All posts by anomalogue

OK, but who decides that?

Philosophy

“OK, but who decides that?”: this is the liberal question.

Society should be just? Ok, but who decides what justice is? All people should be given an equal chance to flourish? Ok, who decides what equality is? People should be free within reasonable limits. Ok, but… People’s basic rights  should be respected. Ok, but… Etc.

In the realm of liberalism, where assertions of principle are followed by the liberal “ok, but” questions are rarely answered; they are hammered out with the crucial but possible impossible goal of eventual agreement.

(Having goals is more important than achieving them.)

Scientific gossip

Philosophy

When conducting design research in a team context we uncover general truths about groups of people, but in the process we uncover profound specific truths about our fellow researchers. 

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To know someone deeply, reflect with that person on the thoughts and behaviors of other people.

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Maybe this provides us one charitable explanation of the appeal of gossip?: of all conversational genres, gossip gives us the most intimate glimpse into one another’s souls.

The kind of person I am not

Philosophy

I went to a Baptist church for a few weeks. They were nice people. They preach an ultimate reality who is alive with love for them. But they also teach a reality peopled with hateful and wicked neighbors.

If they are right, they are also not right enough. Their insufficiency is not in what they affirm, but in what they oppose: those who they are not. 

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When I was young I was a left-liberal who thought all conservatives were stupid and mean. Then I met some smart, nice conservatives who helped me see how liberals opposed themselves to only the stupidest and meanest conservatives, and how they did this to justify their own flavor of mean stupidity. Years later I found some even smarter, even nicer liberals, and saw how my conservative friends were ignoring the best liberals, in order to elevate themselves above liberalism in general. And then I looked up into heaven and imagined alternating layers of better and better conservatisms and liberalisms, each trying to be more right and less wrong, and maybe at some rarefied altitude starting to crave justice for who they are not.

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Perhaps morality consists not in who we are, but rather in who we aren’t. 

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“And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question, to test him. ‘Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?’ And he said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.'”

Bliss

Philosophy

Find a quiet place and sit down. Still your mind. Breathe. Inhale and exhale naturally. Concentrate on your bare breath. Do not force your mind or body to do anything. Be in the present. Your mind will wander, and when it does, gently bring it back to the present, to here, to now, to awareness of here and now. Give yourself some much needed relief from the torments of transcendence. This is the dead opposite of religion, and for this reason it is bliss.

Souls

Metaphysics, Philosophy, Politics

Every soul is the size of the entire known universe, containing every known thing within it, endures for all time from the earliest known pre-history to the most distant imaginable future, and encompasses every conceivable possibility. Therefore, no two souls are alike. 

Souls vary in size, density, variety and complexity. Souls overlap in reality, but weave through realities differently, touching, entangling, moving and being moved by different beings. 

Some souls have space in them for your soul, and are happy to extend you hospitality. Some souls seek your hospitality. Other souls need your soul locked up inside your silent body.

Postenlightenment harmony

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics, Pragmatism

Tillich (from The Courage to Be):

The whole [Enlightenment] period believed in the principle of “harmony” — harmony being the law of the universe according to which the activities of the individual, however individualistically conceived and performed, lead “behind the back” of the single actor to a harmonious whole, to a truth in which at least a large majority can agree, to a good in which more and more people can participate, to a conformity which is based on the free activity of every individual. The individual can be free without destroying the group. The functioning of economic liberalism seemed to confirm this view: the laws of the market produce, behind the backs of the competitors in the market, the greatest possible amount of goods for everybody. The functioning of liberal democracy showed that the freedom of the individual to decide politically does not necessarily destroy political conformity. Scientific progress showed that individual research and the freedom for individual scientific convictions do not prevent a large measure of scientific agreement. Education showed that emphasis on the free development of the individual child does not reduce the chances of his becoming an active member of a conformist society. And the history of Protestantism confirmed the belief of the Reformers that the free encounter of everybody with the Bible can create an ecclesiastical conformity in spite of individual and even denominational differences. Therefore it was by no means absurd when Leibnitz formulated the law of preestablished harmony by teaching that the monads of which all things consist, although they have no doors and windows that open toward each other, participate in the same world which is present in each of them, whether it be dimly or clearly perceived. The problem of individualization and participation seemed to be solved philosophically as well as practically.

