All Life Is Problem Solving

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 in the White House. How do I know?

Well, I know because it has done such a poor job of what I call knowledge processing, namely seeing problems in Government behavior, solving those problems, and communicating the solutions to people in the Federal Government who might need them, or to the public where that’s important. How do I know I that? [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 fallacy, Platonic folds, Platonicity, randomness as incomplete information, retrospective distortion, and the round-trip fallacy. [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 Platonic fold is “the place where our Platonic representation enters into contact with reality and you can see the side effects of models.” (p. 309) I think, more accurately, since we never really have such contact, it’s the place where our representations are confronted with statements or thoughts about reality which diverge from expectations we’ve developed by using the models. Platonicity, refers to our tendency to focus on our Platonic representations, “at the cost of ignoring those objects of seemingly messier and less tractable structures.” (p. 309) That is, it is our tendency to not see Platonic folds with sufficient clarity to know where it is that our models are failing us; or, in other words, to “mistake the map for the territory.” [Read more →]

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 that one collects positive Black Swan opportunities. However, this is not so easily done because of the tendency to mistake positive Black Swan opportunities for opportunities that can only produce positive results in a manner consistent with Gaussian normality. The lottery ticket fallacy is a specific form of this error in which the accumulation of opportunities to win the lottery through the accumulation of lottery tickets is taken for the accumulation of positive Black Swan opportunities. [Read more →]

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. [Read more →]

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 fallacy, the ludic fallacy, Mandelbrodtian randomess and Gray Swans, the narrative fallacy, Platonic folds, Platonicity, randomness as incomplete information, retrospective distortion, and the round-trip fallacy. In future Knowledge Management blogs, I’ll be commenting on many of these ideas. In this blog, I’ll begin with NNT’s distinction between Medocristan and Extremistan, and will also comment on the idea of randomness as incomplete information. [Read more →]

One reason why I haven’t blogged in the last week or so, is that a very active discussion about the Federal KM Initiative has been going on in the new FedKM google group. At one point in the discussions I had occasion to offer a first crack at an elevator speech for the Federal KM initiative. I thought I’d share it here, in a slightly revised version, as well. The speech reflects my own proposal for Federal KM written up previously in my National Governmental KM series. [Read more →]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s (NNT) The Black Swan is a “best seller,” and therefore may be having a certain influence on our thinking in many fields including Knowledge Management. From the viewpoint of KM, The Black Swan isn’t about what we know, or about what we know we don’t know, but rather is a book that focuses attention on the un- or ill-conceived, on what we don’t know we don’t know, Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “unknown unknowns.” And the concern of the book is how we can begin to think about “unknown unknowns,” and prepare and position ourselves for them, so that we live in a state that is more robust relative to their possible occurrence and impact.

In an earlier post, I gave NNT’s definition of Black Swans in terms of three attributes. First, they are events that are “outliers” in the sense that they fall outside of the realm of common expectations. Second, they carry an extreme impact. Third, even though they are outliers, after they occur human nature makes us formulate explanations for them so we make them explainable and “predictable” retrospectively. [Read more →]

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Today, leading Civil Liberties and Human Rights Groups met with President Obama to talk about the recent actions of the Administration in seeming to support Bush Administration policies and his continued reluctance to support investigations and prosecutions for War Crimes. Reportedly, the President was not pleased by the questions and comments he received from those attending and he continued to express his view that we need to move forward and not look backward. I think the statement of Jonathan Turley’s, in the above video from Keith Olbermann, says some of the most important things about the torture issue. If you’re a constitutionalist and believe in Open Society, there’s nothing more important than getting this done and restoring the foundations of Governance in the United States.

So, for us, the real “distraction” from the President’s efforts to get his very broad agenda passed is that he continues to block serious efforts in the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute alleged high crimes. This determination of his, coupled with his continual tacking toward the center on other issues creates both frustration and mistrust among some of his formerly most enthusiastic supporters. If this pattern continues we will see the beginning of new political movements in the netroots, dedicated to real change, by the Fall.

Dave Snowden, whose work I’ve often discussed here, recently filed this post which really speaks to me. I think it’s right on the money, and is about both KM and politics, and also complexity and measurement. I’ll look forward to the next one, Dave.