Design systematizes both inter-subjective and objective components, where engineering systematizes non-subjective components.
(This is the latest version of an iterating thought.)
Category Archives: Philosophy
Brand and pluralism
The free market is at least partially redeemed by the emergence and development of brand positioning. Brand positioning is strategic pluralism.
Morality and experiment
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?
No use for useless
“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.
Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine
This ought to be useful: Special thanks to my good friend, caffeine.
From the classic animated short Ah, L’Amour.
Innovation
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-logic
“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.
Plans
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.
Lost quote
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.
Curious and curiouser
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.
The crucial skillset
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 and design
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.
Cat-agoraphobic political statement
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.
Scientific Method vs Lean Startup
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:
- Hypothesis formation. Hypotheses are not just guesses which can be tested experimentally. Hypotheses are informed guesses, and it is on-the-ground-discovery that informs mere guesses and transforms them into hypotheses. Starting with a hypothesis rather than some dude’s random notion can reduce development cycles. Also, some ideas are so weak that no amount of pivoting will tweak it to awesomeness.
- Theory. Theory in science is what directs experimentation and lends knowledge a progressive thrust. Without an appropriate theory, experiment devolves into aimless and fragmentary trial-and-error. This kind of aimlessness and fragmentation in a business context translates to confusing and disjointed products. It is not that Lean Startup does not accumulate knowledge, but that its “validated learning” is too product-centric and not nearly user-centric enough. Lean Startups know everything there is to know about their own product and the possible permutations of their product and the customer behaviors and reported opinions about the product, but insights into the user’s inner life and outer context — the things that inspire the best design ideas — will not readily surface using Lean Startup methods.
- Crisis. Without the rigor of theory and the discipline of reflection, the kinds of problems that produce revolutionary solutions cannot come into view. Teams will hack their ways right past the crises that and miss the chance to find simple radical product insights. This is the precise point where philosophy can become a competitive secret weapon. According to Wittgenstein “A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’. Isn’t innovation all about finding, posing and solving such problems?
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.
I and I
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.
Abstract
Abstraction benefits from proximity to concreteness.
Freshly-abstracted abstractions are better than frozen concentrates, powders and artificially-flavored concoctions.
What is
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.
Otherwisdom code
To be know and live on terms with what could be otherwise means:
- To be alert to the permanent possibility of surprise.
- To embrace the anxiety of listening to stark otherness.
- To show hospitality to truths that await invitation to enter.
- To be faithful to mute realities that speak only in experiment.
- To respect every thing as the heart of an everything.
- To remember that every single time “this time is different.”
This practical knowledge of actualizing what might be otherwise can be called otherwisdom.
Faith
Faith is the strategic deployment of ignorance.
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Faith is less about the positive assertions that appear to constitute it than the will-diluting concerns it excludes.
Faith defines a way of life: a what-matters / what-does-not-matter, a what-one-does-do / what-one-does-not-do, a what-is / what-is-not. A separating of finite concerns from infinite non-concerns. A de-finition, a rendering of finitude.
Faith is easiest for those blessed with incuriosity, inexperience or absence of intellectual conscience.
Does it sound to you like I am disparaging faith, oh you of little faith, you who are anxious and troubled by innumerable hassles? The faithless are scattered, centerless, skinless, bleeding indiscriminately.
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So many things I want to not know.
Foot, eye, hand, heart and head
I’m working on a simple framework for aguiding the instauration of individual and collective common sense.
Foot: Where have you (and others) stood within the situation, and where are you standing now?
Eye: What are you (and others) trying to observe?
Hand: How are you (and others) acting on the situation?
Heart: Why do you (and others) feel the situation ought to be changed (or not changed)?
Head: How are you (and others) conceptualizing the situation?
The interaction and interrelation of all these elements is indispensable to understanding. Every element of common sense must participate — foot, eye, hand, heart and head — or we end up with an ungodly soup: dissociated chunks of non-common private sense floating in a broth of common nonsense.