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)

The importance of valid disagreement

This is a great clip and certainly one that needs to be shared.

clipped from ravimohan.blogspot.com Paul Graham says, in one of his essays (emphasis mine) "....Why do you need other people? Can't you just think of new ideas yourself? The empirical answer is: no. Even Einstein needed people to bounce ideas off. Ideas get developed in the process of explaining them to the right kind of person. You need that resistance, just as a carver needs the resistance of the wood. In my experience, this need for "friendly resistance" extends to far more than creating startups. Every time you have a new idea, you need people you can bounce it off. To get any real benefit out of this process you need people with a complex combination of characteristics. They should have firm (but not rigid) opinions on their own have logical reasons for those beliefs and be able to articulate them clearly are driven by ideas and not ideology not attach their egos to their opinions. be willing to concede a valid argument even if it forces them to possibly re-examine their beliefs know how to listen

Data sharing: the next generation

This is what I love about science and what, I feel, many of the anti-science people don't like about it. It is at its core, fundamentally democratic and non-hierarchical. Now I know that sounds funny to some (in fact it is hard for me to believe sometimes) since science is associated almost in lockstep with academe which is (at it core) hierarchical in nature (and thus suffers from lack of democratic principals I feel). This is true, and sites like these may well break some of the strangle hold that academe has had on the process of science. That last assertion needs follow-up so I should write more about that in the future.

What do others think about the influence of academe on science?

clipped from www.nature.com

The Internet has already become a place for people to share knowledge, opinions, music and videos. Now, in a slightly geekier aspect of the same trend, social software is allowing people to share data too. More than 1 million data sets have been uploaded to the data-sharing site Swivel since its launch in December. And on 23 January, IBM labs launched Many Eyes, which allows users to visualize their data with tools previously available only to experts.

The idea is to make data analysis more democratic, as tools such as Google Earth have done for geographic visualization

Making such tools available will not only empower individuals, Viégas predicts, the collective intelligence and expertise of users will result in new insights.

Links
Swivel
IBM's Many Eyes