The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world»
Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have not caught up to the technologies and practices of our age.
We live in a world that consists of distributed, decentralized, and constantly-changing networks of real-time connections, but we still think in terms of simple one- and two-dimensional polarities, velocities, pressures, and collisions.
It’s like we’re trying to draw three-dimensions without knowing anything about linear perspective. It would be easy if someone could just show us the tricks — but nobody has quite figured those out yet.
Overcoming the old habits, learning new ones, is an incremental process. Think of it as replacing planks on a platform one-by-one rather than tearing the whole thing down. We still need something to base our thinking on, it’s impossible to simply clear everything away at once. Or you can think of this as either bootstrapping or disentanglement: we need to get the new ideas through the old; ratcheting ourselves up gradually, using the old habits as leverage for learning new ones.
Specifically, digital media needs to serve as a metaphor for appreciating the new ideas about human nature; at the same time, the updated understanding of human nature is required to fully appreciate a socially dynamic world connected by digital media… back-and-forth until both aspects become intuitive.
The series itself was inspired by a more recent post about social media and the creative/intellectual cycle»
Everyone has a slightly different interpretation, with a slightly different vocabulary (that is constantly evolving). Batches of books keep coming out that say essentially the same things in different ways, suited to slightly different needs (which is natural). There’s a lot of corroboration and consistency but it’s mostly tacit and subjective, difficult to get an objective grasp on.
So when we find ourselves in disagreement — like Chris Brogan and Robert Scoble recently have (see here and here) — we have to be nice to each other, agree to disagree, and wait for new features to come along and reframe the disagreement or make it irrelevant. We lack the basis for objectively placing each other’s interpretations in relation to each other.
Most disagreements don’t even matter very much because people inhabit different spaces within the domain. That helps everyone get along, but a lack of friction also indicates a lack of scientific traction. There’s no rigorous, canonical framework for figuring out who’s right and decisively eliminating the bad ideas (other than watching them try and fail).
There’s little in the way of unifying structure — no definitive map, no architecture that shows exactly how everything connects.
We’re well into the digital age but still camped in tents.
That might be acceptable (and probably necessary for a time) but I don’t think it’s optimal or sustainable. It has to change eventually.
A new lightning rod
There’s a lot of electricity in the air.
It’s going to ground itself somehow — whether we wait for sparks to fly or whether we construct some kind of theory, structure, or apparatus for conducting it in the most generative (or least destructive) way.
But it isn’t just about social media or even the web. I’ve been working on the “grounding” thing since well before I began blogging. The web definitely factored into it, but as one of many other cultural aspects, e.g. as I wrote in my first post, a week after the start of 2007’s credit crisis that transpired towards 2008’s financial collapse… I expressed concern that our ideas are on the same shaky ground»
It’s the same with ideas as it is with money: it isn’t wise to go from fad to fad, investing with borrowed wealth; we need long-term vehicles for learning and understanding that retain some of their value when markets lose their footings — or rather, such long-term enterprises are the stabilizing force that markets need.
I’m referring to both ‘knowledge markets’ and financial markets: the former is a foundation for the latter…
To address arguments that thinking is a waste of time and action is universally superior to theory, I made a case for why ideas need to be managed» (while accepting it’s ok if most people don’t want to do it).
This idea of investing in and managing ideas was elaborated most fully in a post outlining a new kind of pragmatism»
Think of how much life goes by without being harnessing for educational or intellectual use. There are ways to turn anything towards more generative, sustainable, and manageable ends. All experience is in a sense learning experience, but it is predominantly undisciplined and unproductive; we tend to let most things come and go without effecting us or our ideas and habits.
Meanwhile, we allow ideas and habits become important parts of our lives without accounting for them. We learn some of our most influential habits, preferences, and beliefs by accident. Most people have no clue how these were formed, nor would they know how to evaluate or correct them. When these habits, preferences, and beliefs are challenged, people will stand up for “who they are,” they’ll go to war over “what they believe,” but they are hardly able to make any account of the sources of their identity or beliefs, nor make the even the minutest adjustments needed to turn a destructive confrontation into a generative conversation. Instead, most people are content merely to be “who they are,” and “agree to disagree” with anyone who’s different. This goes nowhere.
The ultimate good of pragmatism is not profit or truth; the ultimate good of pragmatism is social. Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.
A ‘pragmatic plasticity’ is required to be both tough and soft – rigid at times and malleable at others. On one hand we need to use hard facts and rules to avoid or overcome subjective excesses. On the other hand, the desired aim of life is subjective well-being and freedom.
So I’m going to suggest a couple of terms to describe two complementary aspects of the pragmatic approach to working, learning, and living: ‘open objectivity’ and ‘tempered subjectivity.’ Tempered subjectivity is the supposed end, and open objectivity is the means to that end.
Open objectivity recognizes that we can’t accomplish anything together unless we have hard structures and facts to serve as common points of reference. When disputes arise, we need to be able to say, “Well, let’s see how X turns out, then we’ll know if either one of us is right.” But this is no way to enjoy life; merely knowing what’s right and following hard rules is not the whole point of living, so this objectivity needs to be open-ended, incomplete, liberating.
