I’m going to bring a little more focus in form to this weblog, mixing short posts in a more traditional weblog format with longer essays divided up into parts so you don’t get big long chunks of text to wade through. And we begin with a paper called Self Organizing Systems: a tutorial in Complexity This is a tutorial on the processes and patterns of organization in complex natural systems. No technical details are included in describing the models or theories used. Instead, I focus on the concepts of self-organization, complexity, complex adaptive systems, criticality, the edge of chaos and …
In case you think that intuition is just some wacky new age concept with no place in a real world which demands reason and logic, consider the case of Stanislav Petrov who single handedly saved the world from nuclear devastation in 1983 on nothing more than a gut feeling: It was Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov’?s duty to use computers and satellites to warn the Soviet Union if there were ever a nuclear missile attack by the United States. In the event of such an attack, the Soviet Union�?s strategy was to launch an immediate all-out nuclear weapons counterattack against the …
From Curt Rosengren comes a link to a Wall Street Journal article on trusting intution: “Watch for bias. Don’t confuse intuitive thinking with personal subjectivity, which often emerges as a result of prejudices, biases, fears, fantasies or purely emotional reactions. Constant analysis of your thinking is the only way to winnow genuine intuitive grain from emotional chaff. Keep a record. To determine how strong your intuitive ability is, keep a record of your intuitive insights, or hunches, as they occur. Rate them objectively. If a reasonable number have worked out, cultivate and pay attention to your intuitions. Diary-keeping is the …
The last of three parts on music. We are talking about improvisation as a method for working with or being in groups – developing a set of practices that refine one’s ability to think on one’s feet and to see full opportunities in small hints (Blake’s “world in a grain of sand“). Improvisation, especially in a collaborative environment, produces material that would never otherwise arise. And yet, it is worth pointing out that great improvisation is not simply making stuff up on the spot. Consider this from Becker’s essay: When I used to play piano in Chicago taverns for a …
Another post on music, this one inspired by a great essay on the etiquette of improvisation, by Howard Becker: Collective improvisation–not like Keith Jarrett, where one man plays alone, but like the more typical small jazz group–requires that everyone pay close attention to the other players and be prepared to alter what they are doing in response to tiny cues that suggest a new direction that might be interesting to take. The etiquette here is more subtle than I have so far suggested, because everyone understands that at every moment everyone (or almost everyone) involved in the improvisation is offering …