All posts by anomalogue

On Justification

ANT, Ideas

Two reasons I am glad to have read Luc Boltanski’s On Justification:

  1. I have been looking for something like Boltanski’s Framework for Analyzing the Common Worlds for two years: basically a structure for describing a lifeworld/worldview.
  2. Boltanski’s descriptions of the different political worlds in pure and hybrid form have provided me with a much finer schema for understanding political affinities and differences.

My immediate use for it is in business, in understanding political conflicts and in establishing cohesive hybrid solutions that can serve as a foundation for inside-out brand differentiation.

To me, this system is very similar to Jung’s personality theory of functions and types.

Let’s stop aping physicists

Ideas

If physicists could interview quarks and ask them questions that would help them uncover new paradigms and conduct new, more productive experiments, they would do it.

Physicists are strictly etic out of sheer necessity. Consequently, they have gotten really good at working around this limitation — but again, not because this is an intrinsically superior approach, but because there’s no other option available.

Meanwhile some social researchers, who have the advantage of being able to converse freely with those they are researching, not only fail to do so, but actually take pride in renouncing this advantage. It makes them feel rigorous because they resemble the hard sciences.

Booj Party

Ideas, Politics

If, by some miracle, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street were to cool their jets long enough to realize the common enemy is power concentrations of every form — that whether it takes the form of government, business, religion, military… any kind of power concentration is a threat to democracy — and united on the common goal of empowering and expanding the middle class, imagine what could happen.

Freedom depends entirely on even distribution of power/wealth.

I would love to see a  Booj Party, whose ideal is a universal middle class.

Universal middle class is just another way of saying “moderate prosperity for all”.

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The fundamental ideal of the Booj Party is: Equal access to moderate wealth for all people.

The fundamental test of every economic policy will be: Will this policy put in place conditions that will encourage equal distribution of power/wealth?

And keep in mind: the power to distribute wealth “equally” presupposes a gross inequality of power. The Booj Party does not advocate any agency distributing anything anywhere. It works entirely by policies that enable individuals, through their own initiative, to become moderately prosperous.

What is moderate prosperous?

Simple.

MODERATE PROSPERITY = TOTAL WEALTH / POPULATION

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There’s no such thing as giving everyone the same opportunity to amass obscene wealth.

The minute someone seizes that opportunity and actually amasses obscene wealth, they have the power to destroy that opportunity for others.

But if all have the same opportunity to amass moderate wealth, each individual has far less of an opportunity to disrupt the system that encourages equality.

That arrangement is sustainable.

Design problems vs engineering problems

Design, Ideas

Many problems are left unresolved because they are design problems misidentified and approached as engineering problems.

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To conceive a situation as a design problem means to approach the situation with the intention of improving it, by acting into the situation with some kind of system that does something for someone.

Breaking the problem down into component parts:

  1. A design improves a situation, which means it requires some clarity on what constitutes an improvement. In other words, design is guided by some kind of ideal.
  2. A design acts into a situation, which means design fits into a larger context and becomes a constituent part of it.
  3. A design is a system, which means it is a set of interacting or interdependent components forming an integrated whole.
  4. A design does something, which means it performs specific functions.
  5. A design is intended for someone, which means the design successful to the degree that it is valuable to people for which it is intended.

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Engineering problems are embedded within design problems, as point three and four: a system that does something. To isolate this part of the problem from the context of the situation and to suspend the consideration of the people for whom the system is intended is to define an engineering problem.

This makes the problem as it is defined easier to solve. But this comes at the cost of solutions that fit into situations and actually improve them significantly, despite the fact that they meet all defined requirements.

Implications of Pragmatism

Ideas

Pragmatism is the philosophy underlying the science of Actor-Network Theory and the technology of User Experience. Design Thinking defines the scope of application of User Experience to the entire realm of wicked problems.

As chaos theory has shown that most apparent linear equations are only approximate descriptions of non-linear processes, I’m certain that someday we will recognize that all human problems that appear “tame” are only approximate comprehensions of wicked problems.

