This is a summary of my ISSS Workshop in Washington in June 2024.
“Divided by a Common Language
– or the Tyranny of the Explicit”
Workshop by Ian Glendinning
ISSS 68th Annual Meeting, Washington DC 2024
4:30pm to 6:00pm, Day 2, Tuesday 11th June 2024
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Introduction
The thesis of the session, very tersely, is that there is “more than science” and that the language of discourse doesn’t just favour the (E) explicit (objective, definitive, scientific, dialectic …) forms, but also effectively kills the discourse when attempting to introduce the value of the (I) implicit (embodied, humanistic, subjective, intuitive, dialogic …) forms and/or destroys much of the “I” value if it is modelled to fit the “E” forms of language.
This philosophical (epistemological) conflict or paradox is as old as philosophy itself and captured in never ending “footnotes to Plato” to this day, including (not least, say) the 1946 Macy Conferences origins of today’s complex (human) systems thinking community of which ISSS (and ACS and INCOSE) are a part.
But rather than debating 2500 years (or less than 100 years) of evolution of this epistemology, or the many competing “systems theories or methodologies” that might claim to address it, the scope and aim of this workshop was limited to simply finding some language consensus – just a few words – that might allow such “E & I inclusive” dialogue to progress.
The format of the session itself was a brief ~15 mins introductory presentation to the advertised topic with the remaining ~75 mins intended as “dialogic” discussion as opposed to the more usual “dialectic” Q&A / Critique. [See “Meta” comments below for the actual arrangements, which meant this intention was only partly achieved.]
This post / paper contains a transcript of the whole session as the source input to the discussions and findings that follow.
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Key Takeaways for Future
Paper / Workshop / Presentation(s)
as a Post-Note below.
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Full Presentation, Dialogue and Transcript
Source:
https://www.isss.org/2024-conference-washington-dc-members-page/
(The last session at the bottom of that page.)
Direct link to presentation ISSS2025GlendinningWorkshop.PPT
Direct link to video recording https://vimeo.com/981750071
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START
[Transcript from recording. Imperfect, not all participants named. If you recognise names / identities I’ve omitted or got wrong, please do feedback.]
[Ian Glendinning] Let’s Start. I know this isn’t an entirely random audience. I did hear someone say they were intrigued about what I might have to say, so that’s a promising start for me 🙂
And, after (the topics of several previous sessions), world peace, world hunger and replacing the entire global capitalist economic system, my topic is about a small piece of the world – “about this big” – just a few words in fact.
[So … Problems with presentation mode screen and microphones … ]
[Ian] I’m going to talk about language, a very small piece of language. My title was an attempt at humour, a nod to my being a Brit speaking English in the US, so in fact the subtitle is my real topic “The Tyranny of the Explicit”.
[Refer to the abstract] as my tersely encoded outline – the key word is the “Explicit” as opposed to the “Implicit” – all I intend to do is to un-pick / elaborate this outline for about 20 minutes. We’ve actually got about an hour and a half set-aside, maybe an hour given we’ve been delayed. But my plan was to talk only for 15 / 20 minutes because what I want to do once I’ve said what I need to say is to start a conversation, a dialogue beyond any clarifying Q&A.
[Language Slide] So, I’ve already mentioned, not just the two words Explicit (or Scientific) and the Implicit (or Humanistic) I’ve effectively set-up two camps (?) of people taking those two views, so I will be talking a little about camps and dividing lines.
The explicit [bullet] / The implicit [bullet] – you can read the list of suggested words.
Well, why have I been setting this up as two camps with these two views? [Later – I’m absolutely NOT suggesting this is a good model of the world, philosophical or practical. Unfortunate that I used the word “camps”!]
I’m reporting my direct career experience in Systems – hard, physical, infrastructure, energy, information & technology systems. And for the last 20 years I’ve been gradually moving into what I now realise is “Complex Systems Thinking” with systems as the actual (explicit) discipline, not just an incidental (implicit) part of what I did in engineering and management. There’s a CV / Bio section at the end if anyone wants to know more about me and my working experience, which I’m happy to come back to, but (as well as all the engineering-discipline-systems-specific experience) I have come across, working with and for INCOSE people so I have had a fair bit of exposure to Systems Engineering as a discipline, but it’s only really in the last two years that I took an interest in ISSS and I’ve been – Observing.
Observing how all these mini-symposia are given and shared and responded to, and I’m talking about seeing those people that take an explicit view of everything, expecting very explicit detailed answers versus those take a more humanistic view, whatever the actual topic is that we’re talking about. And I’ve seen in the dialogue (chat) if someone is getting very technical very detailed, and gets met with the more humanistic question, dare I say spiritual, question, as people have done, it tends to get met with silence. Or confusion. Or moving on to the next question. (Or like minded but parallel dialogue in the chat.) So I tend to see when these two camps come up against each other, the more one questions the other, it just becomes a dialogue killer.
So, the words I’ve chosen “The Tyranny of the Explicit” is actually a quote used by Dave Snowden, I think you know him, I’ve heard him mentioned a few times in our ISSS context? He quoted it most recently, but didn’t actually coin it. In fact it was originally coined by Johnnie Moore, another management consultant facilitator.
And another way of looking at it is that Requisite Variety includes necessary ambiguity. When we try to make everything explicit we actually lose a lot of the tacit – that’s all I’m hoping to convince you of before we have our conversation.
Making the tacit and implicit, objective and explicit obviously has its uses, because we can model things we couldn’t model without it. But it always loses something that was in the implicit, subjective – in the more natural language use of the term. So I’m really just talking natural language, and when I say language I really do mean just a few words, the ones I’ve already thrown up here and I really want is to talk about alternative uses of those words. So I’m NOT here talking about a full ontology, building an entire language for an entire system of systems, though I have done that as my day-job before (!) that’s not what I’m talking about here.
As we’ve seen here (in DC) and in many other presentations over the last couple of years, many people presenting taxonomies OF systems approaches, these kind of approaches to these kinds of approaches, to these kinds of approaches, etc, where … each approach has it’s own internal taxonomy as well as being part of a taxonomy of systems approaches.