It is the belief in a preexisting harmony that separates the classical Enlightenment view from a Postenlightenment view. I believe in disharmonious reasons, which is another way of saying that I believe in Pluralism. To extend the music analogy, reason does not produce chords, it produces a chromatic scale, from which harmonies can be made, but only if sour reasonable notes are muted, at least until the melody progresses and the key changes, making the formerly sour note sweet. A harmonious truth must be designed, and design always means making good tradeoffs.

What is design thinking?

Philosophy

Putting it as succinctly as possible, design thinking is a perspective on problems:

Problem finding

  • All people-thing problems are design problems.
  • Alternative wordier definition: all problems that involve systems of interacting objects and subjects (“soft system” problems) are design problems.
  • Design problems are often misdiagnosed as engineering, management and marketing-advertising problems.

Problem shaping

  • Design problems are “wicked problems“, which have peculiar and disturbing characteristics:
  • The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
  • Wicked problems have no stopping rule.
  • Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong.
  • Every wicked problem is essentially novel and unique.
  • Every solution to a wicked problem is a ‘one shot operation.’
  • Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions.

Problem solving

Admirations

Philosophy

Sometimes I admire people as examples of the kind of person I would like to be. This is a kind of admiration of an aspirational future self. 

But I try to also admire people who are utterly unlike me, people I could never emulate without undermine who I am trying to be. I admire them as collaborative partners with whom I might accomplish things I could not accomplish by myself.

I consider this admiration of otherness in potential collaboration superior and rarer than admiration of potential likeness. Both of these, however, are superior to admiration of inaccessibly distant otherness, which in extreme form is worship. 

Tillich: ontology speaks analogously

Metaphysics

From Tillich’s The Courage to Be:

What does self-affirmation mean if there is no self, e.g. in the inorganic realm or in the infinite substance, in being-itself? Is it not an argument against the ontological character of courage that it is impossible to attribute courage to large sections of reality and to the essence of all reality? Is courage not a human quality which can be attributed even to higher animals only by analogy but not properly? Does this not decide for the moral against the ontological understanding of courage? In stating this argument one is reminded of similar arguments against most metaphysical concepts in the history of human thought. Concepts like world soul, microcosmos, instinct, the will to power, and so on have been accused of introducing subjectivity into the objective realm of things. But these accusations are mistaken. They miss the meaning of ontological concepts. It is not the function of these concepts to describe the ontological nature of reality in terms of the subjective or the objective side of our ordinary experience. It is the function of an ontological concept to use some realm of experience to point to characteristics of being-itself which lie above the split between subjectivity and objectivity and which therefore cannot be expressed literally in terms taken from the subjective or the objective side. Ontology speaks analogously. Being as being transcends objectivity as well as subjectivity. But in order to approach it cognitively one must use both. And one can do so because both are rooted in that which transcends them, in being-itself. It is the light of this consideration that the ontological concepts referred to must be interpreted. They must be understood not literally but analogously. This does not mean that they have been produced arbitrarily and can easily be replaced by other concepts. Their choice is a matter of experience and thought, and subject to criteria which determine the adequacy or inadequacy of each of them.

Symmetrical egalitarianism

Ethics, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Synesis

Can egalitarianism be disrespectful?

In some social contexts strict egalitarianism is the very embodiment of respect. An example of such a context is a gathering of equal peers deliberating on a shared problem. Each is understood by the others to hold an opinion of equal validity to his own. Each peer is entitled the same level of attention, the same time to speak and to be heard out and to be believed and also to be questioned. Of course, each participant has a personal opinion regarding the rightness and wrongness of opinions stated, but any expectation that others will give one’s own opinion more weight than any another’s undermines the equal peer relationship. Let’s call this symmetrical egalitarianism. 

In other social contexts, however, strict egalitarianism can be disrespectful. An example of this kind of context is a group of people gathered to discuss a specialized topic, where some members of the group have invested significant time, energy and resources to continually improve the quality of their beliefs in this area, where other members have not made the same level investment. The former have worked to become authorities on the topic at hand and the latter have not. (Imagine an accomplished physicist in conversation with a group of less experienced scientists, or even scientists who are accomplished in fields outside the one being discussed). In such situations, giving equal weight to each person’s opinion would insult the authority’s hard-won expertise. For one reason or another his work has failed to accomplish its goal of improving his understanding — that is, elevating his initial opinion to informed belief, reflective practice,  cultivated knowledge and refined judgment.

