Quotes for December 27, 2024

Nothing really to add today to these quotes I'm sure that we could painfully go through some process to find how they connect with one another and it would seem sharp and wise and the lake and I don't, or I shouldn't dismiss such fun work when it is being channeled. But right now that's not where my mind is.

*Update: I am being lazy. In adding labels/tags to this post I realized how much they have in common. To some degree. each quote weaves together insights into how we interact, make decisions, and share power, knowledge, and communication within societies. Together, they form a tapestry of ideas that challenge us to think about structures of democracy and how they lead to equity, collaboration, and resilience.

Quotes

"There can be no creative power without some acknowledgment of the other’s interests, just as there can be no healthy love if the self is wholly lost in concern for the other."
(Adam Kahane, Power and Love)

"According to the neoconservative position, because private firms are more subject to free market forces than are public firms and government agencies, one should expect less employment discrimination within the private sector than within the public sector. However, the empirical evidence offers no support whatsoever for this reasoning. As a matter of fact, whenever employment audits have been used to compare the discriminatory behavior of private versus public firms, private firms have been consistently found to display substantially higher rates of employment discrimination than public firms."
(Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, Social Dominance)

"“if we (humanity) don’t find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we have a big problem. Because it means that anyone who promises certainty will always have a following.”"
(Sonja Blignaut, Reconnecting With the Spirit of Exploration)

"Therefore, the behavior of complex adaptive systems is determined by both their internal structure and contextual relations. Change can be induced from the outside, but these contextual influences do not result in uniform, predictable output; as these external perturbations are ambivalent, they can be both disturbing and the source of further development. They are modified and rearranged in line with the system's internal state and structure. The resulting behavior can be explained neither by the external influences on the system nor by its internal states alone, but through the interaction of both. So having trust in self-organization is about paying attention for emerging patterns and responding to them."
(Bob Williams, Richard Hummelbrunner, Systems Concepts in Action)

"Abstraction makes it harder to understand an idea and to remember it. It also makes it harder to coordinate our activities with others, who may interpret the abstraction in very different ways. Concreteness helps us avoid these problems. This is perhaps the most important lesson that Aesop can teach us."
(Chip Heath, Dan Heath, Made to Stick)

"Far better than being first, Tellis and Golder concluded, is being what some have called a “fast second”: an agile imitator."
(Annie Murphy Paul, The Extended Mind)