So we see, people like Gary (Smith) have done a huge amount of work recently, pulling together enormous, comprehensive detail of every extant approach to the concept of systems. And he and others obviously have contributed to ISSS Education group and the Systems Engineering Body of Knowledge (SEBoK), which is also huge and full of valuable detail. The focus is on detail and the multiplicity / plurality of different approaches.
Coming down in scale, I find the Ramage and Shipp book, a summary of systems thinkers is very powerful just because it has a very simple way of grouping everybody who’s ever published on systems, into 7 broad categories.
Dave Snowden I’ve mentioned already, he has these 4 strategic contexts for approaches applicable to different contexts. In reality we are mostly focussed on the complex one anyway, so it’s mainly many metaphors with which to approach complexity.
Stuart Umpleby talks about it in terms of just the 3 fields and the relationships between those 3 fields – Cybernetics, Systems and Complexity – without getting too focussed on any one of them.
And in a recent presentation Arandzazau I thought did a really clever job of reducing to the epistemology questions – language and understanding – questions between Complexity and Cybernetics. I think she’s just using the word Cybernetics for systems thinking in general (as I do). She said some quite telling things for me – Reading from the slide.
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- “A standard definition of complexity would be absurd.”
- “Complexity starts where causality breaks down.”
- “Complexity as a language game”
Now, coming down [the list] we’ve got fewer and fewer dividing lines until just the one dividing line [in the epistemic approach]. And I call these [dividing lines] “#GoodFences” – comes from a Robert Frost quote – good fences make good neighbours. And also there’s the G K Chesterton quote about closing the gate (in a fence, that runs off out of sight) into the forest. The same story which is that the world is full of dividing lines. People have written “their” taxonomy across the landscape and across everything we deal with. And all these lines intersect and any taxonomy is essentially binary however complex your ontologies, everything is “this not that” divided into this not that, this not that (ad infinitum). So it’s naturally hierarchical when you get there. The key thing is every dividing line was put there for a purpose. It wasn’t drawn to cast in stone that everybody is that side or this side, the line was drawn for a purpose to distinguish between [issues in language for the person that drew it].
So I’m going to keep using this [Good Fences] expression.
So, with our theme of influence and responsibility, I thought I’d just try and relate it to this.
I’m always concerned when I see very explicit methodologies for intrinsic [implicit] contexts. In reality I think all of the systems of significant interest to us involve humanity and our wider ecosystems. So this complexity is of the highest order with psycho-social agents in the complex, living eco-system before we start, so they’re clearly of the highest order in terms of complexity, and if we can’t join up these two schools, two ways of looking at [our systems] I think we are letting the world down, by leaving half of our knowledge of the world out of our approaches. The two [explicit / implicit] things I’m arm-waving about.
So I’m contending – it’s a language game and it’s more than science.
The first thing I want to do is get us comfortable with the fact that we can talk about science and non-science. That’s my first dividing line.
And the second thing is, once we’ve done that, I want to bring up the words that I use earlier to describe these two sides and really have a conversation, about how much sense I’m making, whether It would be better with different words, which word(s) we should use in different contexts.
So these are just 3 restatements of my simple assertion and I don’t propose to read through them. The important thing is I’m not suggesting there is anything supernatural. I’m not suggesting anything against science. To bastardise the Einstein quote “As scientific as possible, but not more so.”
Trivially true in one obvious sense – we don’t worry about the fact we can scientifically justify our aesthetic tastes. Although, ironically, there’s actually a lot of wisdom and knowledge in such artistic / aesthetic content, content that we maybe don’t pick-up and use enough? But I don’t want to say any more about that now. So …
More than science?
Deliberately a very simple picture. I’m really only talking about one dividing line [between scientific and un-scientific on the slide]
Stuff that fits within existing processes and endeavours of science, and the body of knowledge created from those endeavours [to the left] I’m being deliberately vague about content and process, because I mean both really.
So we have certain criteria to say “yes, we can typically justify as scientifically verifiable” And then we have a lot of stuff that looks mysterious but we have reasonable faith that with the right changing models and effort will eventually become treated as science to the same scientific criteria.
All of which leaves the stuff on the other side [to the right of the line] which is just non-scientific knowledge, where we might say “if it’s not scientific, is it knowledge?” Obviously I’m contending that it is. And however radically we change [evolve] the criteria, unless the criteria becomes “anything goes” – which is very unlikely? – there is always going to be material which is to the right, that stuff which because of the criteria we set to call it scientific is non-scientific. I’m going to return to [the simple logic] of this picture later.
Definitions? I always get asked at this point to define some of the language I’ve been using. Obviously, just by drawing my line I’m saying I’m talking about my working definition. And every definition involves binary chops, binary splits of our domain. This side or that side of a line. The criteria are whatever we think the criteria are being cited. A Good Fence for my purposes here today.
So I’ve just a few things, verifiable, falsifiable, objectively repeatable according to an explanatory thesis.
Obviously science involves a lot more creative human activity as well, but what makes it science, in your list of criteria, may vary.
So the discourse? Once we actually start to have a debate about is this science or not, there are actually rules about what that discourse should be. Not all of our dialogue is actually debate or critique. It’s about developing understanding.
For 2 reasons I don’t like to – apart from the kind of level of detail used already, I don’t intend that we – I don’t believe that we should spend a lot of time on definitions BEFORE we have our dialogue. And I’ve picked-up from Dan Dennett and Anatoly Levenchuk support for the idea that definitions are things you DISCOVER through dialogue, not things that you put up front to limit the dialogue. [Reading the Dennett and Levenchuk quotes]
We’re going to get onto having a dialogue about how people might see themselves in either of those 2 camps, might refer to the thoughts and knowledge of the people in the other camp. Both ways. So, I mean, we need to be choosing our words, if we want it to be a dialogue where we actually do progress understanding, be very careful not to use pejorative words that somehow dismiss the value on the other side. It’s related to the rules of discourse, but there really isn’t any better rule than Good Faith – if you’re not actually planning to improve mutual knowledge as opposed to winning an argument, then you’re not in good faith.
