Psybertron Asks

I’ve blogged a couple of times already that I’ve been reading Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”. Well today on flight CO5 to Houston I completed it.

I said before that the high mediaeval historical content made it difficult to sort fictional characters and events from real. Few of the important doubts (people or artefacts) survive the final carnage (I’ll say no more) so it’s mostly pretty clear by the end.

In many ways it’s a formulaic who-dunnit detective story – Holmes & Watson, Poirot & Hastings, Morse & Lewis. All the usual ingredients – multiple heinous deeds, even more motives and suspects, reversals of fortune snatched from neat conclusions, staged set-pieces involving all the suspects, heavy-handed investigation by the authorities cutting across the hero’s informal sleuthing, wise sleuth whose inexperienced sidekick unwittingly uncovers the key clues, denouement scene with “conversation” to allow explanation of the plot. Of course The Rose is far more than that. A tale of good and evil on a fundamental (philosophical) scale – is there any right and wrong at all; what is truth anyway ?

There’s also a good dose of “follow the money” and “cherchez la femme”, though in the case of mediaeval monks you can read “femme” as any young flesh, novices being more freely available.

Apart from intending to be an educational insight into the machinations of the holy roman church at the time of the inquisitions – the hypocritical paranoia in the name of the infidels and the anti-christ in political pursuit of wealth and power – the book’s main theme is the suppression of doubt by the imposition of faith.

In fact, the suppression of Aristotle’s “Poetics” is at the core, and the idea that humour, jest, irony and rhetoric can contain a good deal more truth than any declarative decree, papal bull being the main target.

(PS – the church conflict between the Germans and the Italians, with the ironic Brits mediating couldn’t help but remind me of my own recent experience of the Dutch / Norwegian / British saga in data standards collaboration, about which I’ll say no more, in order to protect the innocent. Go read it guys, you know who you are.)

Anyway, I hope I haven’t given too much away. A thoroughly recommended read. Top 5, maybe even top 3, of my all-time best reads.

From a multitude of bloglines search cross-hits I picked-up this metafilter link.

This is a small world, full of small worlds, each full of … etc.

Amazing how each thinks it is the first to find something (anything). Takes us back to the nothing new under the sun theme, and particularly the conceit of believing in invention [after Mitch Ratcliffe]

I thought emergence was going to be last year’s word, but it looks like it’s going to arrive this year at last.

It’s been a thread on MoQ Discuss recently and I find this post from Seb Paquet too.

Recipes for success are always doomed, in management just as anywhere else in life. Success is emergent from a process, involving support and tension; it’s not a state in itself. Pure Dynamic Quality in Pirsig’s MoQ terms.

Support and tension ? I’m getting tightrope-walking, falling then flying, I’m getting Douglas Adams, Nietzsche and Pirsig all in one go.

I’m also getting the “immigrant tailors” story as a recipe for success … Nobel prize-winning George Wald quote [after Pinker].

The CIA World Factbook [via McGee’s Musings][via Jack Vinson] (The UK is a “money laundering center” – which is nice. Apparently Northern Ireland doesn’t count as an international territorial dispute – which is also nice. !!)
The US declaration of Independence [via McGee’s Musings][via Jack Vinson]
The Value of Certainty, from Jack. Like it.
Personal Knowledge Management, also from Jack
Play & Humour are the most important forms of work. [from Rebecca Ryan]
Organisation design is about What You Know.

Saw this some time ago, but found the link here [via Rivets].

Taste ? Quality ? Interesting article from Paul Graham about the subjectivity, but rightness, of taste. His students are clever but do they have taste ? Would they recognise the “strange beauty” in the design of an SR71 Blackbird ? Couldn’t help thinking of Pirsig’s quality.
(Interesting reference also to form folowing functon.) [via Rivets]

I’ve blogged two or three times before about Dutch and UK experiments with removing all road signs, speed limits and road markings and discovering increased road-safety due to the humans (yes, cars have humans inside them) having to rely on common sense and eye-contact to communicate and negotiate priorities etc.

Picked this one up from FN4, but it seems Toyota are going one further. Building body-language and expressions of emotion into the cars themselves. Barking mad ? Maybe not.

I’ve not yet finished reading Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” – great 14th century murder mystery with philosophers, inquisitors and church leaders thrown in – hard to spot where fact ends and fiction starts … anyway the point is I’ve also just received and started reading the 2nd edition (2002) of Nils Brunsson’s “The Organization of Hypocrisy” (1989).

Only just through the introductory paras, but having read Brunsson’s original (1985) “Irrational Organization” (as part of my MBA Dissertation) I’m already sympathetic to the message. In my Manifesto, and my Dissertation before that, I refer to Chris Argyris’ and Donald Schon’s “Theory in Use” – which I tend to summarise as “What we say, What we do, & What we say we do, are three different things”. The basic hypocrisy often turns up as “political correctness” in what we can say, whatever we intentionally or naturally actually do – with a clear conscience – a necessary lie. The net result is best-laid-plans, written records, and any knowledge learnt from them, can be deadly misleading if you act on them. They are comfortable “rationalisations of the irrational”. Knowledge and learning must be based on action and intent – hence “Theory in Use” & “Action Science”.

Interestingly Brunsson’s preface to the new edition suggests that perhaps he should suspend judgement on whether the hypocrisy was just a feature of society & culture at the time of original publication. Sadly for us all I suspect “it was ever thus” again – nothing new under the sun.

Remember Pinker’s “Baloney Generator”. Innately (by genetic evolution) the left side of our brain is hard-wired to be a spin-doctor, thanks to a long history of memetic / cultural evolution of rationalising the irrational.

Just noticed Brunsson’s subtitle is …
“Talk, Decisions and Actions in Organizations”
which maps very neatly to my own aphorism …
What we say (Talk),
What we say we do (Decisions) &
What we do (Actions) …
being three distinct things.

Looking forward to reading in full.

Two interesting blogs here via Jack Vinson’s Jolt with Jack.

This one “Open Source Knowledge” from Jack himself, quoting a blog by Karl Nelson.

Also this from Peter Bailey’s Synop.
Some great always-been-truisms quoted from Peter Drucker.

Made my comments at source – follow those links.

Following the Lisa Jardine trail … lots of interesting stuff Francis Bacon and Milton, to name a few … anyway … at the Center for Editing Lives and Letters (CELL) …

The Auchinleck Manuscript was probably created in London in 1330/1340-ish and is currently housed in the National Library of Scotland. This is an on-line copy of an English language literary work that pre-dates Chaucer, so is important lingusitically and culturally as well as a work of literature.

I was moved to blog the link. because I happen to be reading Eco’s 1980 “The Name of the Rose”, set in and around the “scriptorium” of a monastery in 1327, under investigation by a member of the “inquisition”. The text is full of the jargon of scribes and manuscripts and the Auchinleck site has a useful glossary of such terms.