[An archival post carried over from the defunct Transformative Tools blog] If this looks like a version of the medicine wheel, know the medicine wheel expresses the archetectonic fundamental; is the archetypal template for the matrical model and heuristic learning process. This tool was profoundly influenced by the work of Little Bear and Hummux, their investigation following the work of the great process theorist, Arthur S. Young. The matrical form is encountered as descendent of the sacred hoop in Young’s book, The Geometry of Meaning.)Another way to look at it is to think of the simple “four square” matrix, (well known as the Johari Window,) as another kind of depiction. Going farther, these kinds of matrices also formulate compasses and mandalas.The learning principle is straightforward: plotting positions on the form articulates a positions with respect to the arrangement of opposed categories. In turn, each categorical pair expresses a dichotomy or pair of opposites. Any position or relationship between two or more positions encompasses a critical tension betwixt and between these dichotomies. The result is a way of plotting and learning about the tension of opposites. Obviously, this process is explicitly dialectical.

Here’s a simple example:

It could address an inquiry based on the question, If happy or sad, how sensitive is this mood to being changed?

Here’s a richer matrix upon which is set two pairs from Baxter’s Relational Dialectics. It’s more abstract yet it could yield a lot of data in response to a concrete and practical question.

I’ve most often intuited a set of two dichotomies in response to the process I’m engaging with learners. There’s no normative aspect to setting up a given matrix. In effect, they can be conjured as a matter of feeling what the critical tensions in a situation seem to be. Alternately, by drawing two cards from the deck of opposites, (another tool,) the matrix can be randomized. Here’s the result of drawing two cards right now:

Hmmm…good draw. Any matrix given through any procedure is employed against the, hopefully, already critical inquisitive intention of the learner.

As a learner, you can put together, ad hoc, your own 4 square matrix.

Here’s an example of a political self-test using this format.

featuring 24,014,408 books
(including 1,251,822 with full-text)

[as of April 27, 2010]

One web page for every book ever published. It’s a lofty, but achievable, goal.

Open Library is a project of the non-profit Internet Archive, and has been funded in part by a grant from the California State Library and the Kahle/Austin Foundation. About Us

Terrific blog too.

You can make out Matt’s magic bat leaning up against the back-stop to good ol’ field 8.

Opening day of Free Play Softball, April 18th, ‘the first Sunday after tax day!’

Since 1986, I vaguely recall. Have I been playing with the Free Play crew since, hmmm, 2000? If so: ten years and counting.

Alas, it was cold, it was drizzling and worse, and only five blokes showed up. And, I had to pass all the equipment on because I have a work commitment next week.

Still, we batted around a bit and it seems my undercut and uncanny ability to swing away at crappy pitches has survived the winter, intact. This, nevertheless, makes me very happy.

The Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80-20 rule, first figured into my own thinking several years before someone hipped me to the origins of a conception I was using. In truth, I had developed its bastard child, also a regulation of the vital few, I called–at the time–the 10% problem. The context was artist development in the music industry and the application was as a device to thoughtfully put reverse pressure on a musician’s tendency to spend time convincing naysayers. What I saw was artists spending more time trying to market to naysayers than they spent either pullng fence sitters in, or turning their believers into evangelists. Also, it seemed at the time what promoted this was their sense everybody was supposed to be a fan and that those who weren’t yet fans were thought to be ripe targets. But, the naysayers were hardly low hanging fruit and so I offered the suggestion that they should be ignored.

Several years later a colleague on the only management team I’ve ever been a member of hipped me to The Pareto Rule in the aftermath of my attempt to apply the 10% problem to the company’s marketing philosophy. In this instance, I was advocating more product testing because it seemed to me the company was wasting resources based in the assumption that 90% of the new products would always appeal to 100% of their customers.

Since then I’ve employed variations of the 80-20 (or 90-10) principle to all sorts of situations. My innovation is with respect to transformative learning: roughly, spend a figurative 10% of your time doing wild experiments, and doing so irrespective of so-called conventional wisdom. Here, in a sense, one pays attention to the outlying possibilities.

This has led me to reflect upon how the concept of the vital few may be consequential for perspectives about systems. This follows from a hypothesis about systems, (or about how in effect the world works,) that goes like this, what aspects of the system are hidden when it is presumed seeing the entire system in fact sees only 90%?
(90%, or, whatever is the presumptive portion said perspective views.

This comes back to the genesis of the 10% Problem because often the conventional wisdom, or habitual perspective, holds its conclusions about the system to be the inevitable product of seeing/understanding the system in the purportedly correct, (read into this also: normative, ‘as commonly understood,’) way. Whereas, my supposition holds that any incomplete perspective allows for, at least, inclusion of what’s absent, and, audaciously, allows for novelty–especially novel ways for viewing and analyzing the system at hand.