The point of working, learning, and living in those objective structures is to develop enough personal knowledge and competence so that we’re not totally bound by those structures. The aim is to learn how to make spontaneous decisions and evaluations that are just as fair and effective as those calculated by objective instruments. This is what I mean by tempered subjectivity, whereby free thinking has been (in)formed by objective structures and facts, and those structures and facts are always readily available to keep thinking from wandering back towards past mistakes.
Creative freedom is both experienced as enjoyable in itself and serves practical necessity – just like owning your own home. At its simplest, a good and happy life is about having the freedom (which, don’t forget, also means having security and stability) to enjoy spontaneous moments of beauty, discovery, laughter, and love.
At the same time, emergencies and surprises inevitably occur, whether we want them to or not, and these cannot totally be accounted for by objective means in advance. The most effective response to new realties is performed by people who have been trained to just know what to do without being paralysed by analysis.
Ultimately, a society of human minds is smarter than anything we could ever design. But our minds can’t function without conceptual facilities, and these facilities are designed. If they’re designed poorly, we think poorly; if they’re designed well, we think well.
A lot of what I’ve written since then is an attempt to refine and rephrase and illustrate those points in relevant contexts. Most prominent is my attempt to frame web as our way to understanding»
I’ve been learning a lot more from the web than merely web-stuff — and so have you, whether you know it or not.
First, our tools, activities and surroundings literally teach us how to think. We constantly absorb metaphors and images that go on to inform our intuition and reason. [...]
In the past, the most dominant metaphors in civic and commercial spheres were from machines, war, and sports. Now the metaphors are becoming more organic (e.g. concepts like “streams” and “cloud computing”). As life and work gets more networked and dynamic via the web, life and work via the web also supplies the metaphors for making sense of the new structures and systems.
Like nothing else, social media provides a working model of life’s yin and yang»
Imagine there are two essential aspects of everything (that go by many names): space and time, body and soul, object and subject, rest and motion, permanence and change, solid and fluid, stable and dynamic, being and becoming, existence and experience…
These two aspects exist for each-others’ sake. Space couldn’t happen without time, while time couldn’t be measured or observed without space. The object can’t exist without a subject experiencing it, while the subject couldn’t experience without the existence of objects, etc.
Think in the practical terms of the web: if a site isn’t used, then it dies; if an event occurs but doesn’t leave a permanent record, then it dies too. The optimal arrangement is events-generating-artifacts, artifacts-generating-events.
The importance of the subjective, moving, living aspect should be self-evident: we’ve all experienced it — especially people who’ve nurtured relationships online before meeting in person…
Conversely, we sometimes forget how important it is to make permanent stuff. It’s more of a long-term investment (or maybe just an insurance policy that could never pay off — but just might…), the benefits of which aren’t immediately evident. It’s great to just enjoy life but activities that generate artifacts and monuments tend to be the ones that spread, replicate, repeat, and survive.
If necessary, I’m not afraid to get deeply cosmological to address the life’s vital and flowing character»
To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all.
It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists.
I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous with the rest of experience.
If something weird happens — e.g. someone acts crazily, markets go haywire — rather than guessing wildly at causes or dismissing the event as completely unexplainable, we can start by reminding ourselves that “something had to happen” and organize our thoughts from there.
It isn’t so much an explanation as it is a way to overcome some of the old ideas and biases that prevent us from recognizing and understanding new opportunities. On the deepest level, we need to be careful we’re not resting on false assumptions of concrete objectivity»
There is no logic that compels us to explain everything logically, there is no purely objective account of why or how we can be purely objective; instead we have deep undeniable feelings that we must make ideas objectively explained.
Start with that simple fact and work backwards: instead of obeying the rules of objectivity, account for them.
Evolution is the ultimate explanation for all of our knowledge and beliefs.
It’s about what’s practical — whatever works in the long run, whatever manages to survive and succeed.
We’re the species that happened to acquire imagination and memory capable of transposing the real world into a conceptual world of symbols — abstract objects that aren’t subject to the physical laws of change and motion affecting the rest of reality.
The impulse for manipulating abstract objects and transposing them back into real-world action eventually developed into principles and laws, which in turn provided frameworks for civilizations.
Civilizations themselves are conceived as objects that come into contact with other communities — “the barbarians,” etc.
History indicates that (at least where and when the environment allowed), civilizations which accommodated the most complex systems of abstract objects tended to persevere and succeed over those that used less complex abstractions.
Occasionally there have been exceptional disruptions, but in general the civilizations which dominated have tended to have the most effective systems of ethics and discipline, the most sophisticated mastery of science and engineering, and the most powerful religious symbols.
A hypothetical pre-historic group that wasn’t comfortable with abstractions like “freedom” or “justice” (or “me” or “us” and “them” — or truth itself) may have been more empirically sound but they wouldn’t have been as effective at communicating and collaborating.
Such a group would have found it more difficult to surviving — especially if they lived in the same area as proto-humans better-developed systems for working, living, and fighting together.
But eventually our objective systems reach a point of diminishing returns.