So, to kick off our dialogue – this is just a little story, something I’ve been discussing, variations on the above for 2 or 3 years [Reading the dialogue from the slide concluding with the assertion:]
There really is stuff beyond science – and always will be – that matters when it comes to our engagement with the real world.
[Corollary – we cannot therefore expect the language of science to be enough to describe the stuff beyond science.]
[END PRESENTATION / START DIALOGUE / MORE REFERENCE SLIDES BEYOND IF NEEDED] [Slides 11, 12, (my Bio) Pasted at the end here.]
I’ve used 15/20 minutes so we have at least an hour for dialogue. Obviously I can take clarifying questions, but I’d prefer it if you just dived in with observations that can be conversation starters, to turn it into a dialogue. The only rule will be, I will decide – since it’s my session – if we really are having dialogue or if we’ve strayed away into something else. Or I could suggest some more words and statements to kick us off by provoking responses – adding to the two lists of words already suggested – to fill a few minutes?
Scientific – Humanistic
Explicit – Implicit / Tacit
Objective – Subjective / Emotive
Definitive – Intuitive / Spiritual
Reductive – Mindful / Holistic
Like, for example – “it wouldn’t be unusual for people on the humanistic side to accuse those on the scientific side of being reductive” say? Is that anyone else’s experience?
Or …
[Mike Nelson] The problem I’m having is that you’re drawing a line [Yes, explicitly my point – #GoodFences] yet there’s a whole bunch of people who look at the art of science or they take images produced by engineers and it has an impact just like art would. So in that sense it’s both. It’s produced by scientific method(s) it’s produced by engineering and yet it’s as powerful and emotive as the finest art somebody might produce.
[Ian G] Sure, I’m not suggesting or recommending that it’s a good idea – a good world model or philosophy – to have this idea of divided camps between science and art (say) quite the opposite in fact – just observing that the line is there in the language used in ISSS symposia / presentations / discussions.
[Ian G] And secondly, that doesn’t address my basic assertion that there things of value beyond the science? Even if science (and engineering) resources are used to create artistic / aesthetic value (and vice versa).
[Discussion to re-arrange ourselves for hybrid
in person and on-line discussion “circle”?]
[Ian G] Anyone else want to comment on what [Mike] said? ….
[Ian G] Yes, you know, I’ve made the opposite (complementary, same point from the other side) comment based on something Richard Dawkins once said (about human inputs to engineering beyond simply applied STEM / science) which goes something like: “A bunch of people – social scientists – flying to a conference need to understand that it took a lot more than cultural relativists to keep the aircraft flying, implying that it took hard science-based engineering nuts and bolts to achieve it. Apart from the “who wouldn’t understand that?”, my response was always “No, it also takes a lot of people management to get that aeroplane flying and the physical design is only one very specific aspect of it.” The actual phrase being “it takes a lot more than science to get 500,000 rivets flying in close formation” (a reference to second world war aircraft).
[Mike Nelson] But again, my point is that to say that something is only one or the other, I think puts you in a place where you can’t, because there’s no actionable decision to be made based on it – making a choice that can’t be made.
[Ian G – sure, again (as above) I’m not suggesting – recommending that division. My complementary point is agreeing exactly that from the other side – it’s always both. Just trying to get to the assertion that whatever that “both” is it’s more than science, wherever we chose to draw lines or not.]
[??] I like your point, it’s just …
[Mike Nelson] Your diagram implies you’re on one side of the line or the other?
[??] Which is …
[More ongoing discussion on re-arranging ourselves for better interactive discussion.]
[Ian G – I’m implying there are two sides to that line, and that I’ve observed people expressing views on each other’s work across that line, but no, absolutely, this is back to the #GoodFences. No dividing line is to in any way rigidly, wholly, permanently or in any sense putting people in those camps. Simply to recognise that some of the things , aspects of things, we’re considering fall different sides of such lines. I’m saying the whole spectrum is valuable, just that some of it is not, is beyond, science?
[Janet Singer] One thing I’d like to say, there still is this whole idea of opposition between science and the humanities is often based on a misreading of Positivism and the work of August Comte, and I’ve come to think that it was deliberately misread, because Comte was posing an integrated view in positive philosophy where science and art would be in the service of humanity and the planet. He had a 3 part slogan, 2 parts of which are now in the flag of Brazil. “Love as the motivation” “Love, order and method” or something like that. But he said that the scientific method has to vary progress, has to vary depending the area studied, and once you are beyond a certain level of complexity, you can’t use simple controlled experiments. He actually in his proposal for education, he wanted children to only study literature until they reached their teens. Because he wanted them to develop their sensibilities and he didn’t think they were ready to study science yet.
[Ian G] Right, so you’ve made several points there. I think that’s really good. But it’s not the point I’m making. [Can acknowledge a lot more of Janet’s points – most of which I agree with and could elaborate my view on.] But, quite simply I’m reporting my experience of dialogues that actually happened – when people in presentations and responses they have got from others in ISSS. I’m absolutely with you that we need a properly integrated view …
[Janet Singer] Maybe you haven’t had much experience of people in the social sciences, they will often say positive philosophers / positivists say such and such or engineers or positivists or whatever, and it’s all based on a misreading or misunderstanding. So there is no, you know, even the hard core philosophy of science, and Comte was the first philosopher of science, plus philosopher of science has no opposition. Science always involves art. It’s always relative. It’s always inspired by sympathy and usefulness. So I think the question is maybe more how do we get beyond the myth, that people are saturated with, where they think there is some kind of opposition. I’m supporting [the first speaker] the idea that there already is no opposition. There’s just some propaganda in our popular culture that there is an opposition.
[Aside – Again not suggesting opposition, just that there are “good fences” between science and non-science, that we need to recognise in language … not just call it all science or scientific. Science involves all human ingenuity and creativity, but not all findings / knowledge of wider aesthetic human activity can be called scientific?]