Had the pleasure of participating in a Hunting & Gathering session with a very close friend, and veteran of squareONE learning‘s experiential tool processes. This unfolded on the birthday of original squareONE partner, and mentor to us both, Judith Buerkel. (Judith passed from this world in 2007.) It was exploration fit to Judith’s charge to fully dive into the open-ended learning any moment provides.

It was great fun. I’ll have something to say about some of what came ‘up,’ soon.

Yolanda Nave’s cartoon is a real good one, as far as fitting into my model of the teaching cartoon. It was a serendipitous find of the hunt.

While I was wrestling with a problem of terminology* with respect to key definitions with respect to my concocting a Transformative Anthropology, I happened upon Serendip at Bryn Mawr College.

Here’s a few captures from this marvelous site and project.

SERENDIPITY (from The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 3rd Edition)
The faculty of making fortunate discoveries by accident.

[From the characters in the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, from Persian Sarandip, Sri Lanka, from Arabic Sarandib]

Word history: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for coining the word serendipity. In one of his 3,000 or more letters, on which his literary reputation rests, and specifically in a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Perhaps the word itself came to him by serendipity. Walpole formed the world on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of a “silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip; as their highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of … One of the most remarkable instances of this accidental sagacity (for you must observe that no discovery of a thing you are looking for comes under this description) was of my Lard Shaftsbury, who happening to dine at Lord Chancellor Claredon’s, found out the marriage of the Duke of York and Mrs. Hyde, by the respect with which her mother treated her at table.”

From its birth in 1994, Serendip has been committed to exploring and creating “less wrong” ways of making sense of the world. Itself an exploration into the potentials of relatively undirected evolutionary systems in which chance plays a significant role, Serendip necessarily changes over time. Hence what was originally a major Serendip section on “complexity” has become in 2008 one on “complexity and emergence.” This change mirrors wider changes in alternative intellectual perspectives: an increasing awareness that making sense of complexity requires not only an acknowledgment of its existence and the development of tools to analyze it but also an appreciation an important historical dimension. Complexity increasingly seems to be not “designed” but rather to emerge over time from from a relatively undirected evolutionary process beginning with simpler entities. (src)

*The term I use to title the central concept of Transformative Anthropology is strategic serendipity. Strategic serendipity: in the context of individual human development, a chance event that comes to completely alter the course of a person’s development. Among the many kinds of change such an event impacts, the common kinds result in changes in: key relationships; career; location; interests. (see notes)

A New School Teaches Students Through Videogames. A school uses videogame-based lessons to teach a new generation of kids
By Susannah F. Locke; Popsci January 7, 2009

more:

The Quest to Learn school opened last September in Manhattan, welcoming the first class of sixth-graders who will learn almost entirely through videogame-inspired activities, an educational strategy geared to keep kids engaged and prepare them for high-tech careers.

This year’s 72-student class is split into four groups that rotate through five courses during the day: Codeworlds (math/English), Being, Space and Place (social studies/English), The Way Things Work (math/science), Sports for the Mind (game design), and Wellness (health/PE). Instead of slogging through problem sets, students learn collaboratively in group projects that require an understanding of subjects in the New York State curriculum. The school’s model draws on 30 years of research showing that people learn best when they’re in a social context that puts new knowledge to use.

The Quest To Learn School: “Quest to Learn is a school for digital kids. It is a community where students learn to see the world as composed of many different kinds of systems. It is a place to play, invent, grow, and explore.”

I’m going to bet, and do so with confidence, that the uncited research folds in the following, “People learn best when the learning is shaped to be, for the learner, intrinsically rewarding.

For adults, I would put it this way:

adults learn when they’re able to test their experiential knowledge and then to use it

Implicit in this formulation–and perhaps applicable to young learners–is the intrinsic benefit provided by active learning, via which a learner is supported in their putting their own discoveries to concrete tests. This intrinsic benefit is named: fun. The added benefit is that accountability itself becomes an easeful aspect of the ecology of learning. Against which the grim banking theory of education is likely to, at the end of the school day, have students praying for the bell, and, dismissal.

In her book, Magic Trees of the Mind, Dr. Marian Diamond, neuroscientist at the University of California/Berkeley, describes the characteristics of an enriched environment that:

Includes a steady source of positive emotional support

Provides a nutritious diet with enough protein, vitamins, minerals, and calories

Stimulates all the senses (but not necessarily all at once!)