For school vouchers

Ideas

In my direct experience with both public and private education, I’ve observed one big difference between public and private school administrators:

  • Public school administrators are trying to attract distant public money with aggregated quantitative data.
  • Private school administrators are trying to attract money from individual parents who want to see qualitative proof that their money is well-spent.

If a private school parent sees that his child is bored, unhappy, lethargic or stagnant, that school will lose funding from that parent. Consequently, private schools focus all their effort on making students interested, happy, energized and engaged. They don’t attempt to quantify any of this, because the outcome is immediately present to the decision-maker.

In contrast, if a public school parent sees problems with their student, they can lobby, complain, threaten and escalate issues all day, but it will not affect the bottom line. Generally, the most convenient lever for making a change is harassing and blaming the individual teachers. Escalating issues to administrators is a means of pressuring teachers, not in effecting change to administration to to the design of the system.

Public school administrators focus most on serving the only stakeholders that really matter: the bureaucrats above them who scrutinize their numbers and dispense reward or punishment. The numbers are what matter, so numbers are the real product of public schools, and the students are only a means to making those numbers.

To the public school system, if something isn’t quantified, it doesn’t exist. However, though some indicators of educational success are quantifiable, at bottom education is an essentially qualitative endeavor. Education cannot be reduced to quantitative terms without destroying it. But because we insist on trying to control it centrally from a distance, the more we try to take centralized control of it, the more the system falls apart.

For this reason I actually agree with conservatives on the desirability of school vouchers. I have not any progressive thinker take the concept seriously and try to find ways to make school vouchers less abusable by the rich. I don’t think the problems with vouchers are insurmountable.

Chaos

Ideas

Chaos might be blackness, or blindness — or it might be white noise.

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Chaos might be inarticulate meaningless phenomena waiting to be given articulate meaning by an interpreter.

Or, chaos might be infinitely meaningful phenomena which overwhelms us until we choose one definitive articulation — or a plurality of compatible and harmonious interpretations.

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Many people think truth is like a mirror of reality.

Another optical metaphor: Truth can be seen as a prism to help us stratify superabundance of meaning into layers of understanding.

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In everyday situations where chaos reigns, isn’t that chaos composed of too many competing and conflicting orders — but partial orders, which suffer from blind spots, fuzzy patches, distortions and gaps? And don’t these orders perceive differing patterns of relevance, which justify the deficiencies as acceptable? The real problem is not to remove the deficiencies, but to come to an agreement on which deficiencies matter more and which matter less.

 

Freedom

Ideas

We feel most free when we exercise our best judgment.

When our judgment is displaced by formal processes, we feel unfree.

If it is shown that this unfreedom is ultimately beneficial, sometimes we find the sacrifice of freedom valuable.

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When sacrifice of freedom is demanded without justification, or the justifications given offend our best judgment — we are forced into unfreedom rather than persuaded to voluntary sacrifice — this is experienced as tyranny.

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It doesn’t matter who does it, any power that forces unfreedom upon us is tyrannical.

This is why the enemy is not “big government” but any concentration of power that allows one group to impose its will on another.

This is why we should be as wary of corporatism — the tyranny of the corporate executive — as we are of bolshevism or fascism.

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We’ve got to get over our vulgar fixation on prejudices of soil, skin color, genitalia, sexual preference and religious affiliation.

Many other forms of prejudice exist as well, and our prejudices in respect to what constitutes prejudice permits prejudices of temperament and philosophical orientation to run rampant.

 

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

Fables, myths & parables, Hermeneutics

“Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes”

That was the deep uncanny mine of souls.
Like veins of silver ore, they silently
moved through its massive darkness. Blood welled up
among the roots, on its way to the world of men,
and in the dark it looked as hard as stone.
Nothing else was red.

There were cliffs there,
and forests made of mist. There were bridges
spanning the void, and that great gray blind lake
which hung above its distant bottom
like the sky on a rainy day above a landscape.
And through the gentle, unresisting meadows
one pale path unrolled like a strip of cotton.

Down this path they were coming.

