emergent properties, and herding cats
(I loved Peter's analogy of herding cats with cat food): (02)
People who are designing CPU chips, airplanes, or bridges do not want
their designs to display novel properties. They want very predictable,
optimal behavior within very well defined requirements. Quality can be
measured according to conformance to requirements, which can be
explicitly categorized in advance. I wouldn't want to buy a computer,
fly in an airplane, or cross a bridge that wasn't designed this way.
The whole is equal to the sum of the parts. This is one world, folks
can spend their entire lives and cognitive energy within this. This
works well (it did get us to the moon, for example), and as long as the
problem domain stays within this world, it is great. (03)
On the other hand, there are artifacts (as well as natural processes) in
which the emergent properties (i.e. the difference between the whole and
the sum of the parts) are predominant. These properties are NOT
predictable in advance, and we cannot measure "quality" according to
pre-defined categories. These systems live in a state of "perpetual
novelty," predicting what will emerge from looking at the parts is not
very fruitful. The web is "perpetually novel," we cannot predict what
web sites will emerge as successes by studying the W3C protocols, for
example. Designing for emergence (I think that this is actually Shawn
Murphy's old company's name) is simply a different discipline, with
different measures of success. Rather than being "optimal" to fixed
requirements, emergent designs must be adaptive. (04)
Lots of things trigger this crossover to the organic threshold. A
single plane is one thing, putting a lot of them together in the same
skies with terrorism is an entirely different issue. Lots of things
change when working with emergent properties. We lose the "undo button"
- we can't reverse evolution, unsay things in conversations, change
health decisions or medical interventions, or "un-emerge" things which
have emerged. We can't put cats back together again after we have
dissected them. Design and understanding at the "organic" level is an
entirely different way of looking at the world. It helps to understand
the cat food, rather than each individual cat, but even that is not
enough. (05)
I happen to be focusing on the latter form of design. How do we pull
together the parts to create emergent properties which will somehow
exhibit a desired quality, not knowing in advance exactly what those
qualities are? How do we define "good" emergent qualities without
sounding like the Taliban's religious police, and goons who "promote
virtue and prevent vice?" What are the patterns of uplift we can
discover and replicate? Do we even have a language to describe this
process? This is a topic I am exploring with the Hillside Group -
Eugene and I attended their last meeting in October - can we create an
uplift pattern language to do this? --- more to come on this topic
later. (06)
This ultimately leads to the question which Doug Engelbart asked himself
in the early 1950's, "How do we use technology to make the world a
better place?" Perhaps the word "collaboration" is a little too
limiting in this discussion. It presumes that we are "laboring" rather
than working with self-organizing, self-propagating processes. I find
myself using the word "cascading" a lot, indicating more of a
generative, autocatalytic model. I have a draft of a chapter at
www.munnecke.com/Overview.doc which discusses this more. (07)
-----Original Message-----
From: Henry K van Eyken [mailto:vaneyken@sympatico.ca]
Sent: Thursday, November 13, 2003 3:51 AM
To: yak@collab.blueoxen.net
Subject: [yak@collab] Re: Survey of yak and tools-yak on the way (08)
I guess it goes well back into human evolutionary psychology to
celebrate talent to the point of tolerating a lot on the part of those
who through no accomplishment of their own were by nature and
circumstance endowed with it. (09)
But that behavior of Gell-Mann to reduce a waitress to tears by showing
off his superiority deserves no accolades. An anal orifice would be a
better characterization. (010)
Henry (011)
On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 10:46, Tom Munnecke wrote:
> And great minds run in circles...
>
> Akin to your questioning of the AAA surveyor and her lack of advanced
> knowledge of molecular biochemistry, it reminds me of a lunch I had
with
> Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe.
> http://www.munnecke.com/blog/archives/2002_10.html#000066
>
> He is quite an imposing figure; people came up to him after our dinner
> to meekly say hello, not knowing who he was. A sweet young waitress
> came to take our order, Murray wanted to know what kind of mushrooms
> they were serving. Her first response was rather generic, to which he
> firmly asked her to ask the chef. She returned, a little flustered,
> with more specific names for the mushrooms. That still didn't satisfy
> him, and he nearly reduced her to tears grilling her on a list of
> species which might be candidates. After that, we turned our
attention
> to philanthropy and complexity theory, and he suggested that we hold a
> workshop at the Santa Fe Institute on the topic. I jumped at the
> chance, hearing repeatedly that he did not suffer fools gladly. I
> opened the meeting with an Appreciative Inquiry question, "Introduce
> yourself in terms of your most meaningful act of generosity." When we
> finally got around to Murray, he looked at me and said, "That damned
> question!" I was preparing to slide under the table when he launched
> into a touching story about his scholarship to Yale as the son of
Jewish
> immigrants. Choking up with emotion, he had trouble getting his words
> out, and there weren't many dry eyes in the audience, either. I was
> stunned that such a simple question could have such a deep emotional
> response. http://givingspace.org/May2002/overview.htm The whole
theory
> behind Appreciative Inquiry is to ask questions which touch people's
> positive core values, using this as the starting point for further
> discourse.
>
> I think that there is a lesson learned from this for us: how do we
> collaborate, based on our positive core values? Predefining these
> values according to charts of accounts, metrics, or accountability
> standards locks in certain ontologies (excuse the word), but do they
> reflect that which gives life and energy to the group? How do we
> systematically discover and work from the positive, life-affirming,
> generative aspects of human interaction, instead of narrowing our
> perspective to only that which has been "approved" by the category
> deities?
>
> Another lesson to be drawn is that even under gruff exteriors, a
gentler
> inner person thrives... Jacks's comments are just his way of
> volunteering to revise the survey...
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jack Park [mailto:jackpark@thinkalong.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 12, 2003 4:57 AM
> To: yak@collab.blueoxen.net
> Subject: [yak@collab] Re: Survey of yak and tools-yak on the way
>
> Tom Munnecke wrote:
>
> >Jack, you probably didn't color inside of the lines when you were a
> kid,
> >either.
> >
> >
> >
> Yes. I'm pretty impressed with myselves ;-)
>
>
> --
> This message is archived at:
>
>
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=3FB22E18.7090
307@thinkalong.com
--
Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca> (012)
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09.5.camel@localhost.localdomain (014)
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