[Ian Glendinning] OK, well let me throw in some slightly more extreme cases – this is real experience of real dialogue – I agree with you that it ought to be myth that we can see it that way. But probably “the spiritual” was probably the most extreme word that I put in that second list? Absolutely, could take that [spirituality] as far as actually being based on Religion, but hopefully not religious dogma for example – or – I notice several sessions here already in the last couple of days, where people are bringing-up what I’d prefer to call “non-Western” philosophy into it, but Oriental (or Aboriginal / Indigenous). Again, because I’m just making a single distinction. And it’s being talked about, I’m just not seeing people joining up conversations about that. But the conversation is already happening about detailed planning and methodologies.
[??B] It sounds like you’re saying that when you hear people speaking in one kind of language and then someone brings in the other, then it seems to be a conversation stopper.
[Ian G] Yes, that’s exactly where I started.
[??B] OK. And so instead of engaging in dialogue like “let’s see what it looks like from this other perspective and see what we can learn from each other”. There’s maybe a stiffness or discomfort, you know.
[Ian G] Yes, A discomfort, exactly. Almost an embarrassment – a question gets asked from the “wrong” perspective from somebody giving their presentation, then what I see is a dialogue-killer. That’s it. Whether it’s embarrassing me or the other person. or whether it’s … yes.
[Janet] Or fear.
[Ian G] Yes – fear of embarrassment in being unable to answer, etc.
[??B] And so you’re inviting us here to see if can have a conversation that is more inclusive.
[Ian G] Yes, and having achieved that, hopefully, whatever we call it, record which words helped. Absolutely.
[Checking recording arrangements – we are in fact recording, though not great quality due to mixed locations of people and mikes]
[??B] I just wanna say thanks you for bringing this up, because I think it’s important that we do not have that (common language). I agree with what Janet said, that it’s all based on a big misunderstanding, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not like we experience it. It’s like this misunderstanding is getting enacted all the time. So, yes …
[Ian G] In less sophisticated environments … [Sorry …]
[??C] Yes, it’s like a classic one I hear in ISSS, even now in our own community. “oh you’re / that’s reductionist”. It’s a classic right? Even when everybody in here knows to avoid reductionistic thinking, right? But it’s this repeated trope we sling at each other. And I don’t really understand [why / how] It’s like it’s almost a laziness that we constantly battle or we’re policing ourselves about some battle that was fought 80 years ago.
[??B] Can I ask you about that? So, thank you for bringing in a real live example, So … There’s 2 things that I don’t even know how to say this right, but like my suggestion or my impression or my experience is that like, just none of us wants to be racist, none of us wants to be sexist, but we group up in a culture that means there’s a lot of races (say) (*) And, so when something happens that feels like it’s that way – How can we share that in a way that isn’t hurtful, and so my experience is that we also live in a culture that is really imbued with “technical rationale”. And even if we all of us believe in our heads that we don’t want to be positivistic, would it be OK for me to say that to you? “Wow, I don’t know how you meant that, but I’m feeling like my intuitive side is being left out” or something like that – would that be an OK thing to say, if that’s what my experience is?
[Ian G – (*YES!!! Good fences) – and yes, you can obviously have a chance to say that, but I’d like to add to it exactly that. So we’re obviously a relatively sophisticated community, and we all know, the whole point of complexity is that we get all this emergent stuff that’s not reductive – we kind of know this. But we’re in a culture that doesn’t really know this yet. A culture that is very anti accepting anything that’s kinda “and then magic happens” – as people often write in popular writing when something emergent happens, something that “science can’t explain” – Complexity science CAN explain, we know that we can explain. That’s not the kind of culture that most of the population around us, that we’re trying to influence. I think it’s much more like you said, which is we’re in a culture where – I mean I could choose some fairly crass example, but you know every politician is asked to cost their proposal, everything has to be done in an incredibly rational sense. If it’s not artithmetic, it doesn’t count. That’s all around us. And I’ve got very specific experiences of justifying things in very complex projects, where you get hearts and minds bought into what’s basically good about doing something this way, but before you can actually get to a decision, it gets tabulated and added-up in very rigid ways, so the actual decision-making process is unfortunately stuck in this very rational cultural expectation, even though we know we could have a conversation between if the right people could speak our language. OK
[Mike Nelson] I’m a scientist right – somebody has an experience with this particular disease, so you’re gonna put a lot of money on that, even if it doesn’t make any sense from a cost-benefit analysis – I lived in the two worlds right – I worked on science policy. This is youknw, a very political town and it’s getting more political. more and more driven by slogans. It’s more driven by stories and things that trigger emotion. I don’t think this dichotomy between explicit and implicit works. But I do think there’s something to be said for scientific analysis vs emotional triggers and try to reconcile the 2.
[Ian G] Right I’d love to pick-up on that actually. I’ve obviously also got the examples exactly with the cost-benefit analysis where the people involved have emotion and preferences based on real solid experience – worthwhile preferences. But nevertheless, it still gets tabulated like it adds-up this way, but you invent an object which is the risk/cost of this emotional factor and put it in the tabulation so the answer comes out the right way. It’s what people do.
[Mike Nelson] You mean people fudge statistics / numbers?
[Ian G] Yeah exactly.
[Mike Nelson] No, no. (laughs)
[Ian G] No, no, in a way this is a good place for my point. It’s almost like it’s become expected yeah, like you’re not allowed to be honest, you have to fudge it.
[Mike Nelson] In the US, and frankly in the UK parliament, I mean it’s driven by stories. It used to be that you were at least half the time, I hope. Now it’s very much politicians taking this situation and saying “how bad could this be?” What can I do? And no matter how many engineers and economists come in and go, “look for this little investment we get $20 for every dollar invested.
[Ian G] But the mainstream press and the economic press reporting this still wouldn’t use those arguments that are really those being used.
[Mike Nelson] You know they would quote the politicians, and the politicians often have, I mean, look at my talk yesterday about bumper-stickers – that is driving so much not just tech policy but healthcare policy. And it’s less so in some of the established areas and in tech policy where you have all these new opportunities, brand new fears and brand new dangers. And so you can’t do the calculus. You haven’t done the experiment because the prototype hasn’t even been built.