Has an atmosphere free of undue pressure and stress but suffused with a degree of pleasurable intensity

Presents a series of novel challenges that are neither too easy nor too difficult for the child at his or her stage of development

Allows for social interaction for a significant percentage of activities

Promotes the development of a broad range of skills and interests that are mental, physical, aesthetic, social, and emotional

Gives the child an opportunity to choose many of his or her own activities

Gives the child a chance to assess the results of his or her efforts and to modify them

Offers an enjoyable atmosphere that promotes exploration and the fun of learning

Above all, allows the child to be an active participant rather than a passive observer.

excerpt: Learning Society of the Future: Questions to Consider by Dee Dickinson

A daring hypothesis holds that younger learners are not dramatically constituted to be different than the adult learners each will grow to be. I’m reminded of Malcolm Knowles.

Knowles (1980) came from a humanistic orientation and believed that self-actualization was the prime objective of adult learning, and the mission of educators was to assist adult learners to develop and achieve their full potential as emotional, psychological, and intellectual beings. Knowles made four assumptions about adults as learners: (1) Adults tend to be more self-directed as a result of their maturity, (2) Adults possess personal histories which defines their identities and serve as a resource of experiential learning upon which new learnings can be applied, (3) Motivation in adults is directed to more socially relevant learning, and (4) Adult learners have interest in immediate application for problem-solving. (src)

x

Now I’m driving through Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s The Black Swan. It provides a gripping journey for a Jamesian fallibilist such as myself. Also, Taleb’s so-called skeptical empiricism circles around my own current central concern that is also strongly skeptical about, as Taleb terms it, narrativity.  The interesting difference is I’m looking at ubiquitous hidden chance events, (in ordinary human development,) whereas Taleb deals with rare hidden chance eventsin large-scale domains. I too am similarly fascinated by how linear narratives clothe non-linear events as a matter of post-hoc rationalization, but, again the domain I’m interested in is different than those of Taleb.

There is a funny moment in the book where Taleb blows off a causal assertion about this domain I’m interested in. I’ll return to this after I finish the book.

As a collector of dichotomies, the following is of great interest. Via Nassim Nicholas Taleb, purloined from his notes page at the web site for his book Fooled By Randomness. (Excellent review of The Black Swan by Dan Hill @cityofsound)

116- Fooled by Rationalism; Lecturing Birds How to Fly [From Tinkering]

The greatest problem in knowledge is the “lecturing birds how to fly” effect.

Let us call it the error of rationalism. In Fat Tony’s language, it would be what makes us the suckers of all suckers. Consider two types of knowledge. The first type is not exactly “knowledge”; its ambiguous character prevents us from calling it exactly knowledge. It a way of doing thing that we cannot really express in clear language, but that we do nevertheless, and do well. The second type is more like what we call “knowledge”; it is what you acquire in school, can get grades for, can codify, what can be explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, provable, etc.

To make things simple, just look at the second type of knowledge as something so stripped of ambiguity that an autistic person (a high functioning autistic person, that is) can easily understand it.

The error of rationalism is, simply, overestimating the role and necessity of the second type, the academic knowledge, in human affairs. It is a severe error because not only much of our knowledge is not explainable, academizable, rationalizable, formalizable, theoretizable, codifiable, Sovietizable, bureaucratizable, Harvardifiable, etc., but, further, that such knowledge plays such a minor life that it is not even funny.
We are very likely to believe that skills and ideas that we actually acquired by doing, or that came naturally to us (as we already knew by our innate biological instinct) came from books, ideas, and reasoning. We get blinded by it; there may even be something in our brains that makes us suckers for the point. Let us see how.

 

 

TYPE 1	TYPE 2
Know how	Know what
Fat Tony wisdom, Aristotelian phronesis	Aristotelian logic
Implicit , Tacit	Explicit
Nondemonstrative knowledge	Demonstrative knowledge
Tëchnë	Epistemë
Experiential knowledge	Epistemic base
Heuristic	Propositional knowledge
Figurative	Literal
Tinkering	Directed research
Bricolage	Targeted activity
Empiricism	Rationalism
Practice	Scholarship
Engineering	Mathematics
Tinkering, stochastic tinkering	Directed search
Epilogism (Menodotus of Nicomedia and the school of empirical medicine)	Inductive knowledge
Historia a sensate cognitio	Causative historiography
Autopsia	Diagnostic
Austrian economics	Neoclassical economics
Bottom up libertarianism	Central Planner
Spirit of the Law	Letter of the Law
Customs	Ideas
Brooklyn, Amioun	Cambridge, MA, and UK
Accident, trial and error	Design
Nonautistic	Autistic
Random	Deterministic
Ecological uncertainty, not tractable in textbook	Ludic probability, statistics textbooks
Embedded	Abstract
Parallel processing	Serial processing
Off-model	On-model, model based
Side effect of a drug	National Institute of Health
Nominalism	Realism

 

My intentionally idiosyncratic interpretation of Taleb’s usage of the term ludic, is: it names the error found when people believe that their management of known simple fixed probabilities is identical to management of complex dynamic uncertainty. The latter is, of course, impossible to actually manage.

