Keep on learning

Leafing through Mary Catherine Bateson’s “Willing to learn”, I discovered this passage, which speaks for itself:
“Biologists used to talk about the fact that human beings are what is called neotenous, which is to say that we never grow up. Thank heaven for that! If you look at a baby chimp, it’s almost identical to an infant human being, but it’s smarter and it develops and learns faster. But at a certain point, the chimp grows up and becomes less responsive. The shape of the skull changes, and the adult chimp is less like a human being, although very smart in many ways, less willing to learn, less willing to develop trusting relationships. Human babies are born extraordinarily immature and dependent, and our whole system of adaptation and survival as a species depends on the fact that we are cared for intensively over a long period of time. It is because of this that we can have an adaptation based on so much learning and we’ve been able to move over the entire surface of the planet, learning new adaptations – inventing science and technology and things of that sort – instead of following built-in instinctive programs.”
(From “You will know the future when you get there” by Mary Catherine Bateson, “Willing to learn: passages of Personal Discovery”, Steerforth Press, 2004, pp85-86 ISBN 1-58642-080-1 )

Freedom matters

Yesterday I listened to a fascinating conversation between Paul Miller and Clay Shirky at Demos – some good questions from Paul Miller and lots of important insights from Shirky – do listen yourself. Later that day I visited Hugh Macleod’s gapingvoid where he had a great link to an interview with Shirky in the Gothamist, some four years ago. His answer to the question, what will change the world, is worth reproducing in full:
“The thing that will change the future in the future is the same thing that changed the future in the past — freedom, in both its grand and narrow senses.
The narrow sense of freedom, in tech terms, is a freedom to tinker, to prod and poke and break and fix things. Good technologies — the PC, the internet, HTML — enable this. Bad technologies — cellphones, set-top boxes — forbid it, in hardware or contract. A lot of the fights in the next 5 years are going to be between people who want this kind of freedom in their technologies vs. business people who think freedom is a shitty business model compared with control.
And none of this would matter, really, except that in a technologically mediated age, our grand freedoms — freedom of speech, of association, of the press — are based on the narrow ones. Wave after wave of world-changing technology like email and the Web and instant messaging and Napster and Kazaa have been made possible because the technological freedoms we enjoy, especially the ones instantiated in the internet.
The internet means you don’t have to convince anyone that something is a good idea before trying it, and that in turn means that you don’t need to be a huge company to change the world. Microsoft gears up the global publicity machine its launch of Windows 98, and at the same time a 19 year old kid procrastinating on his CS homework invents a way to trade MP3 files. Guess which software spread faster, and changed people’s lives more?
So while things like FCC regulation of the internet have that MEGO quality (My Eyes Glaze Over), they matter, a lot, because the only way for 19 year olds to change the world in this medium is to give them the freedom to ignore all previous work to date, and come up with something new.”

Control the elegance of your behaviour

Despite my rather snotty remarks in my last post about going to Bryan Appleyard’s interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb yourself if you wanted to read the bits about the value of tinkering and why you shouldn’t trust people who wear ties I couldn’t resist quoting Taleb’s top life tips here. (which includes a bit about ties:
1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.
2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.
3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.
4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.
5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.
6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.
7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).
8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants… or (again) parties.
9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.
10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.”

And now you’ve read this do go the interview here, lots of good stuff.

Tinkering intellectually

I’ve just enjoyed an interview with Nassim Nicholas Taleb by Bryan Appleyard. Well worth reading. I particularly liked the bits about the value of tinkering and why you shouldn’t trust people who wear ties. I was going to include those extracts in this post, but now you’ll have to go to the article yourself read them. (A quick google showed that the tinkering bit had been well covered in many blogs.)
Instead I’m going to quote a bit from Taleb’s Notebooks, number 33 to be exact, which I stumbled upon in my googling and may have less exposure:
“It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well… I am involved in an activity called “glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles  flâner which has this perambulation part; though glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia).
Glander is how I write my books, how I brew ideas. Remarkably it best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity. Newton was my kind of a “glandeur”; In [Dijksterhuis 2004]:
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that  “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating.  Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”“
(I am assuming the Dijksterhuis quote that I have put in italics is from “Think different: The merits of unconscious thought in preference development and decision making”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 586–598)

Something very close to grace

“… The ability to pay attention, to focus, to concentrate, to resist distractions, is as essential to the design process as it is to successful life in general. It is the quality of attention that distinguishes design detail, that enables an architect to design a building that belongs where it is. For attention to detail does not mean fussiness, but an appropriate locating of energies.
In the end, it is something very close to grace.”
Ralph Caplan, “Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects”, Fairchild Publications, 2006, pp247
ISBN 1 56367 390 8

Time to revisit Toffler?

