Thinking Slow, Thinking Fast, Thinking Beyond Binary Systems

This is an age-old competition between efficiency and resilience, aesthetics and utility. While efficiency and resilience are clearly placed here, aesthetics (as perception or experience) and utility (as effect-multiplication or intentional consequence) oscillate across arbitrary boundaries and definitions. There is an unacknowledged dimension to this binary model; that is, not so much that any reductive abstraction of necessity simplifies by exclusion, but that the persistence of undefined variables in any cognitive model or organisational framework is actually the greater part of that system.

This is a lesson in philosophy that many aspirational “best practices” and organisational – or for that matter, ideological – heuristics would do very well to learn. Whatever and however an organisational system or explanatory framework is defined as, or through, can never excise the sum entropy of unreferenced variables or alternate frameworks and models that still exist outside the terms and taxonomy or vocabularies of reference.

An explanatory system or mnemonic model is only ever the logical complement and inadvertent antithesis of all other possible models and unacknowledged variables. We all require mnemonic abstractions but should be aware of their implicit limitations.