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak —
mute, impatient, looking straight ahead.
In large, greedy, unchewed bites his walk
devoured the path; his hands hung at his sides,
tight and heavy, out of the failing folds,
no longer conscious of the delicate lyre
which had grown into his left arm, like a slip
of roses grafted onto an olive tree.
His senses felt as though they were split in two:
his sight would race ahead of him like a dog,
stop, come back, then rushing off again
would stand, impatient, at the path’s next turn, —
but his hearing, like an odor, stayed behind.
Sometimes it seemed to him as though it reached
back to the footsteps of those other two
who were to follow him, up the long path home.
But then, once more, it was just his own steps’ echo,
or the wind inside his cloak, that made the sound.
He said to himself, they had to be behind him;
said it aloud and heard it fade away.
They had to be behind him, but their steps
were ominously soft. If only he could
turn around, just once (but looking back
would ruin this entire work, so near
completion), then he could not fail to see them,
those other two, who followed him so softly:

The god of speed and distant messages,
a traveler’s hood above his shining eyes,
his slender staff held out in front of him,
and little wings fluttering at his ankles;
and on his left arm, barely touching it: she.

A woman so loved that from one lyre there came
more lament than from all lamenting women;
that a whole world of lament arose, in which
all nature reappeared: forest and valley,
road and village, field and stream and animal;
and that around this lament-world, even as
around the other earth, a sun revolved
and a silent star-filled heaven, a lament-
heaven, with its own, disfigured stars –:
So greatly was she loved.

But now she walked beside the graceful god,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.
She was deep within herself, like a woman heavy
with child, and did not see the man in front
or the path ascending steeply into life.
Deep within herself. Being dead
filled her beyond fulfillment. Like a fruit
suffused with its own mystery and sweetness,
she was filled with her vast death, which was so new,
she could not understand that it had happened.

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.

She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.

She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.

She was already root.

And when, abruptly,
the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around –,
she could not understand, and softly answered
Who?

Far away,
dark before the shining exit-gates,
someone or other stood, whose features were
unrecognizable. He stood and saw
how, on the strip of road among the meadows,
with a mournful look, the god of messages
silently turned to follow the small figure
already walking back along the path,
her steps constricted by the trailing graveclothes,
uncertain, gentle, and without impatience.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

 

 

Pain of innovation

Brand, Design, Hermeneutics, Ideas

The primary obstacle to innovation of every kind is the pain of philosophy, which begins as angst before blooming into perplexity.

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We don’t hate new ideas because they’re new.

We don’t even hate new ideas because they displace beloved old ideas.

We hate new ideas because they require the creation of conceptual vacuum before we can understand them.

A conceptual vacuum is not like empty space. It is empty of articulated order, which means it overflows with everything-at-once. It is chaos.

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The depth of an idea means: “how much forgetting does it require in order to be understood?”

More depth = more forgetting = more pain.

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Real innovation is the product of deep thought. That is, it involves forgetting the conventional wisdom of some realm of activity, re-conceiving it, and thinking out the consequences. This alone generates new ideas capable of inspiring people.

But most people have no taste for thinking, much less thinking in depth. They see thinking and doing — and especially creative doing — as opposed. To this sensibility, disciplined thought and research — anything that seems to question or negate can only encumber the creative process, which is understood to be purely positive. So the method is brainstorm the maximum number of ideas possible — very deliberately excluding thought.

What comes from this process is usually large heaps of uninspiring cleverness, which gets translated into forgettable products, services and marketing.

Doing something really different requires a hell of a lot more than ingenuity. It requires the courage to take the preliminary step of “thinking different”, and then the faith to relentlessly execute upon the new thinking. We reject what comes before and after, and pay attention only to the easy middle part.

  • Before: Philosophy
  • Middle: Ideation
  • After: Operationalization

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The very deepest ideas draw us into the underworld of mind. To grasp them we must cross the river of forgetfulness, and then grope through limbo, without boundary stones, maps, compasses or stars to guide us. If we look back, all is lost. We are trapped in the old life, rooted to the institutional view, pillars of respectability.

