9/02/06 Some of my oldest ideas, from long before, seem to be what may be breaking through, said in slightly new ways. I do apologize for presenting my work as a mishmash of versions at different stages. Some I might abandon, most not, but there are lots of reasons to leave one's loose ends on one's own sketch pad.... Approximation skips over is all the apparently 'fuzzy bits' of connection between things we find hard to describe. That includes the real engines of complex natural systems and how they fall into place, the individual physical emergence of things hidden beneath and between the surface appearances. This work is about the consistent shapes you can find there that shows you what's happening. Learning to read the curves of things that are out of control gives you a fresh means of connecting one's mind with the full reality of what matters to us. It also helps with steering...
6/17/06 A friend asked if I could summarize how I read system information from the dynamics of data curves... and a lot of ideas came out in a reasonably coherent way in one sitting. It's a little much, but then so is our situation. Observing Systems
6/11/06,I had an amazing three years, 1976-79, when I invented a queer sort of general systems theory from direct observation, without much of any awareness of the then current state of the art except for a handful pop culture ideas floating around, like Lincoln's "a tree is best measured when it is down", and Bucky Fuller's odd approach to design & engineering. From closely watching a prolific variety of undocumented growth systems I observed that growth systems are locally originating explosive reorganization processes that give up their own structure in giving birth to other things... or something like that. I had different terms back then and didn't begin find much in common with other systems theories for a very long time. I did make a significant effort to connect with the General Systems Theory group in the mid 80's, but broke with them and just continued trying to figure out how to say it and expose others to the depth of systems knowledge available from directly reading the dynamics of growth. That's sort of where these pages originated, with the math for how and when to interpret a string of dots as a curve, that I started in the mid 80's and only got very far with 10 years later. Much of that work is still here, mostly unaltered, some with layers of discussion of various kinds overlaid and inserted as it came to mind. I guess my current thinking is not well represented really, though still comfortable with resting on the same foundation. I have eliminated some things occasionally, but not much, choosing to even leave some faulty work that I know has solutions and would still like to get back to and fix someday. There have been two gaps in the work, when my son was born in 87 and when I collapsed from exhaustion in 2002 I think. My current thinking began to develop after the recent long break, just deciding to write down a bunch of thoughts for fun it again in Jan 05, and reading more.
I've been very frustrated over the years by my inability to write what I want, seeming to produce content that was too perfectly logical for anyone to read, a kind of hopeless mathematics of words, or just too fantastic. My only complaint about my readers is that they've been just too damn polite and mostly said nothing at all. Just writing for the fun of it seems to work better, and I've been reading other people, like the old standards by Ashby, Weinberg, Boulding, Meadows and others, the SFI complexity group and the renegade SGSR alum's, a few new ones like DeLanda, Gladwell and the journal ECO, the Columbia Earth Institute program, and seeing more connections. Consequently my current thinking isn't really represented on these pages. Some of my oldest work still holds up comfortably (even if probably still a little too radical), such as my 78 "Unhidden Pattern of Events" which I scanned and uploaded recently. What seems to be happening is that there are several versions of systems thinking that have evolved over the same period, looking at the same problem in different ways, all of which are probably necessary to create a reasonable whole picture of the subject. There's also the likelihood that the physical distortion and tearing apart of the human system as a whole, under the stress of overshooting economic growth is creating inroads for alternate points of view and giving them rich observations on which to develop. Well, a 'hopeful danger' is indeed the kind of thing people sometimes invent out of thin air... so I try to present the nuts & bolts of what I see of it, and the empirical study from which my solid stuff grows, as just a menu for people to chew on as they like.
Perhaps my current thinking is best represented on the NECI, IntSci, and Friam, forums, in my correspondence with Stan Salthe, Don McNeill, Aleks Jakulin, Steve Kurtz among others and with various friends in the Westside 3 Parks democratic club. You can find the forums on the web and if you're interested in the correspondence I'll try to get permission & collect it in a manageable form. The best scientific document I have is definitely the current draft of the plankton paper now in publication review.