[ba-unrev-talk] Re: Just the facts.
OK, now I've stopped laughing at myself I'll try and articulate better what I
meant. (01)
I have the kind of brain that tends towards a high degree of coherence.
Everything has to fit together as a whole. If I encounter incongruent evidence
sometimes it takes me days or weeks for my mind to rejig everything so that it's
coherent again. It's not that I'm not open to change, just that assimilation of
new information is an involved process. On the positive side it tends to lend me
a lot of power to exert on matters that call for sophisticated modelling of the
situation. While other people reach for tools to aid their thinking I can often
just think.
So, the theory goes, when I start thinking about how to solve world problems,
everything in my head is neat and lined up, and the problems outside are all
messy and poorly understood, and the task for me is to move my comprehension of
the mess to the point where I see it as a system and not as a poorly understood
mess. Once I've done that I will start to see solutions. Seen in that light,
human wobbliness (to use a neutral term) becomes something that has to be
accounted for, factored in, made predictable. That's fine, as long as it's part
of the model building in my head and not a projection outward.
Now, I also have creative tendencies. So I would add the following analogy to my
model. Imagine I sit down to play a Beethoven sonata on the piano (for the
record I can't play it really), but my playing is truly wobbly. Someone comes up
to me and says, "Great jazz, man!" By sheer chance someone recorded my playing
and my latest jazz composition becomes a hit. Can I replicate the performance?
Not a chance, but apparently it was great jazz when it happened. (02)
So, when I take the time to see, error and creativity look like the same human
tendency - wobbliness - placed in different circumstances. Sometimes though, my
model building tendencies override my ability to see the wobbliness of others in
a given context as essentially human and something to build into the model rathe
r than something to squash out. And when I take my desire to squash the awkward
stuff out, and look at it in another light, I'm just being a wobbly human
myself. I must be more careful about having fearsome expectations of others. (03)
Perhaps extra slack-giving is something we need to build into our future social
systems. Maybe many of our systems even need to be built to capture errors as a
source of creativity. (04)
Yours, in penitent wobbliness,
--
Peter (05)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gerald Pierce" <g_pierce@pacbell.net>
To: <ppj@concept67.fsnet.co.uk>
Sent: Saturday, October 05, 2002 5:07 PM
Subject: Just the facts. (06)
> I accept your appology, though for the life of me, I haven't a clue what it is
> for. Perhaps I need another dose of coffee. It is just that I value what you
> have to say and it seems to me that there is more of use to the group (or at
> least to me) in back of your comment. GER
>
>
> (07)