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When we rethink how we think, we gain freedom of movement, first in mind, then in body.

Born againandagainandagain

Ideas

When a person has no idea of the role he plays in the construction of the world he inhabits, and he has no awareness of the deep changeability of  significance of the world, he is a naive realist.

If a person suddenly experiences a shift in the significance of the world, without recognizing the permanent possibility of yet more shifts, he will interpret this event as a lifting of the veil of illusion and the revelation of the true world, and he will become a naive realist for a second time.

Some people never get bored with lifting and shredding veils. Realism does not have a monopoly on naivety.

Practical philosophical reductionism

Anthropology, Design

Less than a month ago I observed I’d collected three anti-method books in my library: After Method, Beyond Method, Against Method, and noted the absence of Before Method, Within Method, For Method.

I forgot that I also own For and Against Method, which is half argument for method, and Truth and Method, which argues against the existence of any universally valid hermeneutic technique.

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I did not set out to collect books on method. I own these books because the concept of good method is one of the most effective (because it is the least questioned/questionable) vehicles for enforcing practical philosophical reductionism.

We fail to recognize how aggressive this is, partly because we tend to harbor a monistic orientation to “best”. We are seeking the best way, and if someone has already found it, we should set aside our own semi-articulate objections, preferences and intuitions and resist the temptation to “reinvent the wheel.”

This aligns with a general moral preference for self-effacement. We are eager to show that we can put our own preferences aside in the interest of a better outcome. This is admirable — if you’ve actually established the superiority of the less preferred method. But all too often we adopt a “pain, therefore gain” attitude that does nobody a bit of good.

Then, of course, many people don’t want to think philosophically. They just want to figure out what they’re doing, so they can get down to the doing. Thought is an unpleasant necessity that precedes making and executing plans. For such minds, method eliminates a lot of crap they didn’t want to do anyway. Re-considering method introduces unwelcome extra work of a kind they’d prefer not to deal with. It’s like making them slaughter the cow that will become their tasty cheeseburger. They’d rather just slap it on the grill, already.

Then finally there’s the “involvement anxiety” toward  participatory understanding that’s endemic to human sciences. We badly want to know without our own selves figuring into the equation. Even people who pride themselves on accounting for context when studying human subjectivity often want to subtract the themselves out of the context they do create — and must create — through their practice. A practitioner’s preference of method is taken to be a subjective impurity to be removed in the attempt to understand the others’ subjectivity more objectively.

It reminds me of a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities:

After a seven days’ march through woodland, the traveler directed toward Baucis cannot see the city and yet he has arrived. The slender stilts that rise from the ground at a great distance from one another and are lost above the clouds support the city. You climb them with ladders. On the ground, the inhabitants rarely show themselves: having already everything they need up there, they prefer not to come down. Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests and, when the days are sunny, a pierced, angular shadow that falls on the foliage.

There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

 

Specere

Etymology

Special – ORIGIN Middle English: shortening of Old French especial ‘especial’ or Latin specialis, from species ‘appearance’; literally ‘appearance, form, beauty,’ from specere ‘to look.’

Respect – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin respectus, from the verb respicere ‘look back at, regard,’ from re– ‘back’ + specere ‘look at.’

Inspect – ORIGIN early 17th cent.: from Latin inspect– ‘looked into, examined,’ from the verb inspicere (from in- ‘in’ + specere ‘look at’), or from its frequentative, inspectare.

Circumspect – ORIGIN late Middle English: from Latin circumspectus, from circumspicere ‘look around,’ from circum ‘around, about’ + specere ‘look.’

Suspect – ORIGIN Middle English (originally as an adjective): from Latin suspectus ‘mistrusted,’ past participle of suspicere, from sub- ‘from below’ + specere ‘to look.’

Despise – ORIGIN Middle English: from Old French despire, from Latin despicere, from de– ‘down’ + specere ‘look at.’

Continue reading Specere →

How to learn

Ideas

Unexpected events can be painful — but they are also instructive.