If I reflect upon phenomenologists about town…well, there aren’t many of us. Anyhowsa, Frank M. Mills is one of the few. In the past few days, he’s melded his family of web media locations into emptyspaces. This will make it easier to keep track* of Frank.

I’ve done a little walkin’ and talkin’ with Frank years ago. With Frank, if you walk down–say, Virginia Street (above) in Lakewood–he’ll stop and talk with people and stop and contemplate and, otherwise go about it as if the real deal isn’t between points A and B. Great fella with which to get lost in space.

…since KW has gone off grid, I better look him up. Frank and KW are the only flâneurs I’ve ever met.

* or sniff his trail

“Better to follow the perfume, than the tracks.” (Shams)

We started our Free Play pick-up softball league in April on the first Sunday after tax day. We’ll play until it becomes too insane to play. This usually means sometime in November, several Sundays after it is merely insane to play.

In a month we’ll hit the third anniversary of the Sunday when I lost a ball in the late fall sun and caught it with my nose. This turned out to be the $6,000 catch, as far as the medical assessment went. This is meaningful this year because I found my old confidence in left field only to lose it on my worst fielding day ever a month ago. As Walt said to me, “Snake bit, eh?”

This year has been interesting for several reasons. First, from May through the end of July, as a result of an email notification experiment, the game attracted between 24 and 30 players. Everybody gets to play–as long as he or she has reached the age of 11–so, as the person who divides the mob into two, the resulting line-ups were obviously long, with eleven fielders, and as many as four people rotating in every inning.

I wondered out loud with Alice and Dave, what this meant for the ethos of the game. It was clear at the time that the game’s remarkable consensual process of accommodation was coming under some pressure from players, including myself, who weren’t 100% dedicated to an experiment morphed to include a substantial degradation in playing time and plate appearances.

Dave, on the other hand, simply told me, “Hey, after July 4th, the turn out will fall back to normal.” Well, it did, but the email announcements were halted too!

Among several developments, two more stand out. Two new players, Mark Jr. and Mark Sr. have come out and delighted the old timers with their consistent and crafty play. Mark Jr. is both a golden glover and a tricky, tactical hit-to-any field batter. He was part of a paradigmatic moment last week, when he drove a swinging bunt fifteen feet down the line and made it safely to first. Except, he was called back for crafting a “bunt-like” hit, where the rule is no bunting. But, it wasn’t a bunt.

He protested to me that “It isn’t fair to make up a new rule in the middle of a game.”

I told him, “It’s fair if you look at it a different way. But, it’s also the kind of game where an unfair rule gets conjured when it serves a bigger purpose.”

It took me a few seasons to embrace how situational rulings emerge in ‘free play!’

The other really notable development is the blossoming of Cat. He’s 16, perhaps? Wiry. He’s been playing off and on for five years. After a big growth spurt, he’s truly arrived with a beautiful swing, rapidly improving fielding instincts in left field, and, well, he’s always been quick as a cat.

It was sometime in mid May he launched a ball about 300 feet and about 100 feet behind where I was stationed in left field. (After nine years patrolling left, I’d guess it was a top five blast.) There’s no fence, so you turn and fetch the home run ball. Fluke? No, several at bats later he hit one 50 feet beyond my more prudent–but not prudent enough–position. He hit it about 275 feet.

Stand back, Cat’s at bat!

In my earlier post, the Second Order position vis a vis belief was explored. There are many ways to describe a Second Order belief. One way says: such a belief is a knee jerk reaction. Another option says: such a belief automatically follows from a specific predisposition. Enter an internalized model of any kind into the fundamentals of a predisposition, then where there is Second Order belief derived from the model, it follows inevitably from the model.

In other words, the model, in effect, programs the belief. Idealized programs very often generate idealized, absolute beliefs about the model.

Krugman:

1.
But the self-described New Keynesian economists weren’t immune to the charms of rational individuals and perfect markets. They tried to keep their deviations from neoclassical orthodoxy as limited as possible.
2.
But there was something else going on: a general belief that bubbles just don’t happen. What’s striking, when you reread Greenspan’s assurances, is that they weren’t based on evidence — they were based on the a priori assertion that there simply can’t be a bubble in housing.
3.
In short, the belief in efficient financial markets blinded many if not most economists to the emergence of the biggest financial bubble in history.

What would you say about a model purported to model macroeconomic actuality, where total belief in the model itself causes the model user to be blinded to particular actualities? What would you say about the nature of total belief in any blinded model. Apparently, best and brightest economic experts can come to be irrationally exhuberant about their own models.

