What, Why & How do we Know ?
Blogging a lot of links to Peston’s Picks these days. Same subject, but for a change this one has an optimistic silver-lining tone after so many panic-stations downers recently.
Be interesting to see what Goodwin does with his wealth and knighthood, once he goes (if he goes). Might he stay on as the manager who “serves” his people – wishful thinking ? But I’m watchin’ fella.
Not seen TRIZ before. I can see why the references to it that I did come across (more below) don’t bother to explain the “romantic Russian acronym“. Just follow the Wikipedia link if you must know.
It’s a diagramming notation (now even annotation / mark-up) and a methodology for describing and finding innovative solutions to problem situations, and it seems to have got visibility in the modern BPM world (Business Process Modelling) having orginated with Genrich Altshuller in 1946 in the Soviet Union in connection with invention, innovation and creativity. (Given my history and interests, suprised I’ve not come across it … you live and learn, never too late, etc … I wonder if it’s any good ? I shall download and play with it, and find out.)
Anyway, I came across its evolution and exploitation in SouthBeach Notation. Which in turn I had come across in a comment (an unashamed plug) in Robert Peston’s Picks on the subject of how concerted global governmental intervention was needed as a “circuit-breaker” as a brake against the “Minsky moment” when markets flee from capital in a self-fulfilling spiral. (BTW making these kinds of connections is precisely what blogging is about, it is never a substitute for jounalism, just an alternative – linkable – medium.)
I was in fact about to blog a link to this role of public intervention in otherwise free markets, into a free-markets discussion in another place ….. This is of course one reason why a share of private-profits must be used to fund public-losses in a “free” market that is to be tolerated in a public environment.
On that original subject …. the financial crisis … interesting that other comments (on Peston’s blog and on MoQ Discuss) recognize that the falling numbers themselves are not really the issue … markets go down as well as up, we are often reminded …. and taking a holiday is as good a break / brake as anything. Roll on real pramatists.
As mentioned in the previous post, I’ve had an enforced hiatus from blogging due to the relocation to Oslo. Two things to note:
(1) After doing some essential overhauls just before going offline in the US, I had added a “simpler” previous posts & archives link to the side-bar, and noted slowness in the rendering of the blog-pages, but I hadn’t noticed the connection. Thanks diagnostic help from Deamhost, I can see the problem and will fix soon, hopefully today. Apologies for the inconvenience, your patience is appreciated.
(2) Secondly, the day we left, a colleague in the US returned the last of 3 Dan Dennett books I’d lent him. “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” (1995). Re-reading it at every available moment travelling and waiting in the last week or so has reminded me why he is my favourite current philosopher. He’s an excellent scientist, philosopher and philsopher of science. He knows when he’s being philosophical, when he’s needing to be scientific, and has the patience of a saint to expose and explain counter arguments whilst recognizing that few have simple logical outcomes beyond the pragmatc “policy” of “significant value-adding” …. and the wit to pull it off.
I can see so many points of contact, that anything I write should be closely linked to Dennett. My whole agenda is a subset of Dennett’s I reckon.
A dense summary – Wherever the intelligence lies, causation, how things came to be the way they are, is an engineering question – creativity is a selection from available options, optimal only so far as permitted by current historical and environmental constraints – you can only ever get there from here. Intention is an explanatory stance in the observer’s hindsight, as if it were in the active participants. The whole thing is a narrative that works. That narrative is an organisation of semantics from available information, information itself being significant difference; Stasis, being or remaining the same is of lower interest, than difference or change. Value-adding is about adding significant value to the narrative. First-cause is simply the cause before the earliest one so far explained in the narrative, but is not in itself a reason to presume a miraculous sky-hook, except as a holiday from explaining and philosophising, and never a reason for a sky-hook as an alternative to a crane later in the engineering narrative.
OK so another football story.
Relocating from the US to Norway, visiting in the UK along the way we’ve been a little out of touch without the internet until yesterday. We missed that Reading’s first away win of the season was Wolve’s first home defeat 3:0 last Tuesday, after the 4:0 win against Swansea last Saturday, and yesterday we caught the 3:1 win against manager-of-the-month Burnley on-line. We are in unheard of territory … goals-for averaging 3.5 per game, and the highest goal-difference in the Championship, now only 2 points behind Wolves and 3 off Birmingham in top spot.