Why would an expert’s expertise be denied or ignored? Perhaps his field is not one where genuine knowledge is possible, and can never be more than a matter of opinion, where one person’s opinion is as good as another’s no matter how much work is invested in cultivating knowledge. Or perhaps the alleged expert has taken a bad approach, and has wasted years of effort following the wrong path further from the truth. Or perhaps the would-be expert has some personal flaw or limitation that has prevented him from acquiring real knowledge or has led him to aquire delusional opinions that only appear to him to be knowledge. Or perhaps the laypeople are convinced that genuine knowledge in the field necessarily and automatically leads an expert to an egaliarian attitude toward his own opinion: the superiority of his view consists in its paradoxical refusal to regard itself as superior, and any hint of judgment is a symptom of inferior knowledge.

This latter view actually has some validity. The world is stuffed with authoritarian experts who flash their credentials and demand submission to their authority. This ought to be resisted. No expert should require non-experts to obey without being persuaded by reason. This is non-egaliarian tyranny of experts. 

But what true experts ask for is not unconditional obedience or uncritical belief. What they ask for from others is patience and effort The expert needs time not only to express their views, but also to impart enough expertise that others have the context needed to understand and fairly assess the expert’s ideas. Let’s call this asymmertical egalitarianism — an egalitarianism that acknowledges equality of reason and judgment, but also acknowledges the realities of expertise and permits it conditions needed to be heard and understood.  

It is these conditions that symmetrical egalitarianism denies. From the point of view of symmetrical egalitarianism, the time and attention an expert requires to convey the background of his factual opinions is experienced as an unfair domination of a conversation. Each person is doled out the same quantity of time as everyone else, and this self-regarded expert is trying to take more than his share. 

But from the point of view of expertise, this symmetry creates an unfair asymmetry of means to convey meaning. The laypeople are given what they need to fully communicate their views, but experts — the very ones best informed on the topic at hand — are forced to provide their views without context, which means their views will seem obscure, pedantic or nonsensical compared to the down-to-earth practicality and plain speech of the regular guy, or they try to provide context and get cut off before their point is made. Symmetrical egalitarianism guarantees the common sense status quo view always prevails, and those in the room with genuinely unique and deeply considered views will be subjected to a Bed of Procrustes truncation that allows them to talk but denies them the means to be understood.

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Incidentally, this symmetrical and asymmetrical egalitarian concept can be applied to other fields. For instance, in education symmetries of fairness are sometimes established on the basis of allocated resources, the right to reach some standard level of acheivement or to maintain some pace of improvement. These symmetries are often enforced at the expense  of subtler forms of fairness, such as the ability to actualize one’s own potential. Obviously, this creates deep problems, including problems of measurement and objectivity, but the depth of such problems does not warrant ignoring these problems as essentially insoluble, or worse (and most commonly) denying the problem’s existence altogether. 

Seeing, knowing, anticipating

Metaphysics

One person sees the same priciples underlying every circumstance, and attributes this to his ability to see the truth. 

Another person sees the same priciples underlying every circumstance, and attributes this to his inability to transcend the truth he’s already learned to know. 

Yet another person, noting both the truths he has learned to know and his belief in the existence of transcendental knowing, wonders what to make of this latter belief, a belief different in kind from the first, yet also a truth seen everywhere and experienced as an ability to see the truth. Can he transcend his belief in inexhaustible transcendence, and if so, how? He suspects that the means will be shocking and will enter from the least suspected nothingness, but that is what happened the last time.

Triads of triads

Philosophy

A phenomenological perspective, a semiotic perspective and a metaphysical perspective will produce different triadic ontologies.

And a meta-perspectival perspective might feel obessessive-compelled to arrange these triadic ontologies into a meta-triad. )O+

  

(A phenomenological perspective is one that organizes reality in terms of individual experience; a semiotic perspective organizes reality in terms of signs; a metaphysical perspective organizes reality in terms pointing beyond the direct experiences of human minds. Private experience; public experience; transcendent experience, respectively. 20th Century thought divided along these lines. Continental and analytic philosophy agreed on little except the importance of excluding metaphysical conceptions from their methods.)

Tradition of wrongness

Philosophy

If the moral shortcomings of our ancestors require us to despise them as vile , to reject the traditions these vile people valued and helped develop, and to renounce the moral ideals of the present which developed from these despised traditions — doesn’t consistency require us also to despise past generations of scientists, scientific method and current science, since the history of science is a story of successive delusion and malpractice? To satisfy the high standards we hold today, we need to find cultures founded from the very beginning on empathy, kindness  and equality, and we also need to find an intellectual traditions with a better track record of knowing what is true and what is not true.