When the financial crisis unfolded a year ago, and in response to the onslaught of ideologically-biased beliefs that rose up to ‘explain’ it, I took it upon myself to investigate the macroeconomic particulars. I did this as a smart lay person might do so. I immersed myself in academic research and the literature. Soon enough I latched onto an over-arching question: ‘when were the first warnings sounded?’ At the same time I familiarized myself–as best I could–with the arcane concepts of finance, especially derivatives.

To delve into intricacies, even superficially, is to develop a sort of heuristic ‘folk’ model populated with minimally understood concepts and operations. Yet, even from this modest base, one can also ask other pertinent, even if naive, questions. For example, I wondered: ‘how was it that the ways new financial instruments may tend to alter the orientation of a system, is perforce understood to only make the system more efficient?’

This naive question is a Third Order question. In other words, it grasps at implicit, different means for reckoning with an important supposition, posit, or principle. Implicit in this specific question are possible different answers about the aspects of orientation and efficiency or lack of efficiency. Alas, I possessed no repertoire from which to choose different ways to address the question. However, I could try to dig up instances where questions like this were being asked by experts and were not, then, naive questions at all.

What I soon enough discovered is that there were numerous outliers who, for example, asked questions about the possible perturbation of the efficient system which might be caused by the repeal of Glass-Steagall, a principle regulatory legal mandate for banks, in 1999.

And, so it went. How early on did some experts note the potential for a speculative housing bubble?

Byron Dorgan in 1999:

Jane D’Arista in 2000? Gramlich in 2001? William Ackman in 2002? McCarthy and Peach in 2004?

Alan Greenspan in 2005 testifies that the housing and mortgage markets will “bear more scrutiny in the coming months.”

Greenspan either wasn’t paying attention, or, the data outliers supplied was being heavily discounted.

Greenspan’s comment is not much different than a Tea Party person fretting about death panels. In both cases, reality doesn’t intrude on the programming.

Infatuation with a model or worldview or perspective or systematic framework or quasi-system is a hallmark of Second Order belief. Being infatuated often will support buffering of criticism. In fact, Second Order beliefs may be hermetic, in effect sealed off from any critical culture–even the critical culture part and parcel of the very domain of the system.

You can test this yourself in asking an advocate of a particular system, belief, perspective, worldview questions such as:

1. What are the weak spots in the model?

5. What can the model not explain?

Etc.. These are questions a lay person may ask. If the subject isn’t forthcoming, or rejects in a knee jerk fashion any prospect for the model, (or what-have-you,) coming under critical pressure, then it may be that the model is held in the Second Order mode, thus is held not to be subject to any pressure.

This may be the case with many: people worried about having their liberties stripped away by treasonous socialists; people convinced 9-11 was put up by the executive branch; people who advocate the scientific sensibleness of Intelligent Design; people who are ideologically fixed to idealized economic models…on and on.

She told me about meeting a future employer at a gas station, on the occasion when both had stopped at the same station, you know, for gas! The thing is: a stranger approaches her, recognizes her because she had taken note of her reputation in some public notice or the like, and strikes up a conversation.

What followed, eventually, was a job offer. And, what followed from taking the job were all sorts of other events that, in concrete respects, stand on the foundation of her changing jobs.

What would have happened had the soon-to-be new employer and employee not stopped in the gas station at the same moment? No one can say, but it’s as if such a speculation is about an alternative universe, rather than the universe in which this life altering and happenstance event took place.

My friend called the event, random. “Random” hadn’t occurred to me as a qualifier. It’s a good term because it strips away something of the various evaluative adjectives which follow from a random event turning out to be positive or negative.

First Order awareness is automatic, and not directed. If you ever have driven a car and noted at some point that you ‘were on automatic,’ and then been amazed at this lack of consciousness about being a driver, you’re recalling what it feels like to be on automatic, in, as-it-were, First Order awareness. “I barely remember consciously driving to work today! I was thinking about something else, pre-occupied.”

Second Order awareness adds to this awareness of what you are doing. A good example is learning how to ride a bike, where–at the beginning–the new rider has to consciously turn against the tilt out of balance. This is conscious attention paid to what you are doing. This awareness has a very narrow focus. It’s not optional.

Third Order awareness adds to this additional modes for awareness. In the example of driving, this means what else you might do, be aware of, while driving. I term this choice heuristic to reflect how multiple modes are balanced by knowing their prior dynamic via experience. Acquired rules of thumb facilitate this balancing act. For example, some drivers figure out how to have cell phone conversations while driving, and balance attention to this with attention to driving.

Fourth Order awareness adds to this an ability to choose modes of awareness by virtue of having made a prior coherent differentiation of available modes and their effective differential application. The difference between Third/Fourth Order phases is a matter of degree, yet the hallmark of Fourth Order is this critical differentiation. This would acknowledge, for example, that driving while phoning incurs a probalistic downside.

