All Life Is Problem Solving

Occasionally, someone in KM brings up the question of whether the discipline is a science. And then the arguments start. Some dislike the idea of science and deny that KM has anything to do science. Others identify science with knowledge that successfully describes, predicts and explains; and they conclude that the discipline of KM with [...]

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During a discussion in the act-km group, Neil Olonoff expressed his distaste for the phrase “knowledge processing,” which I use frequently as a summary term for the activities in the second tier of the three-tier model of KM. In reply, I said that I’m not constitutionally wedded to the phrase “knowledge processing,” that the phrase [...]

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In a recent exchange in the Fed KM Google group, one of my correspondents thought that it would be very helpful to a National KM Center to have access to benchmarking-derived “lessons learned,” “best practices,” and “knowledge architecture” from APQC. In reply, I indicated my agreement provided that these ideas were construed appropriately, but then [...]

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Yesterday, I offered a high-level case for Federal Knowledge Management. But I did oversimplify things a bit, to keep my post short. The complication I didn’t want to introduce earlier is the idea that Knowledge Management already exists in every locale within the Federal Government, whether we think it does or not, and whether we [...]

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The Federal Government really needs Knowledge Management. It needs Knowledge Management in many, if not most of its agencies. It needs Knowledge Management in its inter-agency teams. It needs Knowledge Management in the Congress. It needs Knowledge Management in the Judiciary. It needs Knowledge Management in the Federal Reserve System. And it needs Knowledge Management [...]

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In past blogs, I’ve discussed Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan as a metaphor for systematic doubt and fallibilism as well the ideas of scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket fallacy, the ludic fallacy, Mandelbrodtian randomess and Gray Swans, the narrative [...]

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Here’s more on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan, including discussions of Platonic folds, Platonicity, randomness as incomplete information, retrospective distortion, and the round-trip fallacy. Platonic Folds and Platonicity. NNT focuses a lot of attention on our tendency to view our concepts, models and representations as pure, sharp, crisp, abstract forms. A [...]

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More on ideas from Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan today, including discussions of the Lottery Ticket and Ludic fallacies, Mandelbrodtian Randomness, and Gray Swans, and the Narrative Fallacy. The Lottery Ticket Fallacy. One of the things NNT calls attention to is the possibility and advisability of living one’s life in such a way [...]

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In this post, I’ll continue my discussion of key ideas from Taleb’s The Black Swan, with an examination of: the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error (or platonic confirmation), epistemic arrogance, and future blindness.

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There’s a good reason why The Black Swan is a best seller. It’s written in a very lively style with great narratives, literary images, and vivid terms and phrases. Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT) talks about scalability, non-scalability, Extremistan, Mediocristan, the fallacy of silent evidence, confirmation error or platonic confirmation, epistemic arrogance, future blindness, the lottery-ticket [...]

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