All Life Is Problem Solving

Many progressives, even though they’ve been working for a PO-based health care reform bill, have 1) never given up Medicare for All as the goal of their activity, and 2) decided, in the first quarter of 2009, that Medicare for All could not pass the new Congress. They then reacted to their realization by concluding […]

[Read more →]

In this blog I continue my discussion of reflexivity by clarifying the differences between sequential and simultaneous reflexivity. If reflexivity is sequential, then the effects of our actions on the world and on our thinking at a later time, that is, “the interference” is sequential. Specifically, we cognize and come to an understanding of situation […]

[Read more →]

One of the concepts George Soros emphasizes the most is “reflexivity.” Here’s his presentation of the idea from The Age of Fallibility (pp. 6-7). ”On the one hand, we seek to understand our situation. I call this the cognitive function. On the other hand, we seek to make an impact on the world. I call […]

[Read more →]

George Soros has written a number of very interesting and influential books over the past 20 years including, among others: The Alchemy of Finance, Open Society: Reforming Global Capitalism, The Age of Fallibility, and The Crash of 2008 and What It Means. All of these present and apply a conceptual framework he has worked with […]

[Read more →]

It’s not easy for people to accept that continuous critical evaluation of our ideas is a good thing. During the discussion in the actkm listserv Neil Olonoff responded very strongly to my view that continuous critical evaluation on a level playing field is a good thing. He pointed out that: “Many well-known products and services […]

[Read more →]

The issues of whether we should allow all ideas, both good and bad to flower, and whether bad ideas or fads don’t need to be experienced to be learned, have arisen in the actkm listserv discussion group in the context of my advocacy of critical evaluation of new ideas. This reminds me of the more […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]