Tom. (01)
I realize you were just reporting on an occurrence, one that took my
thoughts back to some dinners which Doug invited me to. One was at a
pleasant, little restaurant, a former railroad station in our near Palo
Alto. The waitress knew him and they joked together, just a little human
pleasantness. We did not discuss business. He talked a bit about some
minor things in his career and I a bit about some small stuff in my
life. All with a nice, little wine. (02)
Realize that I am just an ordinary person of no special merit. A person,
incidentally, he had invited over to his home for a party attended bu,
what? 40 people or so. He gave that party in my honor. I was quite
astonished about that. A part given by a man of his stature in my honor
just because I volunteered to be his webmaster. Life can take some
strange turns. But it just goes to show that a great man can be very
humble. I'd say he is the greater for it. (03)
And than there is that other man of historical stature, Ted Nelson. On a
subsequent visit to California, Doug threw a surprise party for Ted on
the occasion of Ted having become, I believe, an officer in the Legion
d'Honeur. Earlier in the afternoon, Ted had given a chat (maybe a bit of
a tirade) in the same vein as that piece brought to our attention by
Matthew about Ted's working transclusion. During the discussion period,
I had made some probably insignificant remark. Yet Ted was graceful
enough to remember that during his part and he thanked me for my
contribution. Murrey Gell-Mann, it seems to me, is just nowhere in that
class of people. (04)
Henry (05)
P.S. There is much more to your post, but I need some time to digest
that. I certainly appreciate that you are doing important work and that
you need all the cooperation or collaboration that you can get. H. (06)
On Thu, 2003-11-13 at 11:33, Tom Munnecke wrote:
> Sorry, Henry, I wasn't drawing accolades, but rather emphasizing the
> value common human bonds, even under otherwise rough exteriors...
>
> Back to the survey, understanding emergent properties, and herding cats
> (I loved Peter's analogy of herding cats with cat food):
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> -----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
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Henry
>
> 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>
>
> --
> This message is archived at:
>
> http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=1068724284.16
09.5.camel@localhost.localdomain
--
Henry K van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca> (07)
--
This message is archived at: (08)
http://collab.blueoxen.net/forums/cgi-bin/mesg.cgi?a=yak&i=1068747035.1554.16.camel@localhost.localdomain (09)
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