The article Tackling wicked problems : A public policy perspective provides a comprehensive acknowledgment of the complexity of many of the “wicked” problems that large organisations (not just governments) face in negotiating the facts of reality as they are (i.e. being pragmatic), not as we might prefer them to be (i.e. ideological assertions). “The handling […]
Category: Philosophy
Categories
Rethinking (is) Philosophy
Context: Four philosophers who realized they were completely wrong about things The article referenced above is an interesting, if spectacularly shallow, reflection on conceptual about-faces in philosophy. The deeper lesson and message here is not so much that these particular – if diverse – philosophical, political or theological world-views (and their proponents) found themselves in […]
Categories
Unity is Emptiness
We do not wear these mercurial masks anywhere near so much as they wear us, we do not inhabit these digital cultures anywhere near so much as they inhabit us, and we do not lose anything by casting aside our reflexive aspirations to ordered patterns of control so much as ordered patterns of control lose […]
Categories
No One Knows China
Context: Nobody Knows Anything About China It is of the nature of a science or an art of existential introspection (not to mention institutional knowledge) to seek the least-incorrect and lowest-energy, succinct model of an Object or Entity. The curiously mischievous enigma of such a psychologically-reflexive aspiration towards ordered pattern as #truth or fact – […]
Categories
Aurelius: Meditations on Leadership
One thing which really struck me when reading Aurelius’ Meditations was his degree of humility, considering the power he wielded as Emperor. It is unclear whether this was merely a rhetorical tool from a powerful thinker sensitive to the reception and interpretation of his words or if it was the authentic and humble gratitude of […]
Categories
Blind to Probability
Context: Why We’re Blind to Probability Probability seems to live in that space of “just can’t quite wrap my head around” that holistic analysis and paradox also live – in regards to natural cognitive function and any prospective innate ability to understand or intuit meaning. Ironically – even the language(s) and logical syntax with which […]
Categories
Ownership and it’s Dissociative Selves
A problem that I find myself returning to incessantly over the course of extended study and participatory observation in this human life and the diversity of cultural experience we all share is that of misunderstanding. The Philosophers would perhaps identify the problem as being one of Ontological Misunderstanding, of an essential mischaracterisation or ill-informed pattern […]
We are (all) still attempting to brute-force our way towards Artificial General Intelligence. If the complexity sciences have taught us anything it is that there is an autonomous orientation within naturally-occurring information and energy-processing (i.e. computational) systems towards self-organisation and bootstrapped system optimisation via logical extensibility and recursive exponentiation. We appear to be attempting to […]
Context: Pandemic Makes Evident ‘Grotesque’ Gender Inequality In Household Work No surprise, then, that undergoing traumatic paroxysms of existential stress in this pandemic has caused all those unacknowledged (and yet – hardly unknown) faultlines and inequitable socioeconomic discontinuities to percolate into awareness; cultural artefacts like some neurotic’s once poorly-masked behavioural anachronisms, endlessly and problematically oscillating […]
Categories
Strategic Blindspots
Context: Colouring Russian views of conflict in the 21st century Positing strategic culture, as are all cultures, as a semantic overlay or usefully-reductive functional self-representation (if even as that which exists unacknowledged or notionally unconscious) of any state is compelling and undoubtedly carries some gravity but such articulate eloquence often masks a fatal analytical flaw. […]
Context: Truth Beyond Logic and Time Beyond Clocks: Janna Levin on the Vienna Circle and How Mathematician Kurt Gödel Shaped the Modern Mind Gödel is interesting in many ways. While acknowledging that his logical and mathematical foundation-shaking Incompleteness proofs have a very specific context and meaning, the extent to which a broader reading (and thinking) […]
Categories
No Limits
Is it really so? Is ICT or any other language and hyper-extended (or reflexive) cognition really the limit of our world? That would surely to be to assume that that world – any world – was in some aspirational sense bounded, complete, even if only by, in or of itself; but the language, the grammar […]
