Tag Archives: Infographics

The Nature of Nature:Community/Social/Intelligence/Learning, A Metasystem Perspective

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Accelerated Community Learning

Most of us live in  a black or white, flat world. What do we choose to see, black, white, black and white, grey, green, grey and green ?

What we see is what we get. Intelligence is about seeing all of them and beyond. Seeing in pairs (the ark had its pairs) is inevitable since black is black in relation to white. We make sense by comparing. The quadrants pair, reflect each other, Q1 with Q3, Q 2 with Q4, Potential with Performance and Old with New

Potential = Performance + Waste + an Unknown Quantity, our raison d’être

All systems are purposive and reduction in waste is the super ordinate goal of the system

Growth is a process of positioning, fixing the direction (finding true north) and metrics of the  reduction in waste.

Red stands for decay and entropy. Green stands for continual learning and renewal

Community is about the commons, what we collectively share, value, enhance and preserve

More: FDF,  Knowledge Visualization,  

suggested reading :  An Outline of General System Theory (1950) Ludwig von  Bertalanffy

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Angels of Death and Devils of Life, Old and New

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What would you prefer to be, an angel of death or a devil of life?  Be a devil of life, a ruthless one at that, 8×5 if not 24×7.

If the belief in god begets the devil, isn’t it better not to believe in that god ?  God and devil, life and death need not be at the poles and in opposition to create each other. If charity begets charity, it takes a lot of courage to stop being charitable.

Can life die?  Everything that lives eventually dies, says, a popular author to his six year old son who asks, will our sun eventually die and the earth turn into a lifeless planet? It takes some understanding and even more courage to say, I don’t know.

The true scientist working to decipher the code for biological immortality has no options  but to take a different position, live that reality at least in part, now. For her life never dies, everything that lives need not necessarily die.  She chooses to pay attention to ‘facts’ to support her position and work towards translating the dream to a lived reality all through her living life. She sees everything alive and not dying. She too could die but she truly lived when she lived, out of the shadow of death. Biological immortality is a virtual reality for her, now.

Nature continually renews itself. We create death working overtime, resisting nature. Our best selling author also does almost the same, paying attention to ‘facts’ to support his position, spreading the message of death all through his dying life. Death is the virtual reality for him now.  The coward dies many deaths.

The author is an angel of death and the scientist, a devil of life. A devil of life is rarer than a black swan.

Black swans are exceptions when we take very thin slices of  time and space. Compare this with the universal, all slices of time and space. Imagine all the unknown earths where white swans are as rare as black swans on our planet.  In some future time we would be ‘successful’ in making white swans extinct so that the black swans will be the ‘normality. Or it could also be true that in ‘her-story’ in some unknown past, nobody wrote a ‘his-story’ of the swans, black swans were the normality. America was doing all right, perhaps better from some other perspective, even before Columbus ! Thanks to Taleb for the trigger, a black swan in our present slice of time and space. In the cacophony of the market place one with the best noise box is listened to and being audacious is integral to a  B-School education. One is advised to have big hoary audacious goals.  We go to great lengths to prove that we belong to ‘mediocristan’ to use one of Taleb’s coins. Mediocristan and extremistan are two sides of the same coin which has a third side for ordinary mortals like us and many more sides to the likes of Taleb, which most students and their professors fail to connect to in their case studies in B-School.  In the medium run all of us are dead or ‘fooled’ in mediocristan, the flatland.

Angels of death come in all colors and shades, most pleasing, gentle, dying to do good, promise to make you all powerful, beautiful, immortal, a full life here, another one after your death – ‘mutually inclusive’, so on and so forth. The cosmetics peddler, medicine man, philanthropist, priest, pedagogues, top of the pyramid, blue chip performance, pied pipers, astrologer, snake oil in all rainbow colors…………noblest of intentions ………….. The effect is invariably malignant and they are so sure of themselves. You will never hear them say, I do not know.  We are not that sure.

The devils of life come in gray. They are very rare. Keep searching. Appearances are very very deceptive. There could be a beginners’ dilemma.

Keep paying attention to the new. Everything is renewed. Life never dies. Somewhere on the way, the tipping point will come, death will be the abnormal and life the normal. Biology will be in fashion than Physics.

Why wait for the prophet who will never come?  Let us begin building our ark.

We become what we pay attention to. Resistance creates resistance. Do not resist. Meera looks at the jaded jeans from her B-School days completing a quarter century of companionship. She chooses to see the new feel of it, today, now.

 

The Misinformation Overload and another Snake oil Cure

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Misinfographics

It is the same wine, in a larger bottle

Packaging is everything in a cosmetic culture

You seem to be at your humorous best

It is not humor, call it pathetic humor.

The best packaging, container, will not take care of poor content in the long run. Snake oil salesmen will make only quick bucks.

That seems to be what business is all about! How do you separate the chaff from the grain?

We will first arrive at the essential content, the ideal, that which renders real value not the kind of value that marketeers   create out of ‘appropriate selfishness’. When we club all our appropriate selfishness we get what we see.  Osama is less dangerous than Obama

What do you mean?

The enemy within is more dangerous because all our defenses are pointed towards the one outside. And though we might have all the equipment we will not be equipped to pull the trigger when it is called for because of this internal squeamishness. The emperor is naked though fully covered up by the most elaborate and intricate ornamentation

Is there an enemy outside.

It depends on the position. From  a variant position, yes and from the invariant, no. There is no enemy out there. All deaths are suicides and all conversation a soliloquy.

The ideal is an internal dress code, the bare minimum to cover up our nakedness. The day we were discussing the issue one of our participants had a dream of a beautiful tomb. She could also see the rotting body of the emperor inside.