Following the trauma and disorientation of unexpected events, we go into learning mode. We study the unexpected event, explaining how it happened, cataloging its characteristics, identifying the early signs that the unexpected was about to happen.

Now we know how to expect the unexpected. We stay alert and vigilant and ready to respond.

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Innovation is a kind of unexpected event, and learning from innovation follows a similar pattern.

We usually find innovations a little implausible or unrealistic at first. Being new and unprecedented they don’t yet belong to reality as we’ve known it. (Think about everyone’s favorite example of radical innovation — how much ridicule was heaped upon it by precisely those who now celebrate its success.)

The innovations we admire most are the “disruptive” ones — the deep innovations that disorient and reorient our perceptions of what is realistic.

These deep innovations are the most instructive ones. Though at first glance disruptive innovations seem to burst into the world whole in flashes of intuition, closer scrutiny reveals that they generally owe their success to readily-discernible principles that had eluded us in the past — probably because we’d become engrained in the established ways of doing things.

These principles can be distilled into best practices and leveraged to create fresh new innovations.

And because these new innovations are founded on proven, well-established principles, we can justify them to sensible people who reject the squishy and subjective mythology of intuition and insight, and who demand a more objective, systematic and responsible approach to innovation.

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From the liner notes of the first Coolies album, which consisted entirely of Paul Simon covers:

Q: “Don’t the Coolies perform any original songs?”

A: “We do! Just ask Paul Simon — he wrote most of them.

 

 

An ideology of objectified ideologists

Ideas

Voegelin, from Autobiographical Reflections:

“…I have been called every conceivable name by partisans of this or that ideology. I have in my files documents labeling me a Communist, a Fascist, a National Socialist, an old liberal, a new liberal, a Jew, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Platonist, a neo-Augustinian, a Thomist, and of course a Hegelian — not to forget that I was supposedly strongly influenced by Huey Long. This list I consider of some importance, because the various characterizations of course always name the pet bete noire of the respective critic and give, therefore, a very good picture of the intellectual destruction and corruption that characterize the contemporary academic world. Understandably I have never answered criticisms of this kind; critics of this type can become objects of inquiry but they cannot be partners in a discussion.”

The practical danger of this type of statement (though it is undeniably true in some cases) is that it provides a ready-made attitude by which a conservative soul can automatically reject a whole swath of -isms (like Postmodernism) as suspected ideology simply for being associated (however loosely) with known ideologies, or to even dismiss a new and apparently non-nonsensical or irrational philosophical position that requires effort to understand.

This sort of out-of-hand exteriorized dismissal (as an object to observe and explain rather than  a fellow-I to hear out and learn from), is one of the most useful ideologist’s devices. And it prevents him from being a partner in a discussion because he’s too busy observing and inquiring into your true motives to hear what you’re trying to tell him.

 

Chain of differentiations

Brand, Design

Differentiated brands are rooted in differentiated offerings.

Differentiated offerings are rooted in differentiated strategies.

Differentiated strategies are rooted in differentiated operations.

Differentiated operations are rooted in differentiated organizational structures.

Differentiated organizational structures are rooted in differentiated roles.

Differentiated roles are rooted in differentiated personalities.

(By “differentiated personality”, I mean having a personality that doesn’t easily fit into a standard professional role definition.)

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Undifferentiated brands have things  easier.

They have an easier time explaining themselves because they conform to expectations customers have already learned from their competitors. They have an easier time explaining their offerings because the offerings differ from others by well-established attributes. (“Ours is cheaper.” or faster, or lighter, or easier to use, or whatever.) They don’t have to put too much work into strategy, nor do they have to take risks with untried approaches to solving new problem. Instead they can assemble their strategy from readily-available and well-proven best practices. The same is true for their operations and hiring. They’ll find ready-made employees with ready-made knowledge of how to do things, who can just plug right into place and do their thing with no training required, and no adjustment to idiosyncrasies. Plug the role into the hole, and flip the switch and out comes industry-standard deliverables.

For all these reasons, and more, few companies choose to differentiate. Entire industries lack real differentiated brands. And it all works out fine, until it stops working.