[Ian G] Yes, but that’s asking an awful lot of the process, expecting it to be presented in that way, to the public.
[???] Can we just open up what you both are saying. What it’s making me think of, like basically what I hear you say is that sometimes good science is not used and instead we use bad emotion? (*) I mean I’m just very short-handing it, you know, like the fear and manipulation, stuff like that. And so it just made me think, and I think I heard you say it the other way round happens too, and it just made me think of the polarity management tools of – what’s the name of the founder of it. Anyway so if you have a polarity – if we say for a moment that science and not-science is a polarity, then maybe each of them has its positive and each of them has a shadow, right? So there’s definitely a shadow to the emotional angle. But there’s also a really positive thought to the intuitive, implicit, da da da. And maybe there’s a really positive side to the science realm and maybe there’s a shadow side of science gone mad / the mad scientist going for power … maybe it would be helpful to open up the conversation if we were to turn it into a 4-square where each side can have its positive and its shadow – does that help.
(* Aside – I’M NOT!)
[Mike Nelson] That’s perfect. If we can get to win-win that’s wonderful, but so often people are abusing emotions for political purposes. To stop very good ideas in their track. But I think you’re right. Could have the effective use of emotion, effective use of analysis, that would be at the top the holding quadrant, and obviously you’d have the other options where people are making a bad analysis, and worst case manipulating emotion and triggering – pushing discussion to go in a certain direction to meet their need but not public.
[Ian G] Yes, you’re speaking of an environment which is political by design, this town. Politics as big as it gets.
[Mike Nelson] Big politics is still politics.
[???] It reminds me of what is happening now – my apologies – in the Mexican case,
[Ian G] That’s why you’re here. Mexican is a good “non-Western” case for my agenda.
[???] but it’s really amazing what’s going on. Because, you see, we have this election where almost 70% of the population gave the congress to the ruling party, and it’s an amazing turnover, like the population very clearly expressed via a democratic process their preferences for the next 6 years. And you have, we’ve had, this tendency for the last year, all the polls were pointing in that direction. Everybody knew what was gonna happen. But when you see the press and the politicians talking about this it’s like they are totally blind and they are driven by hatred by the mainstream media and the old-style politicians they talk like this 70%, 65% of the population did not exist and that “they” are the victims. and the whole country went one side and they think they are the victims of some sort of political expression or dictatorship, when in most of the villages, 7 of every 10 Mexicans understood the situation. I’m not even saying that it’s right or wrong. just the fact that they can’t see reality and are driven by emotions, by hatred, by fantasies, by fear.
[Ian G] Whether it’s hatred or fear, it’s the othering … the us-and-them angle?
[???] But my point is they don’t see data, they don’t see facts. It’s impossible. There’s no way they can see those kinds that are there, objectively for everybody to see. So when you see the debates, it’s impossible to have any rational discussion because there is no way you can have objectivity. It’s really hard.
[Ian G] I’d like to come back to that anti-polarisation aspect at some point. [Part of the #GoodFences point – we have dividing lines, choices of words in language so we can talk about things – but these are rarely need to be dichotomous, binary / polarising divisions in the “living” world.]
[???] I will continue of the same line, with a little bit of neuroscience. Because we do know that there is an inverse relationship between emotion and rationality, so I don’t exactly understand what is so abnormal(?) here. I mean we do know that there is an inverse relationship between negative emotions and rationality. So, when emotion is coming to the peak stuff(?) People say enough, take positions. So if we want to take rational positions, actually in parliament and in decision-making centres, they take rational decisions only when they are cooled down, when there are no high emotions, then the expert knowledge comes into play and they take good(?) decisions. [] When they think with emotions and deliberately, you push it towards irrationality.
[Ian G] You’ve said some things I disagree with, so we need another conversation and that’s OK.
[Mike Nelson] I want to disagree with it too. Having been on the other end of the screen(?) a lot, I want to give them an opportunity.
[Ian G] Janet, was it you wanted to speak?
[Janet Singer] Yeah. I wanted to emphasise on that question of expanding the 2×2 we were talking about. So there are people can react with fear, or you know, defensiveness, but there’s also deliberate manipulation that we’re talking about here. The media is not disinterested, they are not just reporting what is actually going on, in Mexico. They are, they have agendas and there are hidden agendas that we’re talking about, propaganda manipulation.
([Ian G] – one of the points I wanted to make, between the accidental and the deliberate in these high-stakes national political contexts. But this is all Politics-101 and a long way from my agenda today.)
[Janet Singer continuing] You know, the science, scientific method. Rescuing science from scientific manipulation and misuse of supposed scientific authority. That’s a real problem. So on the one hand we have political agendas and manipulation and deceit, and on the other we have people being unfamiliar with other ways of looking at things. Even if everybody was acting in good faith they might still have fear of defensiveness, discomfort.
([Ian G – I agree with all of this, important aspects of my own considerations too, but getting away from the topic to today’s agenda. Not the much simpler point I am trying to address.)
[Ian G] Yeah, I don’t know who said it in one of the earlier presentations – the loss of trust is a big issue (at this people vs institutions level in particular). But, by definition the more complex things get, the more we take complexity into account, the less everybody is going to be able to understand the arguments. They might look “rational” to a complex systems thinker, but they might just look like gobbledy-gook to someone who is trying to understand why are we making this decision. I think it’s back to the idea that the ecosystem, the culture around the decision-making, is expecting a much simpler rationalistic kind of argumentation – even though we know the politics is in all levels in the media, the actual politicians themselves, and in fact inside science and what gets published, huge political distortion.
[Mike Nelson] Can I ask an honest, quick question of clarification. You say that emotions, strong emotions …
[???] … influence rationality …
[Mike Nelson] Well what if within the system it (the emotion) is positive. If you’re totally energised about meeting some goal. No, actually, you might get super rational (*) You might really do the work, to understand the facts so that you can make your arguments better, if you’re trying to save the world from global warming and you’re passionate about it. You can get people to do the work. That’s my 2×2 not “more” emotion, but positive and negative emotion. Yeah, fear which locks down the brain.
