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recap on Rosen

Posted by glen ep ropella on Apr 28, 2008; 5:32pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Welcome-Jim-tp526087p526140.html

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phil henshaw wrote:
> The 'symptom' I was referring to was being caught flat footed without a
> model to warn you about the approach of major environmental change.

It's not clear to me what you and Marcus are arguing about... But I'll
offer the only real insight I've gained over the past few years. [grin]

There is only one way to prepare for potentially catastrophic change:
agility.  We can, post hoc, find examples where an entity (lineage,
organization, organism, etc) is pre-adapted for some change such that it
_seemed_ like that entity somehow predicted the change.  But this isn't
an effective tactic.  Complex systems are unpredictable (by definition)
in the concrete.

The only way to be prepared for some unspecified, truly novel,
abstractly named "change" is to be as agile as possible.  And the best
way to develop agility is to rapidly swap out "vignettes" (scenarios,
use cases, aspects, stories, models) on a regular basis.  The point is
not to make attempts to ensure that your suite of vignettes contains a
semblance of the coming change, however.  The point is to smear the risk
by practicing/training in as many different vignettes as possible.

And the only way to do this is by continually maintaining multiple
models of reality, all the while staying agnostic about the meaning and
usefulness any of those models.  You don't commit to any one model as
the Truth if you want to remain agile.

Of course, in stable times, exploitation (commitment) is the rule and
exploration is the exception.  But in unstable times, exploration is the
rule and exploitation is the exception.  The trick is to be willing to
sacrifice your exploitative efforts when the landscape starts to
destabilize.  The committed end up dying because their, once true
enough, convictions are no longer true enough.

This is why small businesses are the heart and soul of
capitalism/liberalism and why it's more agile than other organizational
strategies.  The high attrition rate of small businesses allows us to
balance exploration and exploitation.  When times are stable we grow big
behemoth exploiters.  When times become more chaotic, those behemoths
come crashing down and us little guys scramble and wander like ants,
with all our various deviant models and expectations of the world,
exploring the dynamic landscape and hoping to stumble into a niche and
become the next behemoth exploiter.  Then we hope to hoard enough
resources to skate through the next period of instability.

The trouble with applying this to "sustainability" is that we define
"sustainable" in terms of human comforts, wants, and needs.  What I
think Rosen would try to justify is the idea that we _cannot_ engineer a
world that sustains _human_ comforts, wants, and needs.  A sustainable
("living") system can only be designed holistically, from the inside.
Any design based on external or sliced up and extracted aspects/purposes
will eventually fail (or grow out of "control").  "Humanity" is an
abstract and pitifully impoverished _slice_ of Gaia (for lack of a
better term).  So any design we put in place to preserve the system from
the perspective of the human slice will eventually fail or mutate into
something not so human friendly.

Note that I'm _merely_ arguing from that perspective.  I don't
personally believe it wholeheartedly.  The only part I do believe is
that agility is the key to handling novelty and multi-modeling is the
key to maintaining agility (as well as _generating_ novelty).

- --
glen e. p. ropella, 971-219-3846, http://tempusdictum.com
A government which robs Peter to pay Paul, can always count on the
support of Paul -- George Bernard Shaw

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