Fourth Order awareness basically means: being able to match awareness with optimal requirements for effective deployment of awareness. And, do this from a coherent ensemble of choices for being aware. And, be able to explain what one does to both differentiate and select.

Finally, to complete this model, (or schema,) there are mediating and liminal phases between the orders. There is a good example of this. Emotional intelligence, itself a repertoire for meeting the goal requirements of an interpersonal interaction, exists at the beginning of conscious development of one’s own intelligent responsiveness. At the beginning it exists as a choice-heuristic. Later this develops into choice-differentiated; thus moves choice from being the result of a rule of thumb to being the result of very particular, and in some ways formal, differentiation of optimal choice. Such a choice is made from a coherent ensemble, i.e. repertoire.

Yet, this move is sometimes articulated in a fuzzy move between Third and Fourth Order. One feature is common to Fourth order awareness. It instantiates motivation to search out more effective and possibly optimal modes of awareness. In other words, there is a gain to be realized in expanding one’s ensemble of choices. So, one is not satisfied with only the repertoire of “rules of thumb.”

This can be further understood, when stretched between the entire First-to-Fourth range, as making the move from automatic, knee-jerk responses to responses forged from being able to make a conscious selection from a repertoire of possible responses. Given this sense, the move from Third Order to Fourth Order selection procedures reflects a substantial enhancement and individuation of critical consciousness.

Again, differentiation and individuation imply here the ability to explain why one choice is superior to some other choice.

We’ll move next, in a follow-up post, to examples and applications in both negative and positive terms, and we’ll use the current environment of political discourse to do so.

1. What brought you to live where you currently live?

2. What brought you to work in the field you currently work in?

3. What was the circumstance via which you met your current partner?

4. What brought you to your current central interest, (or avocation, or hobby, or passion?)

There are, of course, many such questions like these four.

In conducting an inquiry along these lines, what I have found is that the narrative offered in response contains propositions about features of a necessary founding circumstance Those propositions tell of required features.

For example, I met my future wife at a party in September of 1993. For this to happen, I had to be in Cleveland and be invited to the party. I had to know the party-givers, and, they had to be in Cleveland too. So did my future wife. There are enough implicit features in these three sentences to make clear the obvious point: my meeting my wife rests on a web of contingencies that encompass many lives, and in turn this rests on many requisites, rests on many prior requirements.

It is striking to me that it would be the normal sense of a person narrating a development such as this one, that those requirements are not strongly “felt” by the narrator. However, in facilitating a subject’s re-collection of these necessary requirements, the process has always evoked an intense insight.

Ha! “I never looked at life that way!”

I have a very important intellectual inquiry to address to you.

Here’s the context. In 2005 I trained ‘street anthropologists’ to conduct informal inquiries about why members of their community had landed in that community. It was framed for me as a Boas-like drill down and the results were given by respondents as simple phenomenological answers. Since the goal was more to learn from the process of inquiry than to generate research for other uses, the debrief was as much about what it was like to experience the act of asking and listening.

However, something became obvious when we debriefed the survey. It was this: almost everybody surveyed ended up living in the community due to a priori features of their personal circumstance prior to their relocating to this community. These features turn out to be extremely fragile. Which is to say: that the features are each contingent on other fragile features.

So: the features are both necessary and also contingent upon other necessary features. What necessarily promoted the decision to relocate fanned out into very fragile webs of necessary “prior” conditions. Had one of those conditions been slightly different, the decision would have been different and the respondant would have ended up locating somewhere else.

I’ll give an example I have used to illustrate this. In 1974 I was working in a record store in my hometown of Cleveland and on a June afternoon a robber stuck the store up, marched me into the backroom, had me lay down, and shot me in the back. I was not badly wounded, but the bullet struck me two inches from my spine. A month later I decided to move (the hell) away from my hometown and took a bus to Vermont. Being shot allowed me to re-rationalize my–at the time–confused sense of where I was going in my life.

In Vermont, over time, I met my wife-to-be, developed my ‘karass’ and met lifelong friends, read through shelves of books while working at desk in the back of a book store, had remarkable encounters, met important influences, had wild once-in-a-lifetime experiences like staying up all night with John Cage (who became very close to my then wife,) and on and on. My intellectual preoccupations became diversified in ways I attribute to the flux of bohemian, new age, post-professional, outsider, academic, circumstances I encountered.

So, the upshot is: in what way was the robber a key mover for setting me on this unplanned vector?

“Would I–today–wish for this robber not to have come into the store, and into my life?”