The other day I was walking down to the shops, pondering why I had become so optimistic about the future of the human race, when the name “Alvin Toffler” popped into my mind. Now I hadn’t thought about Toffler for a long time – in fact I assumed that he was one of those once fashionable figures who had since disappeared from public consciousness. Doing a little, quick research I found his and his wife and co-author, Heidi’s, website, which showed that they were still producing books, making public appearances and so on.
But, before I began my research I dug out a battered copy of his “Third Wave”, which was first published twenty eight years ago. In some respects it shows its age, but the characteristic that I suspect prompted his name to pop into my head still holds. Maybe it’s because of his Marxist background (long since renounced), but he is very good at capturing the ebb, flow, contradictions and clashes of the human activity that make up and shape our world.
You get some sense of this in a quote I used a couple of times way back when in “As We Might Learn: Vannevar Bush where are you now?” and “Managing Creativity” from his “Previews and Premises”, which was my favourite of his early books, which I found much sharper than some of his other writing because it is in the form of a dialogue between him and the left-leaning South End Press:
“It’s the computer – but it’s not just the computer. It’s the biological revolution – but it’s not just the biological revolution. It’s the shift in energy forms. It’s the new geopolitical balance in the world. It’s the revolt against patriarchy. It’s credit cards plus video games plus stereo plus Walkman units. It’s localism plus globalism. It’s smart typewriters and information workers and electronic banking. It’s the push for decentralization. At one end it’s the space shuttle – at the other the search for individual identity. It’s flex-time and robots and the rising militancy of black and brown and yellow people on the planet. It’s the combined impact of all these forces converging on and shattering our traditional industrial way of life. Above all, it’s the acceleration of change, itself, which marks our moment in history.”
Alvin Toffler, “Previews and Premises”, Pan Books Ltd, 1984 ISBN 0 330 28421 5
Flicking through “The Third Wave” I found a number of prescient passages, but since I hate typing out other people’s text I’ll restrict my quotes to this one, which seems the most pertinent to our situation now:
“The responsibility for change, therefore, lies with us. We must begin with ourselves, teaching ourselves not to close our minds prematurely to the novel, the surprising, the seemingly radical. This means fighting off the idea-assassins who rush forward to kill any new suggestion on the grounds of its impracticality, while defending whatever now exists as practical, no matter how absurd, oppressive, or unworkable it may be. It means fighting for freedom of expression – the right of people to voice their ideas, even if heretical.
Above all, it means starting this process of reconstruction now, before the further disintegration of existing political systems sends the forces of tyranny jackbooting through the streets, and makes impossible a peaceful transition to twenty-first century democracy.
If we begin now, we and our children can take part in the exciting reconstitution not merely of our obsolete political structures, but of civilization itself.
Like the generation of the revolutionary dead, we have a destiny to create.”
Alvin Toffler, “The Third Wave”, Pan Books, 1981, pp453, ISBN 0 330 26337 4

Just driftin’

“Those of us who aspire to a life of Purposive Drift, try to cultivate habits of mind that allow us, from time to time, to seek experiences that reveal opportunities for well-being that lie outside our immediate context or sit concealed and unnoticed within the pattern of our everyday lives. Habits of mind that encourage us to think of our lives as a series of experiments that provide valuable information about what we like and what we don’t, what we value and what we shun, and what we want and what we don’t. Valuable information that informs how we make it up as we go along and takes account of the richness and variety of the world in which we live.”
I wrote this about eighteen months ago. Things looked very different then. For a start, I had no idea that a year later I would find myself caught up in issues around my health or rather lack of it, which has impacted fairly heavily on the kind of experiments in living I have been able to conduct.
The other stuff, collapsing house prices, threats of recession and so on I had been anticipating – that wasn’t rocket science, busts always follow booms. I had even made plans to insulate my family and myself from some of its effects. Like many such plans the tricky bit is getting the timing and the details of a coming crisis right. Like most people, that’s the bit I invariably get wrong and like many others got wrong this time too.
So whereas at the time I wrote that passage I was anticipating some major shifts in my context and a whole new set of things to explore, instead, eighteen months later I find myself more else in the same place with the central issue being getting by.
But the big surprise for me, which I still find hard to articulate, is the way that I am seeing the waves of bad economic and financial news as being a positive process opening up spaces for new ways to think about and act in the world. Stuff that has been bubbling away under the surface for years if not decades is now seeming ever more relevant. Voices of people, who have been out of the mainstream, such as Russell Ackoff, Jane Jacons, Geoffrey Vickers, Gregory Bateson and Meg Wheatley, indeed all those people from many different fields, who have been thinking in terms of systems and networks.
So here we are in the middle of 2008 and quite unexpectedly I find myself feeling that we are entering one of the most exciting periods in human history, The transition from a civilisation based on selling the family silver – consuming fossil fuels that took ten of thousands of years to form in some thing like two centuries – to a civilisation with some kind of long term future is one that will require all the creativity, imagination and enterprise we can muster. But what an exciting, inspiring project.
Of course, we may have left it too late, but despite all the obstacles, I am still optimistic that we will muddle through.
Which is more or less how I feel about my own future. My nice neat plans may have crumbled and with them the easy solutions have all evaporated. Now it is time for a bit of improvised getting by, bracketing the anxieties that accompany getting by and cultivating a mode of just driftin’ in an alert kind of way, watching out for those unexpected opportunities that a bit of driftin’ invariably reveal.