Dirk & all, (re: recent discussion of new issues)
There are a lot of reasons for people with different approaches to a problem, like steering a planet that is visibly veering off course, to listen to each other. Collectively we’re missing the main problem somehow. If we leave our thinking “to the experts” or just answer every question with “safe ideas” from the past, it’s kind of “going to sleep on the job”. If you just say “I’m comfortable, don’t shake me” you also just might not be up to see the dawn.
We’re at a point in history where all kinds of marvelous undesigned systems that once took care of themselves beautifully are no longer doing so. It’s very obvious that people have not been “getting the signals” somehow. When you carefully look for why, it comes down to people dodging the evidence of change because it upsets their emotionally safe ways of thinking. I think the big picture is of a whole historic web of what amounts to “magical thinking”, the excuses for the “taker culture” if you will, that is now coming apart like a cocoon that has been outgrown. I think we literally can shed the cocoon or be strangled by it, and don’t really have other choices.
I like the ideas suggested for using a wiki with a group like this. Wiki’s also take real work and a learned discipline though. Maybe an open forum within a wiki would allow both loose conversation and more careful collaborative thinking to co-exist side bye side. There are lots of better designed forum layouts, with features like sorting email into threads, and topic areas for example. That’s actually how news groups all originated. Why that much more efficient design was abandoned in the move to GUI interfaces and email is an example of one of the secrets of evolutionary processes in nature, that each follows its own individual path of accumulative development. Along with conversations organized in threads if people got better at putting the kernel of their idea in the first two sentences, most of the complaints about jumbled in-boxes and overload for an active discussion group would disappear. Most would only carefully follow one or another thread and just peek at the others occasionally.
I’m worried though, that we’re not worrying enough or about the right things.
There’s a huge mismatch between what is happing, the multiplying impacts and the several genuine environmental collapses underway, and believing in the small incremental changes we hoped would prevent that. I think we all might start lists of what has gotten in the way of getting the signals and seeing which kinds of change would actually change things. Being both a technician and scientist I see the “first law of science and understanding” as making true observations. There are some clear examples of ways we are clearly not doing that. One of great importance is particularly curious because it hardly bothers anyone..! That’s a sign of real hole in our thinking. There may be others but we definitely do generally consider regular positive % change in things as stable and regular change. In physical systems it directly corresponds to nature’s most dramatic and ultimately destabilizing form of change. It’s the form of change that corresponds to eruptions and explosions and things. The truth is that making things explosively larger ends up making them big, and so making both their internal and external relations dramatically different.
You can simply define the error in the units of measure. You don’t need to “feel it” or learn all about complex systems to see the error. The measure problem with considering regular % change as steady change is that it effectively resets your unit of measure to 1, each and every time you take a measurement. That’s tremendously simplifying. and profoundly reductionist, you might say. Why would we do that if we are measuring nature’s most dramatic form of change? We’re clearly treating the physical world as being immaterial, a thing of magic in our minds. Exploding change is truly not immaterial though.
So I think we need ways of measuring change that reflect the reality, not the fantasy, and detach our values from the magical thinking to reattach them to the real. We also oddly seem to need to search for what’s real, as if having no guide! If we “looked around” we might find something to worry about more useful than we’ve found so far.
- sorry for the long post
Phil Henshaw