***

Armed with this insight, in a second round of surveys we asked questions aimed to evoke identification of the subject’s own necessary contingencies. The question: What brught you to Lakewood? Later, in my own one-on-one inquiries, it has turned out that all sorts of developmental ‘moves’ rest upon all sorts of fragile happenstance.

Several further insights: it’s apparent that we are not hard wired to view our own identity in these terms at all. I have not once made an inquiry to discover that the fragility of necessary conditions had already occurred as an insight of the subject.

Secondly, I have been asked “So why is this important?” To which I have replied, that understanding the fragility of what were/are necessary conditions, may offer us the opportunity to experience more accurately the reality of that which underpins our development in one direction, but not another. And, there’s lots more that could be said about what is the value of recognizing the ‘fragility of it all.’

As an aside, when Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers, his recent book about the conditions which underpin success, I wondered if he would remark on the fragility factor. He does not, and refers to conditions simply in terms of ‘because ofs’ without ever assessing how fragile they are.

My questions is this:

Where is this fragility previously recognized by those who have reflected upon the structure of necessary conditions underneath human development?

(added note; August 2009)

I’ve stepped around how this could be considered in abstract terms or in “spiritualizing” terms. I’ve searched high and low for any commentary that addresses this in pragmatic and developmental terms. The reason I’ve gone in this direction is because I find the intersection of the objective-structural web of contingency, with, the possible import of these true features being well known by the subject, to be a pragmatic instance.

By pragmatic I mean in someway understandable by the subject, (in contemplating their own developmental contingencies,) as a truth, or verity.

Incidentally, this brings to my mind a pragmatic autopoiesis about the deep nature of human development; and given to this are random constitutive-generative “facts.”

I did find an august philosopher, Nicholas Rescher, who wrote a book, Luck: The Brilliant Randomness Of Everyday Life, that, surprisingly, qualifies everyday randomness brilliantly without qualifying the web of contingency.

Go figure!

Now I’m going to turn the loving screws to some friends a bit and learn more. What say you?

“However saying that, I don’t know if the “group” consciousness actually manages to effect a real conscious change in both individuals and in groups. Are these things of the moment?”

Let’s just speak of a simple hypothesis: that a group is possibly a medium for an individual to increase their awareness. There are, in this, several things we’ll need to test the hypothesis.

One, we’ll need a developmental framework that can support both the proof of the hypothesis and its falsification.

Two, given this framework, we’ll need to employ explicit criteria to make a determination about both how to test and next evaluate the results of the test. And, finally we’ll need to grapple and grip with how to interpret the evaluation.

There’s a crucial distinction I’d like to introduce. A hypothesis of this sort is concerned with the development of consciousness of an individual within a group due to the unique opportunities for this development a group may instantiate. Yet this potential for development is not proposed as a positive result of group consciousness, but, rather, is the result of people bringing their personal consciousness to the medium of a group. In noting this, all I suggesting is that consciousness is only a property of individuals; that it would be very hard to characterize what is meant by group consciousness in any normative sense.

As it has come about–in modern psychology–short of defining a framework, there are concrete terms for characterizing the development of consciousness in the medium of a group. For example, these are some of the developments afforded by groups: better teamwork, closer coordination, acceptance of and mitigation of narcissistic and infantile needs, enhanced problem analysis and problem solving, better skills for discernment and differentiation, support for withdrawal of projections, etc.. and on and on.

Also, groups make possible at times the submission of self-oriented egoic impulses to higher orders of awareness, including facilitating recognition and ownership of the shadow. So it is, to use one broad developmental mode, that an individual in a group may leverage the means for increasing their emotional intelligence.

***

I believe all sorts of artistic teams in music and dance and theatre brings lots of unique developmental potential into being. These provide excellent examples, but so do all sorts of other common groups. One such group would be–at their best–the formal or informal classroom.

Of course, my sense here presumes that consciousness itself is not a mountain to be climbed, but instead operationalizes real world capabilities. In short, to become more able at anything poses a developmental increase.

The only move toward spiritualization, would be to suppose that all such developmental increases are qualities of higher consciousness given a timeworn notion of spiritual development–when those better capabilities do no harm.

In this excerpt from my film “Zrareet ! ” my mother-in-law explains how to train a Moroccan husband with a great sense of humor. They have been married for over 60 years.

wifechadly Youtube channel

A few minutes into the video, I feel a gentle tap on my shoulder. A stranger interrupts me to ask about the video I’m watching and listening to on ear buds. This person saw the video playing on my screen from their spot at an adjacent table.
As it turns out the stranger is interested in the african dancers that are part of the video. Inviting the stranger to join me, I share a replay of the video with her.

We strike up a conversation. It ranges over our shared interest in music and the arts. After telling her I have collected a wide variety of music resources over many years, she mentions that she is an artist for whom music and dance is a key source of inspiration. We set up a future engagement to audition media resources and to continue getting to know each other. Perhaps we will become friends.