We’ll be changing the club name from Reading Royals to Reading Irish next.
Twice in as many days … another footbal story, two actually.
Great to see Blades get the decision on the Tevez fiasco at West Ham two seasons ago and love or hate him, great to see Warnock happy. No amount of compensation fixes it of course, but justice is done. (I love the Warnock quote thanking the “independent” witnesses, explaining that whilst he gave his own evidence, he’d “got carried away”. No, really ?)
And the Reading “goal that wasn’t” story. Good news that the league didn’t recommend a replay – what a precedent that would have set ! Coppell said he would be OK if a replay was awarded, but Boothroyd didn’t actually ask for one, so fair play all round, almost ….
[Post Note – guess that would make more sense if I pointed out that we were long-term Reading FC season ticket holders (home and away), are life-time members of the supporters trust and still consider Reading as “home”. Like, we’re positively interested in Reading’s results.]
Just a quickie update.
I’ve pruned the overloaded side-bar – by using a simpler collapsible “previous posts” javascript, and removing a couple of dozen old, redundant or little-used blog-roll links. I’ve also moved the Pirsig / MoQ links to the newer [Pirsig] page, and added additional internal navigation links to that page. The original Psybertron Pirsig Pages are still there, but increasingly being absorbed into the re-organized page, where there is still more work planned. (There is a redirect on one of the old pages which should be invisible to the user … any problems let me know.)
The ongoing re-organization will next affect the [Manifesto] page, where I intend to add an editorial policy and an introduction to the newer projects. Time to move on.
PS – anyone detecting performance issues with the Psybertron site, please let me know. It seems to me that the active PHP & MySQL pages are rendering very slowly ? Still investigating.
Humiliated.
Headless chickens.
Privatisation of profits, socialisation of losses.
Staunching the flow of blood, but not fixing the wound.
A real downer from Robert Peston commenting on the (proposed) US bail-out of the banking industry, and a whole spectrum of comments from his readers. I’m no expert of international banking, but the scale of the numbers, means we need to understand where this might be leading. Since the markets already appear to have taken the bail-out into account, what if Congress rejects the proposal ?
Despite it being an important part of our lives, I suspect this is only the second post in the 7 year history of Psyberton on the subject of football (real football that is, played with the feet). I’m making this posting because this is a wonderful illustration of why objective logic is a useless decision making tool, which is of course a large part of my agenda here.
Circular (strange-loopy) arguments are so much better.
Notwithstanding Sir Alex’s paranoid reasoning, referee Halsey was indeed right to give “serious foul play” as his reason for Terry’s red-card / sending-off last weekend, and wrong to be persuaded to rescind it. It was an absolutely blatant so-called “professional foul” …. no-one at all seems to be arguing with that. It was so blatantly professional that clearly Terry’s and everyone else’s calculations (except Halsey’s) was banking on a yellow-card warning only, based on the “not the last man” defence.
Rules evolve, like everything else. As soon as the last man defence (post-rationlization) becomes part of the reasoning in the decision (a-priori) to actually make the “professional foul”, it moves on from simply being part of the rationale; onto a meta-level, another cycle of a strange-loop, to become part of the foul itself. It excludes itself from application of the new/old rule. The reasoning for applying the more lenient view arose in the days before the offenders had that objective rule available to them in making their cynical calculating rule-breaking decision, before that strange-loop had happened. Once it has happened, game over … and remember evolving psychology really is a game, just like football is a game … effectively the new (now old) rule has a new(er) interpretation / manifestation in real life, beyond the sterile realm of pure objective logic.
Rules are for the guidance of wise men, and the enslavement of fools. (Douglas Bader ?)
Wisdom comes from going round a few loops. Well done Mr Halsey; stand by your own gut feel, and help evolve the human species out of this mess.
I agree with Sir Robert Winston here. The Royal Society has miscalculated if it thinks denying opportunities to even respond to questions about whacky alternatives does anything for the understanding and credibility of science.
Turbulent times for global finances, but interesting take here from the BBC’s Robert Peston.
Talking of accidental shocks to the system. OK, so the wind and water of a hurricane like Ike can cause danger, damage and disruption anywhere it strikes, but why does modern Texas and Houston, have such poor infrastructure that recovery requires a week of city curfews and a month to restore power supplies ?