That's fascinating! Usually when the New Yorker does a long piece on
some obscure subject they really come through with a marvelous well told
tale. Maybe I should look again sometime, but this one really seemed
pointless. For all appearances, though, it seems like it should be
right down my alley, since 'observing everything at once' has some
similarity to my way of breaking with conventional science. The
British "Mass-Observation" movement of the thirties, however, goes about
turning ad-hoc community groups into 'universal observers', with no
apparent method I could see in it at all.
What I actually use as a method for systems research could also seem to
declare the main subject to be 'everything that's meaningless'. I
start by defining my subject as everything that is left out of
approximations, the large volume of "wash water and shavings" left over
from converting data into theory, carted out of the science lab and
dumped somewhere to be forgotten. Yes, that's a large set, fun to
puzzle about as a whole, but not very useful that way. Then I switch
strategies and 'go fishing' in it, instead of explaining.
Metaphorically, when you use a hook designed to pull out things that
have loops, what you pull out is a wide variety of quite unexpected
living things, because that's the kind of soil in which they thrive!
The stuff left out of approximation is precisely where you find what's
unstable and misbehaves, which includes the half formed processes that
are the beginning and end of everything coherent and lots of other neat
stuff! It's a great resource.
Is there any chance these flipped out British 'mass observers' had some
notion of that sort of thing?
Phil Henshaw ????.?? ? `?.????
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-----Original Message-----
From:
[hidden email] [mailto:
[hidden email]] On
Behalf Of Robert Holmes
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 11:39 PM
To: FRIAM
Subject: [FRIAM] Mass observation
At FRIAM today I was chatting with Mike (Agar) about the "Mass
Observation" movement, an eccentric Enlish take on anthropolgy from the
1930s. Here's a link to a New Yorker article about it:
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060911crat_atlargeRobert
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