[(*) Those world-beating problems vs my actual agenda – people inside ISSS simply talking to each other.]
[???] I think that is more about data, not sure there is sufficient data about positive effects of emotion.
[Mike Nelson] That’s why I’m saying we can have positive emotion.
[???] (Seeing the world expert on this next week, so I will ask here)
[Ian G] I’m a big fan of Iain McGilchrist and Mark Solms, not sure of those if those people mean anything to you, but for me I’m absolutely convinced that human rationality is emotion all the way down. It’s all “affect”. You feel that a decision is good, you feel that a decisions is bad, you feel that there is fear or an incentive to make a decision. The stuff that we call rationality is “constructing the argument” after the emotion has made the decision.
[Janet] Don’t know if you saw it, but you got 2 thumbs up online …
[Mike] (Cynical? Too simple?)
[Ian G] It’s not cynical at all. It’s actually just where the rationality comes from, our experience of rationality.
[??A] There’s a lot of science around that, which is really interesting. Also science around the fact that people who have the emotional side of their brain disconnected from their rational side, can’t make decisions, don’t want to do anything.
[Ian G] Yes, it’s explaining how its evolved.
[Mike Nelson] My point is you can have 7 people, they all do the same analysis of the same situation independently. if they’re using proper scientific technique and if they’ve got good data you can get pretty much the same answer.
[That’s science]
[Mike Nelson] But again, one person might be incredibly opposed to doing what the data tells them is the right thing to do, and somebody else might be really excited about it. But the emotions are not driving.
[47:30]
[Ian G] No. So again, I used 2 words together (earlier) which is really important Properly Scientific. You’re giving the scientific view some priority.
[Mike Nelson] Right. … But my point is in the sense that it’s reproducible. Emotional content is always going to be part of the decision made. You can look at the analysis and say “I don’t buy that” and have a whole other set of reasons etc. But what you said is something that just sets me off whenever I see it, which is that science is a construct upon people’s belief system.
[Ian G] I didn’t say that. (***)
[Mike Nelson] I didn’t say you did, but it sounds very similar to the argument that it’s all just a construct. [Nope ***]
[??? Online?] I think it would be a matter of trust, and we need I think, like a rating system. And it could be interesting, like universal. We have rating systems in all the regions, everywhere. Amazon stars ratings, likes on Facebook, Instagram or different types of money. (*Popularity) This artist is good because he is rich, paintings sell for a million dollars, but my ideas is to have something like digital currency, every person can have his own currency you can pay. And you can identify yourself as “OK, I’m an artist” so you issued a million tokens again … and we have system like credit. Again some – in Covid time – somebody, scientist or doctor or other goes on TV saying we should go with these ways, this way, that way. But why do we listen, why must we listen to them? But if this person can say OK this is my credit, against my words means I put 50 million of my tokens credit. And so in this way we can help look back in the future, the we can decide – this person was right, this person wasn’t right.
52.34
[Ian G] We were in another session where I think this was bout sovereignty and quality of data, and we almost had this conversation there as well. This is a technical issue about meta-data. Not just a question of who owns it, but who created it and who rated it and all that sort of stuff is actually part of the metadata in these public systems of sharing data, whether it’s stories in newspapers or social media, or television.
[???] Great feature, great idea. You’re welcome.
[???] I have a question. What if somebody gambles a lot … [… Presidential elections …]
53:13
[Ian G] The provenance (of trust) is never lost. [Mechanism of Trust] (eg Distributed Leger Technology) [Digital Currency]
54:01
[Ian G] Let me bring us back up from technology solutions. But I agree, we have a problem with trust, it’s being eroded by the kind of communications we see.
[???] Are you trying to focus on how we can adjust this, bridge this divide within the ISSS conferences or …
54:46
[Ian G] I deliberately said when we came in, I only want us to talk about a very tiny thing … (Not global warming, not world peace, not global currency transactions, etc. obviously I do have a bigger thesis around the whole of this myself) just to get conversations (in ISSS context) that recognise the other half of each issue, the view from the other camp as it were to use that language.
[Gary] You’ve been working, observing for 2 years particular form of activity and interaction within ISSS (in mini symposia and conferences … and correspondence.) [you weren’t in South Africa?]
[Ian G] No, I wasn’t in South Africa, no, but I watched several of the recorded presentations.
[Gary continuing] South Africa was a particular kind of conversational type … experienced a different type of meeting – more empathetically bridged your E / I distinction. What would you say, that was the case in SA?
[Janet?] ??? There was a lot of emphasis on embodiment … and the mind-body / freedom / rationality connection.
[Ian – important part of my point for later.]
[Gary] Partly because of the way it was structured and partly because of where it was, and in my 10/11 years experience of ISSS it was my highlight. It overcame some of that E/I difficulty for that very reason. A strong emphasis on the land / tribal / cultural groupings. The way the Saturday morning sessions are representative of ISSS is more than it was in 2017/2018 when I instigated a Saturday morning conversation because I felt and observed that ISSS was just about an annual conference, where these kind of situations occurred. Frankly my first real entry to a conference was 2015 in Berlin, and I experience this E/I kind of – a systemic “my systems view is better than your systems view” which was mind-boggling? […]
57:35
[?] it’s methodology thrusting ??? [IG – “critical thinking” – finding fault between COMPETING views – land-grabbing / “methodology wars” / marketing.]
[Gary] Whatever it was, it was just one thing after another and I just couldn’t believe it, that I was experiencing this kind of nonsense.
[Mike Nelson] You mentioned that the conference in South Africa was structured in a way to build the bridges between the different mind-sets, how was it structured that way, by topics covered or did they …
58:02 […? Lost recording momentarily?]
[Gary] … what we were talking about, boundaries, and it had a gate on the boundary, and if you weren’t out by 5 in the evening you were stuck. So, in terms of critical boundary critique there was a physical boundary, and this is the way it was structured in South Africa. It was in the Kruger National Park, so we had relationships to the grasslands and the animals and the culture and the local people who were there … it was a highlight of my ISSS experience.