At some point, rather than expanding, the system starts to require more and more energy to merely maintain the integrity of the structures, rules, and information they already have.
Large empires find themselves with infrastructure and other resources that need to be protected. Monuments deteriorate and need to be rebuilt. Institutions acquire their own momentum, making them difficult to steer.
Meanwhile knowledge accumulates and becomes hyper-specialized.
One teacher might have a hundred students, each working in their own narrow sub-specialty. When the teacher passes away there’s nobody left who remembers how all the paths once parted — and anyone who tries to reunify the field will have to contend with ninety-nine accusations of ignorance and meddling.
I’m afraid this is the point we’re at now: earlier generations built amazing things, but as we work with the ideas and institutions they passed onto us, nobody knows how how it all works together.
It’s time we take a close look at all of our ideas and institutions with an evolutionary appreciation.
The ideas and institutions of the past aren’t permanently true and good, they simply worked for some time. Now it’s time to reassess whether they’re still as generative and sustainable as they once were.
But we also need to be careful of new ideas and institutions.
We may recognize a problem but then become attracted to the first new abstraction that occurs to us — and sometimes we might be attracted to a new abstraction even while the old ones still work fine.
We have to assess every idea that occurs to us by reminding ourselves how powerfully attractive abstractions can be to our imaginations — especially the simplest and most obvious ones — and evaluate every idea with the question, “What are the real effects of this idea?”
Even the idea of object bias is subject to object bias, we have to consider this as well.
By turning the idea of object bias on itself you might send yourself in seemingly endless circles.
It might seem meaningless and futile.
It isn’t futile.
It’s possible, with practice, to overcome the discomfort of uncertainty. It’s possible to cultivate the habit of doubting ideas without dismissing them altogether. The hard-earned ability to manage ideas is more valuable than any idea will ever be.
Accept it and move forward, develop techniques to take advantage of concrete objectivity without trusting it absolutely»
It’s by working with the static slices of time and learning how to interpret them that we learn to understand what’s happening.
Understanding isn’t a thing we hold, it’s an activity we learn and maintain through practice.
It’s also worth considering that putting data and intuitions together isn’t just prescriptive, it’s descriptive; i.e. we never handle facts without affecting them with emotions or intuitions. [...]
That’s the ultimate verification or falsification we should be watching for: not just how accurate the ideas themselves are themselves, but how effective we are at managing our ideas.
That idea of managing effectiveness isn’t just prescriptive, it’s based on a basic fact that personal efficacy is what actually motivates and gratifies people»
A number of theories have extended that insight. Probably the most widely known is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of flow (1990), which means to become fully absorbed in a challenging-yet-doable activity that requires concentration and skill but seems effortless, involves goals, and generates constant feedback and growth.
Complementing flow is the notion of intrinsic motivation, specifically self-determination theory described by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985).
As with the ideas of White and Csikszentmihalyi, the need for competence is key to self-determination theory. Deci and Ryan also emphasized the importance of personal autonomy — i.e. to recognize that outcomes result from personal decisions, not from external interference.
Deci and Ryan also include the need for relatedness, or “organismic integration” — a process of assimilating environmental elements inwards and accommodating oneself back outwards to the environment.
The reason why those ideas from psychology have not had as much influence as they deserve in business, politics, economics, etc, is that we haven’t had the metaphors and models to make them intuitive.
But we do now — thanks to the social web and its well-defined networks of relationships and ongoing interactions. A couple of years ago I proposed we should think of ourselves as motivated by a kind of will to relevance»
The problem with the simplified good-evil accounts of human nature is that they treat people as hard, static, well-defined mechanical units — wealth maximizing machines — whereas our behaviour is affected by all kinds of dynamic, ongoing, subjective processes and interactions that are difficult to define and control.
So I stumbled on the term “relevance” to replace “power.” It’s essentially in the same spirit as Nietzsche’s original, but “relevance” changes the connotation fromdomination and control to connectedness and meaning. Mind you, connectedness and meaning may just happen to manifest itself as domination and control, but connectedness may also manifest itself as altruism, etc.
In my original notebook entry from March 1, 2005, I wrote that “the tendency of individuals persists to an (unknown) end of maximum social relevance — peer-level connections.”
Google’s search engine (especially PageRank) acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.
And it isn’t just the search engine itself. Witness all the effort that goes into maximizing websites’ “relevance” to increase and sustain traffic. It isn’t just search engine optimization: consider the absurd amount of friending on MySpace, whereby people accumulate tens or even hundreds of thousands of “friends”; or witness bloggers jockeying for “authority” ratings on Technorati by exchanging links and RSS feed subscriptions (which, if you read any of the countless blogs devoted to the topic of how to make your blog popular — another absurdity — too many bloggers seem to value stats far more than actual readers).
But relevance means more than just maximizing connections and links, it’s also about optimizing the appropriateness, context, integrity, vitality, richness, and reciprocity of those relations: it’s about how effective and alive our connections are. The value of the subjective relevance of “1000 True Fans” may be far greater than the value of the objective relevance of 10,000,000 “friends” in MySpace, or “authority” points on Technorati…
This is where I’m at… much more to come.