Distillation: a very literal analogy

Philosophy

Few simple ideas enter the world simple. Simple ideas become simple over time through enormous effort. Most ideas are born complicated, inelegant, and inarticulate and messy.

If the only ideas you are willing to entertain are simple ones, you will be limited to ideas other people have already simplified, which means, you will have original ideas.

Think of the word we reach for when we think about simplicity: distill.

The analogy not only bears extension, it demands it:

  1. Start with living ingredients. Not artificial synthesized chemicals. Things that grow out of the soil in the light of the sun.
  2. Crush that living stuff into a pulpy, messy mash.
  3. Let the pulpy, messy mash ferment. You allow it to bubble, froth, steam and start to smell funny.
  4. Identify what part of that fermenting mass of nastiness is worth keeping and start collecting it in its purest form.
  5. Sneak the nasty by-products out the back door and get rid of it before anyone sees or smells it.
  6. Bottle it all up in a beautiful tidy package that looks like it descended from the sky on a beam of light.
  7. Brace yourself for the phenomenon of retroactive obviousness: “If the idea’s that simple, it must have been here all along. In fact, now that I think about it, I had a similar idea not long ago…”*

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* Note: William James observed this phenomenon: “I fully expect to see the pragmatist view of truth run through the classic stages of a theory’s career. First, you know, a new theory is attacked as absurd; then it is admitted to be true, but obvious and insignificant; finally it is seen to be so important that its adversaries claim that they themselves discovered it.” This passage has been distilled and popularized in this elegant form, which may or may not be James’s own words: “When a thing is new, people say: ‘It is not true.’ Later, when its truth becomes obvious, they say: ‘It’s not important.’ Finally, when its importance cannot be denied, they say ‘Anyway, it’s not new.'”

Design Thinking by committee

Design

Combining the core insight of Design Thinking — “everything is design” — with the truism that “design by committee produces mediocrity”, it begins to appear that the widespread (mis)use of meetings to shape collective action might be one of the great engines of contemporary collective frustration. Much of our lives are mired in mediocrity because everything that matters most — our institutions, our processes, our approaches to solving big problems — end up essentially designed by committee.

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In distinguishing design problems from other kinds of problems, my rule of thumb is this: if a problem involves interactions between free people and things of any kind (objects, services, communications, screens, ideas) that problem should be viewed as a design problem, approached with design methods, developed as a design system, and evaluated as a design. In this light, all kinds of things that seem to be management, strategy, engineering, marketing, etc. problems are seen as varieties of design problems.

What design thinking does is fully acknowledge the “people part of the problem” as central to its resolution and focusing its efforts on getting that part right. And the only way to do this is to include the very people who will, through their free choice (or rejection), make the resolution a success (or failure) as partners in the development of the solution.

Failing this, it will be necessary to handle the people part of the problem by 1) speculating on it, 2) ignoring it, or 3) eliminating it.

1) Speculation means remembering/assuming/guessing  on the needs and wants, conceptions and perceptions, attitudes and tastes — in short, the practical worldview — of the people involved in the people part of the problem. We human beings are much worse at this than we think, especially when we don’t regularly put our visionary clairvoyance to the test. It is not uncommon in the design world to hear design researchers cheerfully admit to an inability to predict how people will behave, where others in the room make bold predictions based on their own gut-level knowledge of how people are. (It pays to remember why the Oracle at Delphi identified Socrates as the wisest man in Greece!) People research teaches respect for the elusiveness of other people’s worldviews.

2) Ignoring the people part of problems means pulling the engineering parts of the problem (the sub-problems that are made up of creating systems of unfree, rule-governed elements) out of context and solving those in the hope that the people part will take care of itself (or that “marketing’s got that covered” or that the system can be tweaked after it is finished until people like it enough to accept it.) Fact is, a great many engineers choose a career in engineering because they prefer interacting with objects more than interacting with subjects, and they will tend to prefer solutions to problems that allow them to spend most of their time in the company of objects or teams of like-minded people building object-systems. And that is fine, as long as someone has their eye on the people part and provides context for the engineering problems that contribute to the solution.