[Mike Nelson] So did anyone write that up, say in a blog post.
[Gary] Yes it’s on the web-site actually, if you go to ISSS dot org and go to the SA conference, there’s a lovely reflection by Roellien …
59:00 [Interjection from on-line]
[Dennis] Can I …
[Gary] Hi Dennis, yes you were there of course.
[Dennis] I’ve been following what’s been said on the chat and I’m happy that Janet has made some very good points, but I’ve been to lots and lots of ISSS meetings, I take the points that have been made about SA, but in other ways I think that SA was NOT a very good meeting. And unfortunately the advantage we had of being in SOUTHERN Africa, and area which I’m very very familiar with I should say, wasn’t really taken advantage of, and whilst I take the points made by the other speaker (Gary), I think you need to get back to talking about Wisdom (!!!) and the role of Wisdom in decision-making and what exactly we think Wisdom is. I can’t actually add to that because I’ve got to leave the meeting now. Also I think the meeting has been very constructive and I hope that Ian’s very happy with the way the meeting has gone.
[Ian] Yes, pleasantly surprised. Thanks Dennis.
1.00:00
[Janet] ??? did you have your hand up?
[??? In the room] – [… Competitive …]
[Gary][Ian] (Berlin – Methdodology wars.)
[??? In the room] In terms of the rational side […] I don’t think it has to be this way. Currently The mindset is to get to be king of the hill ??? whoever is left standing at the top of the hill wins, That’s one of the shallow things about the explicit, to use your term for a moment, however one of the positive things about the explicit – I just finished a doctoral program and dissertation last year, and I love the ethics of really crediting everybody who has worked in something. It’s like we’re all working together to feed this web of knowledge and the way it works and [is by degree] appreciating other people’s contributions to it even when they disagree. A beautiful thing and it may not always be honoured in practice […]
1.02:32
[??? In the room] and now for the positive and negative, I just want to put one thought in the input, I think that sometimes, and I’ll start with the negative, when were having a conversation about somebody and somebody says – oh you’re just being empirical – it’s kind of a put-down. Also if somebody says, and my experience is all about unity (?) or something, it’s a conversation-stopper. Where do you go from there? They’re not playing … not – this is my experience I’m curious about your experience … more like this is my experience and you can’t argue with it, or something like that.
[Jesse] Stonewalling.
1.03:20
[??? In the room] But a positive thing about the implicit is that – when somebody is speaking – in my experience – from their own experience a hears something that they’ve [lived ?] not in any judgemental way … I feel that there’s a way that our minds and our hearts can be opened by somebody else sharing their experience. That’s a really beautiful thing about the implicit, and sometimes it not even about the words that they’re saying, it might be the silences or look on their face, or …
[Ian G] Yes, communication is about more than words [body language, delivery, etc beyond formal language] Gary is back in the room and Dennis, before he left us, threw “Wisdom” back into the conversation. I had actually used the word on one slide. But it is the bit that’s missing – that I’m pointing out is missing … I’m terrified that we are going to try and make Wisdom explicit. Gary, tell me I’m wrong.
1.04:33
[Gary] Well ..
[Ian] We’re trying to model it?
[Mike Nelson] The word I haven’t heard yet is Artificial Wisdom. (Aside)
1.04:39
[Ian – to Gary] You are doing a huge amount of detail, and you actually are bringing in – “non-Western” things like the Tao – and OK I’m worried what you are going to do with it when you’ve brought it in?
[Gary] The Tao that can be named is not the universal Tao?
[Ian] Yes. Thank you.
[Gary] Perhaps maybe make use an abstraction(?) of what wisdom is. I think Wisdom is an emergent property from the experienced. My experience can either be learned by being told something or by making lots of mistakes. [IG – Hmmm ***]
[Yiannis] I wrote a paper about wisdom and I collected about 20 definitions, My favourite one is “when people care about the common good”. That’s the strongest definition. And when we structure public dialogue, we claim that we begin not only with people who have different opinions and different perspectives but also conflicting interests. And they reach some kind of a consensus on how to understand the problematique, and how to move forward. And we name this collective wisdom. […] Not only strong disagreements, but different understandings, different vocabularies, etc. to come to a common language and gradually to converge into understanding PRECISELY how their problems are (?) and then to establish their leverage points on which they should take action, to move forward in an agreed way. We need this whole process, harnessing the wisdom of a group – I don’t think that’s feasible(?) / unreasonable(?) – It is a form of wisdom when they leave behind their own perspectives and interests in favour of the collective / common good for everybody.
1.07:17
[Ian] Yes, I felt, by the way you described it with your hands while talking. Wisdom isn’t a thing, it’s a collection of processes or events / stuff that happens.
[Gary] I just want to say for the record, as Dennis said he disagreed with me about SA [being a success in this way / different aspects] … he’s been coming to ISSS a lot longer than I have, his perspective perspective is different. I’ve got a ten year history whereas he’s been coming since 1983 (?) when I was a in a totally different space in my life. And he has a much more direct experience of SA – [SA / Southern Africa distinction. Suggestion Kenya. inner / exterior, conscious / sub-conscious … more about ISS itself and distinctions between conversations and academic “symposia” being lost of the framing…]
[Ian] You know that I completely support your take on conversations (proper dialogue) vs academic / dialectic approach (also explicit in the slides), indeed it’s one of the reasons for me proposing this session as more “dialogic”.
[Janet] Wisdom is usefully codified in maxims and heuristics and fables and parables that convey insight from experience that can be transferred from one person to another, that involves “hard knowledge” and appropriateness of action. INCOSE to their credit has for several years now been working on collecting systems engineering heuristics and principles and recognising the importance, in particular when dealing with complex systems, of taking a different approach where you don’t rely on what has been called “thin rules” that are arithmetically and easily, explicitly codified but you have more of an evocation of “big rules” which bring in some embodied sense. So I’m optimistic that INCOSE is on a good track with this, again SE is leading the way that can show how to integrate this. There are codification problems, my background is before I came into maths and engineering was in comparative religions and what you’re addressing here is “the codification problem” – once you put something into language, into some thin rules, it never captures exactly what you want [Explicit in the slides] and this is why some traditions prohibit codification and only have face-to-face transfers, so you can have the tacit wisdom as context.
