process

We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. # This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront. Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into [...]

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Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration… This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of [...]

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The whole process relies on failure. People have to be willing to accept failure and admit to mistakes, or the process won’t work properly. If we artificially hide information to deny failures — whether it’s done in the name of positive thinking or is simply a manifestation of anti-social self-interest — then the process becomes [...]

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Picking up the Thinking in the 21st Century thread again… I’m nearing the end of the most philosophical stuff. It all turns on this one… Just a reminder to read this as a proposal — a basis for refinement and elaboration (not to mention citations and evidence), not presuming finality. A few weeks ago I [...]

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Continuing the previous discussion of object bias and conceptions of time… As a very rough rule of thumb I like to apply a kind of generalized version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: “the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely…” [via SEP] Applied to social and economic models, [...]

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Things Happen Because Time Exists

by Brian on 12-08-2009

in concepts

Diving in even further over my head, here’s further elaboration of the philosophy I use. 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 [...]

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Here’s Chris Brogan’s talk on serendipity at last week’s Web 2.0 Expo, here’s my earlier one relating to generativity, and here’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of serendipity & generativity in action on Twitter: No, they’re not on the same list, nor are Jeff Jarvis and The Clever Sheep ever normally in the same [...]

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Selection is a natural; so is categorizing; so is ranking; so is list-making. We owe a lot of great things to the human tendency to rank & classify. We wouldn’t have science (and therefore we wouldn’t have a whole bunch of other things)… Think of biology and chemistry. Unfortunately, it also means discriminating. A list isn’t so much about [...]

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After the Google Wave announcement in May I went in to work all excited to share the awesomeness with my colleagues — one of whom caught me off-guard by asking, “Ok, so what good is that?“ My first thought was, “Hmmm, obviously I didn’t stress how awesome it’s going to be.” Then I realized maybe we’re [...]

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Driving Processes

by OpenConceptual on 07-30-2009

in commentary,concepts

You will hear people talking about “latency,” which means the delay between a trading signal being given and the trade being made. Low latency — high speed — is what banks and funds are looking for. Yes, we really are talking about shaving off the milliseconds that it takes light to travel along an optical [...]

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Processing Deliberative Democracy

by OpenConceptual on 07-28-2009

in concepts

I’m becoming a real fan of Daniel Little’s UnderstandingSociety blog. Here he considers “how good is deliberative democracy?”: The approach that starts and ends with voting among alternatives has a major shortcoming: no one gets a chance to make persuasive arguments to other citizens; no one has the opportunity of having his/her own beliefs challenged; [...]

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Fluid Factors of Success

by OpenConceptual on 07-06-2009

in commentary

If you haven’t read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel yet, you should (full disclosure: I’ve read a lot about it but it’s on my to-read list as well). At the Change.org Social Entrepreneurship blog, Nathaniel Whittemore lays out the book’s basic premise… The essence of the argument is a total rejection of the notion [...]

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