3) Eliminating the people part of the problem sounds ominous and it ought to: it amounts to turning freely choosing people into unfreely complying people. It means destroying alternative choices through anticompetitive practices (like those employed by Microsoft in the 90s or Apple’s recent supply chain manipulations) or by finding ways to bypass choice and control behaviors directly either through coercion (legislation) or psychological manipulation (like behavioral economics. The purpose of this is to make people into engineerable elements, that is unfree, rule-governed, controllable, predictable elements of a profitable system. It was this mentality that predominated in 20th Century social engineering projects, which unfairly discredited the very concept of deliberate societal self-determination for a great many US citizens. Social engineering is a hellish totalitarian notion. Social design, however, is deeply liberal-democratic, and the future of liberal democracy depends on it.

But — getting back to the original thread — this means we must learn to see design problems wherever they occur — especially when they seem to be something other than design. It means also that we must adjust our response to them to allow the right mindset and methods. As Marty Neumeier pointed out, we cannot “decide our way through them, we must design our way through them.” Which, again, means meetings are the wrong format for shaping solutions. (Unless, like some Design Management people, you believe the right workshop techniques transforms committees into design teams. I remain skeptical. I’ve seen workshops produce much more kumbaya than eureka. Workshops are more productive than most meetings, but what is produced should not be confused with design. Workshops are better-designed meetings, not meetings that produce better design.)

Once again, I’m going to trot out Le Carre’s famous quote: “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.” It is important to remember that a conference table is just a big desk for a committee to sit behind. No matter how many post-it notes, white board markers and ice-breaking games you try to add to it, a meeting is a meeting is a meeting. To design effectively we must rethink why we meet, how we meet, what we can expect from meeting, what thinking can only be done in non-meeting contexts.

Meetings are an effective tool, but like all tools, meetings have their proper uses and places where another tool might be better.

Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation

Metaphysics, Philosophy

Tillich via Polanyi: “Science, psychology, and history are allies of theology in the fight against the supranaturalislic distortions of genuine revelation. Scientific and historical criticism protect revelation; they cannot dissolve it, for revelation belongs to a dimension of reality for which scientific and historical analysis are inadequate.”

Supranaturalistic distortion of revelation! — I’ve needed this expression.

Just as resorting to magic to explain scientific phenomena ends inquiry prematurely and produces worse than useless knowledge, ending a religious crisis of faith with pat magical non-explanations prevents religion from doing its kind of work.
This is why I keep insisting that fundamentalisms of every denomination are anti-religious pseudo-religions that act to insulate faithless minds from the anxieties of genuine revelation. Fundamentalism is not extreme religion, it is a displacing counterfeit of religion.

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Faith is not a matter of factual belief, it is a matter of personal relationship with fact and what  stands inexhaustibly beyond fact.

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Magic is the splattering of belief upon the inner walls of inadequate understanding.

Pop ideology how-to guide

Ethics, Philosophy, Politics

Here is how to build a popular ideology:

Do rock-solid factual investigation. Satisfy the requirements of the critical mind.

Present the facts of the investigation in compelling stories that win over the heart, too. Adhere to the facts.

Encourage the heart and the mind to believe together for once. And what a relief wholehearted belief is in these fragmentary contradictory times. This rare peace is reason enough to believe.

Build fact and feeling together, higher and higher, to moral heights where gravity weakens and earth loosens its grip. Up here ideas are lighter and can be piled one upon the other with only sporadic logical spot welding.

The heart has the mind’s endorsement now, the newly unified soul hangs on your verdict.

Now is poetry’s moment. Passionate declarations, inspired insinuations, elegant analogies, and flights of spirit move mountains arguments cannot even touch.

Set your conclusion at the tip of the crescendo.

Then drop to earth again. Plant your feet where all can see where they are rooted. Return to facts. Build a second edifice like the first and crown it with the same conclusion. Then drop.

Repeat a third time, then a fourth.

Spread your conclusive points over the breadth of the sky. Now it is a worldview, supported on columns of excellent journalism. Readers will rise with you to hold it up, united in heart and mind, with themselves, with each other, as a community, as a collective mind, as a political body ready to act on behalf of your faith.

Nobody will notice the heavenly roof is suspended by nothing but  a desire for sheltering unity. Nobody can believe the sky is not attached to the ground.

The columns of fact and argument bear no load.  They are decorative stumps. They are monuments to the idea of reason.

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If you teach your poetry ventriloquism, when you let the facts speak for themselves they say what your heart wants to hear. This is doubly true if you think a complete knowledge of facts points to a single moral conclusion.

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The formula: Journalism; poetic ethical interlude; journalism; poetic ethical interlude…

miracle occurs