She must have been a good Christian?

She had overheard her parents reading the bible

The ideal is pure potential, perfection, reason, will, design, internal, conceptual, god for ordinary mortals, the grand design  for Hawking, in essence the same content in different packaging. Re-packaging is what creates the best sellers.  The semantic swamp that results appears to be information at first glance.

Let us get back to the roots. Sanskrit means, processed, civilized, cultured as against, Prakrit, the primitive, unprocessed. The essential content is the output of this processing that goes on, something which is perennial, universally relevant, beyond time and space, ‘akshaya’, immortal, culture or the ideal. We need to be clear on this to master separating the chaff from the grain.

This is the most essential competency to survive today.

Why flout all the rules of grammar and convention?

Sanskrit was the language of processing at one time. We need a new language of processing and our language experts suggested, Inglish. Inglish does not have the worldview that goes with English nor most of its rules of grammar. It is a common purpose oriented language which retains the essence. Most memories and conventions keep us tied down to the past.

So how does this competency take care of the information overload?

Information overload is a misnomer since the very character of information is that it kills variety and reduces the overload. It increases the order, fights decay and death. It is life giving.  We might call this data overload which is a boon to the storage industry and those who put all their faith in more power to the machines and less to the humans in general but not necessarily to an elite few.

We need some kind of meta information about information itself.

‘Ravana’, the emperor,  has ten heads, quite a burden for most practical purposes.  The ideal is mapped under ten heads in the call out in the top left quadrant of the map.  We have ten balls within that one ball.

You are making it more complicated? All those ten heads didn’t really help him.

All complexity is not a curse. Requisite complexity and variety are unavoidable. Miss out on anyone of the recipe, the dish goes to the garbage dump.

Why ten?

Ten is the minimum requisite variety to understand the basic design, the master templates of nature.

What do these ten heads stand for?

Let us take the information head. The information head is information about information. In the absence of this information one will not be able to transform data to information and reduce the complexity. Misinformation overload is the result

Another example

2×2 = 4, 4×4= 16, 16×16= 256, 256 x 256 =?

The multiplication table ceases to serve the purpose at a certain stage of increasing complexity. All tools reach this limit and at some stage the wheel needs to be reinvented. Reinventing is a new synthesis. It is relevant in other contexts too. When one has a major accident, on the road or off, it is time for a new synthesis. There are always better solutions and the best is always yet to come. Even health and healing is more about information than about medicines.

Now a little more meditation on the ten will give you all the clues. You are on your own.

Why always leave a large part of it unexplained?

We need to break from treating others as children, like all governments do, and relate as adults so that the adult emerges.  We point to the issue and one has to figure it out for oneself if it has to be of any use.

Bon Voyage

The Window to the Self – A Thought Experiment

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Return to the Centre and the new beginning

Imagine yourself at the centre of a perfect sheet of rubber being inflated all around in the conflict between the old and the new, the ideal and the operational.   Being a perfect sheet of rubber it does not get torn but stretches perfectly. The centre of the sheet remains at the centre, undisturbed

Now imagine the sheet being transformed into a perfect football. What happens to the centre? The centre is shifted to the centre of the football and the football is being kicked around in the world-cup with no timelines.

It is a perfect football. Nothing happens to the centre. It remains at the centre absolutely centred, motionless and at peace. Sometime during the process of being kicked around the football becomes aware of what is going on.  Instead of being chased around it decides to chase the players!

Imagine your own self, the perfection and the conflicts and the process of becoming centred, taking the lighthouse position and the beginning of the journey of sustained continuous improvement.

Infographics – Return to the Centre, 

Juggling with Ps – The Picture of Philosophy

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  • When everything is a lie, lie detectors are akin to mousetraps where rats are extinct. What we need is a truth detector. Philosophy ought to be that touchstone to detect truth.pic of philosophy
    True normality  
    • When one’s inheritance is from the cloud every one is a prnce or a princess.
    • Will Durant  tells the Story of Philosophy in over 600 pages and Kant takes 800 pages for the Critique of Pure Reason. Yet the story is far from complete. Schopenhauer laments,  “ I could not find a shorter way of imparting it than this book, The World as Will and Idea.
    • Philosophy has gone out of fashion. We should  not expect the princes  to wade through the semantic swamp of philosophy and the other disciplines and  come up with a new synthesis.
    • The shorter way, a new synthesis,  is an imperative. A picture is worth thousand words is an understatement which discounts the value of maps, and mapping. Text can never be free of slipperiness and linearity. We need more maps and pictures to avoid killing more trees, more so when reading has given way to viewing. Visual literacy has become a critical competency.
    • The perceived normal is the abnormal. We can now see the truly normal
    • History is Philosophy in motion (Croce). Pull down the tent poles of space and time, history and philosophy collapse to the present and the two meet. The true historian (all history is lies and it is always His story not hers and western philosophy is no different) and the true philosopher would meet at this  moment of truth. The  artist,scientist, theologian and the pursuers of other paths too would meet at the same cross roads if the synthesis  is effective. We would be saving a lot of wasted effort when all of us use the same philosopher’s compass.
    • Most of our partners in dialogue had  their background in business, governance and developmental management. We worked together to arrive at the common ground since it  is from here that accelerated community learning  takes off.
    • Less is more. “Brevity is the soul of wit.”
    • > Connect > Occam’s razor
    • Philosopher’s stone
    • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Hutter
    • Intelligence > Problem Solving> Continual improvement
    • Why AI, artificial intelligence > Modeling NI, natural intelligence, with gainful compression of knowledge