In college I split the things I cared about into two categories:
Being a young rationalist, I sided against my loves, for things of which I approved.
This lasted into my mid-30s. Starting on my 34th birthday, under the influence of Nietzsche I switched allegiances to what I loved.
Now I am back again, though in a less severely dichotomous form.
I still love Nietzsche, but my allegiance is with John Dewey.
This is a redrawing of a diagram I played with in 2009. It is meant to show the relationship of making and understanding and how it weaves between thinking top-down in wholes, and then bottom-up in terms of parts. It was originally inspired by learning (from Richard J. Bernstein’s Beyond Objectivism and Relativism) that the hermeneutical circle was based on a model from rhetoric theory.
Design systematizes both inter-subjective and objective components, where engineering systematizes non-subjective components.
(This is the latest version of an iterating thought.)
The free market is at least partially redeemed by the emergence and development of brand positioning. Brand positioning is strategic pluralism.
What is the pragmatic “cash value” of a person’s moral vision? I propose this: Where is that person motivated or resistant to experiment, at what cost and at what risk?
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Where: What possibilities of reality does the experimenter wish to investigate and bring to light? These possibilities can range from definite hypotheses or questions to indefinite intuitions of potential.
Cost: How much does the experimenter propose to invest or save, and who pays for doing the experiment and who pays for not doing it?
Risk: What level of unpredictability is the experimenter ready to tolerate?
“Having no use” for something has less to do with that thing’s uselessness than the quality of one’s own understanding and hopes. To the extent one understands, everything may be relevant, and to the degree one hopes everything may be problematic.
As we realize that everything, every thing and everyone is potentially relevant and problematic we lose the capacity for violence — and for this reason understanding and hope should be tempered by humility. We are all living things, after all, and we must eat, defend ourselves, and fight for what matters to us. To deny this fact completely is hubris, but to surrender to this fact is base.
To aspire to humanity is to live suspended.
This ought to be useful: Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine.
From the classic animated short Ah, L’Amour.
One of my all-time favorite quotes comes from Wittgenstein: “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’ ” I love it for two reasons. First, it shows how philosophy is not an archaic style of theoretical speculation that has been supplanted by science. Philosophy is a perpetual discovery of new scientific turf. Philosophy pioneers what science settles and builds up.
But the other thing I love about the quote is it shows where philosophy can fit into the practical activities of everyday life. If you can’t intellectually move about in a problem space, you can’t work consciously and methodically. But what is innovation than looking for these areas? To extend my pioneering metaphor, in any exploration of innovative possibilities, philosophers ought to be brought along as guides to help navigate and map the territory.
“Why” is not logical; every “why” is a logic.
Until a person’s why-logic is understood that person’s beliefs, behaviors and feelings will seem illogical.
The grasping of a why-logic and the consequent grokking of a world via that why-logic is insight, in the most precise sense of the word.
It is an unfortunate habit of speech that has us say “insight into” another person. We should say we have “insight out from” a person.
I saw a quote last week that said something like “Nothing happens according to plan — but nothing happens without a plan.” I can’t remember the source.
I saw a quote recently that said something like “Nothing goes according to plan, but nothing happens without a plan.” I can’t find it, now.
No marginal status of any kind automatically bestows deeper knowledge. Only an urgent need to understand, followed by active pursuit of understanding yields such knowledge.
What is different about my opinions? Why the difference? How does the difference arise and manifest? How do I bridge the difference with others? How do others suppress my difference, and how do I resist or overcome this? How do I know when I am suppressing the difference of another? How does this dynamic work in general? What are the ethical implications? Why would any person who does not have to ever want to embrace an ethic of respect of the marginal? Can I count on my own loyalty to this ethic if I it carries me to a position of dominance? Should I remain loyal to it…?
Any person who stops trying to understand others and otherness through reflective practice, not as a solitary meditation is going to dwindle in insight, and as the blessed anxiety subsides comforting clarity floods the knowing subject with the blessings of faith: confidence, determination and uncanny charisma.
I lack capacity to how I am not right, therefore I am right.
I have good reason to disregard what my enemies say to me.
Everyone agrees with me on this — everyone who matters.
Know how to form grounded innovative hypotheses.
Know how to craft the cheapest, fastest and most informative experiments.
Know how to find and use perplexities.
Know how to think through and design out new logics from new perspectives.
Know how to observe, learn and respond across a range of developmental stages: from the broadest and fuzziest to the minutest and most precise.
Engineering develops systems of interacting objects.
Design develops systems of interacting subjects and objects.
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When we engineer systems that ought to be designed, the systems we create demand subjective beings to function as objects. Algorithmic rule-following replaces free choice.
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Social engineering has always been a horror. Social design might be our salvation.
I acknowledge only voluntary political identities, and I condemn all involuntary identifications.
Every individual American has the right to make political alliances according to his or her own ideals, and it is on this alone the individual should be judged.
If the political body you’ve chosen to join and identify with imposes political identities on other groups defined by race, sex, class, orientation, or any other non-voluntary classification, for any reason no matter what the justification (including imputed capacities or incapacities, genes, essences, spirits, lineages, legacies, texts, behavioral probabilities, etc.) politically you are not my friend. I don’t care which direction your racism or sexism or chauvinism or xenophobia points, or why you point it in that direction. The problem is not the target — it is the targeting.
I’m prepared to be politically isolated and to suffer the consequences for refusing to treat enemies who resemble me in irrelevant ways as natural allies. I have only artificial allies: people who collaborate with their own natures to overcome mere nature to become super-natural, and who affirm other’s attempts to do the same.
In his instant-classic The Lean Startup, Eric Ries restores some crucial components of the Scientific Method to innovation processes, long-neglected by “scientific” management. Among his most important restorations is the the experimental practices that are the heart of scientific discovery. This is enormously important: without experiment, the creative dimension of science is lost and “scientific rigor” of quantification becomes an expensive, time-consuming and intrinsically conservative hindrance to doing anything unprecedented.
However, I do not believe that Ries has restored the entirety of the Scientific Method, and for the sake of setting up an unimpeded engineering-dominated process, has omitted or de-emphasized key non-engineering components that improve outcomes and shorten timelines. Here is a partial list of omissions:
I’m going to read as much as I can about Scientific Method and develop this thought further and support it with some research. But I’ve been sitting on this idea too long, and I wanted to at least sketch it out.
When spoken, I is the most constant of constants.
When heard, I is the most variable of variables.
I is the extreme of particulars. (I, the subject of a sentence.)
I is the extreme of universals. (I, the one who utters this sentence.)
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At the heart of ambinity, where the dance of opposites is a frenetic blur, I says I to one who is not oneself.
Abstraction benefits from proximity to concreteness.
Freshly-abstracted abstractions are better than frozen concentrates, powders and artificially-flavored concoctions.
What is true, what is actual, what is real, what ought to be – these are all different ways to be, and they are perpetually confused.
To be know and live on terms with what could be otherwise means:
This practical knowledge of actualizing what might be otherwise can be called otherwisdom.