[Ian] You are making one of my points for me. Absolutely. Jessie, you weren’t here from the start, but natural language?
[Jesse] It’s really important to have meetings where people can communicate. [Laughter] That discussion is not necessarily about the science it’s about communication, but the science matters too, learning about what the subject is if it’s not science. My experience is pretty strange. I actually contributed a couple of papers in 1985 and “took a powder” basically because I couldn’t understand why the community and feedback loops were ignoring them. And I’ve come back here after doing a lot extra research, finishing a career, took off early [more research] made a lot of advances, and I still see a community that invented feedback loops ignoring them in our (ISS)Society. Now why do you do that, why do we all do that? Why does the conversation force us to do that? Whatever it is, why ignoring the feedback loops in our society, like the endless compounding driving the economic system.
[Ian] Yes, we’ve had the conversation earlier about the expectation of “fit” – feedback doesn’t fit expectation of the language, so we can’t make it stick. Precisely the point of this “let’s find a language” session.
[Robert Johannson] The problem in the ISSS is the problem in science, it doesn’t appreciate feedback loops, it tries to define them in physical terms, but they’re not they are information. So a science that is a materialistic science, that doesn’t communicate information, that doesn’t believe in ideas, that doesn’t believe in anything other than matter and energy is capable of creating change, they you’re not gonna talk about Cybernetics because Cybernetics is communication. A cybernetic process is a communication process.
[Ian] One of the points made here [by Janet?] was that this materialist view is a myth.
[Robert] Depends what you mean by myth, I come across it every day in every conversation in the ISSS, the fact that there are a lot of people challenging it is also true. People are challenging the materialist myth, but the myth is still there in the definition of science and its what prevents. It’s a reason why the only place cybernetics ever got a hold is in business schools. MIT business school, Hull’s business school. The sciences systematically ignored it, because they systematically ignored communication.
[Ian] I share a fundamental information & communication view, more fundamental than the physical. Anyone else have a view on that?
[Tomas] Wisdom. For me I’m trying to integrate east-west systems thinking, trying to use a modern systems theory in trying to understand what the ancient theory is talking about. So talking about wisdom is interesting, how Buddha(?) actually talk about wisdom. When he talk about wisdom it’s like a forest of leaves. So many on one tree and we have a whole forest and the wisdom you require is only a handful of leaves. Wisdom is not to know everything, it is to know those that are most important, and he does point out the most important for wisdom – the first one is suffering, the second one is impermanence, and the third one is “know me” the self / ego. So how do I understand why these three are the most important and that wisdom is all of those? So we have to go back to today’s topic, which we’ve got this explicit and implicit, scientific and holistic. So what is it doing giving rise to all the conflicts is because we did put a boundary between, and when we have a boundary there will always be the yin and yang, the good and bad. A spectrum depending where, how explicit / implicit the line you always be having a problem, because you try to make the boundary between reductionist and holistic even worse, try to make the boundary totally closed. so that you are in a closed environment, not able to do what you want to do. So that’s why in open-systems-theory (Bertalanffy) then we can see that totally closed is reductionistic and that get even worse, you are always saying that the explicit is always right or that the implicit is always right because you don’t open up the boundary [IG absolutely not] So closing the boundary doesn’t work because of the wisdom of impermanence, because you cannot have a 100% boundary, there are always things that interact with each other, always changing. So if you want to apply a totally closed boundary, then you will never be satisfied. Hopefully it’s about suffering.
[Ian] We are going to have to close up soon, but I’d like to respond to your point. Hopefully you will have noticed that any boundary, what I call a #GoodFence, to use the poetic description, it’s not impervious, it’s not fixed, it’s not permanent. that’s the whole point [to be able to describe processes and interactions across them] is that there is still value to draw the dividing line in order to have words to talk about the processes. Simply choosing between two words implies some significant division between two thoughts, without needing to imply some permanent power-hierarchical taxonomy. We’ve use up our allotted time.
[Other] Wisdom? Use what you know to do what is right. Don’t play golf in a thunderstorm …
[Ian] Thanks everyone, I got a lot of good stuff out of that. Great for me that both Gary and Tomas brought up “eastern” thought, I have whole agenda on that too, which I didn’t even touch on. But, I need to wrap this up. Thank you.
[Ah, but what is “right” ? … what is “to know” ? … etc.
And what is good Phaedrus, do we need anyone to tell us these things?]
END
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Post Note: Key Takeaways.
[Gary / Ian] This whole session was premised narrowly on observing ISSS behaviour / dynamics over a couple of years – but this is absolutely about complex systems thinking generally and indeed the whole world of science and non-science language issues for humanity and the planet 🙂
[Janet / Ian] This was definitely and deliberately a philosophy-lite session with a very narrow focus on language in choosing a few words, but please be assured there are very broad and deep philosophical readings behind all of this. Lots of paradoxes, but not the victim of any one “fallacy”. Just dismissed above as “Footnotes to Plato” here 🙂 One important distinction noted – to add to my pairs of words – philosophies or world-views that are “embodied” vs “conceptualised” – feedback from Kruger Conference?.
[Mike / Ian] – Anyone who thought they heard me suggesting a Post Modern / Social-Construct take on knowledge and science or “opposing camps” of thought (either sides of #GoodFences) was thoroughly misled – and triggered – by me 🙂 My apologies, I introduced the word “camp” – but not with that connotation. Again, be assured there is much wider and deeper philosophy resources behind this deliberately narrow agenda on the day. I recognise this as a common misunderstanding to be further clarified and I tend to tag myself “PoPoMo” in the sense we do have to understand what the PoMo’s were getting at in order to constructively move beyond 🙂
[Dennis / Yiannis / Ian] Yes, this agenda was – and continues to be – very much about rehabilitating the language of “Wisdom” in the 21st C 🙂
Thanks for everyone’s input.
I/We have some good resources to build on.
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Post Note: Ian Glendinning Bio Slides:
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