In fact, a friendship develops and it eventually alters the course of both of our lives. There will come a time when both the once-a-stranger, and myself, having become colleagues and having undertaken together and separately further life changing projects, travels, and learning, realize almost all of what unfolded was contingent upon the pivot provided by the original encounter in the coffee shop.

What would you, the researcher have to know to determine what was necessary to have happened in the lives of both parties to this encounter in the coffee shop prior to its occurrence, so as to guarantee its occurrence?
What follows is my ‘scratch pad’ about a goal-oriented method for conducting interpersonl inquiry, and, self inquiry. It’s a wrok in progress, yet, the method of inquiry has been beta-tested in informal anthropological project work over the past few years. Fundamentally what I’m on about is how fragile the necessary contingencies are which underlie life-altering events. The lens of this method may be used to look at all sorts of events, events such as the circumstances that supported: a person meeting their spouse or most intimate partner, discovering their scholarly or research interests, hobbies, calling; what locale a person resides at, etc.

working notes…subject to timely revision; January 2009

(Pivot is configured to be the term for an event that itself is constructed out of many necessary conditions. The pivot integrates the conditions, so the event coming about is contingent on this integration of conditions.)

Years later my good friend, met as a matter of happenstance that day in the coffee shop, remarked how much the encounter had altered both our lives. To which I responded:

“You know, we might never have met that day had my business partner not prematurely returned from a trip the day before and then called an impromptu meeting. I never go to coffee shops, rarely, drag my laptop around with me. You were attracted to the video I was watching, right?

She recalled, “Yes. It caught my eye.”

“Well, I have a lot of different interests and superficial preoccupations. If I had been reading blogs or browsing online book dealers or reading the news, there we both would have been, in close proximity, yet, what ignited your interest might never have found the spark.”

“When you put it that way, because I stopped in for tea there regularly, had I chosen some other seat, then no spark, no meeting, no life changes.”

Responding to her recognition, I told her, “At the time you told me you like to sit in your favorite seat in the corner. It was available that morning–lucky for us; whereas I plopped down on the open seat nearest the entrance.”

I saw her mind churning. She looked at me intensely, “Consider the odds.”
Indeed.
My research into a possible structure for inquiry, what I term transformative anthropology,  coordinates a close and critical investigation into the Pivots, the pivotal points, and how such points integrate–usually–extremely complicated arrays of necessarily essential prior events upon which the pivot is contingent.
This story conceals the factors that were necessary for this encounter to ever come about in the first place. Normally, such factors rarely receive any attention. Yet, people will sometimes reflect on an encounter and remark, “How amazing we were in the right place at the right time!” Still, it is apparently the case in my home culture, that of the USA,that people are overwhelmingly not acculturated or ‘wired’ to be sensitive to just how fragile are the (so-called) prior events that lock together to formulate the necessary array of factors upon which the pivotal points as-it-were rest, like a house rests on it foundation.The crucial emphasis is upon: fragile and necessary.

Prior event; integration; contingency; necessity; are clarified in looking at the explicit features of the necessary foundation upon which the oivotal point/event rests.

These events can be viewed as the stuff of necessary layers. In the above example, both parties to the event, have to be in the coffee shop at the same time. Next they have to be in a proximity close enough to spark the igniting event. Why the proximity necessary to this spark, (or, more generally, the proximity that supports the instantiation of the event,) itself has come about, itself rests on another layer of more complex prior events. For example, for two people to meet in a coffee shop in Cleveland, both persons have to go to the same coffee shop for various reasons, and, both have to be in Cleveland in the first place, and this latter factor is due to a separate array of various reasons. In each cases the underlying prior events are required, are requisites as features of the foundation.

Such requisites can be unpacked and divided between local and global factors. Global factors are requisite in relation to any likely future event. Whereas local factor, built as they are upon global factors, reflect what is required to ignite the actual event, pivot. By way of example, two parties live in Cleveland, and they have the potential to meet ‘globally’ as long as the condition that they live and circulate in Cleveland is met. Still, for them to actually meet adds to this, explicit local condition (or requirements.) Although the two could live in Cleveland, yet meet outside of Cleveland, nevertheless for this event there would still be requisite, global conditions discoverable at its pertinent layer.

Because this is research anybody can do about the pivotal points in their own life, everybody may discover the specific conditions required to found the various pivotal points in their own life. As it turns out, and likely much to the individual researcher’s amazement, very often the conditions underlying pivotal points are extremely fragile. Fragile describes how sensitive the array of prior events is to having been configured differently.

In the coffee shop event, my business partner’s coming home early to schedule a casual meeting entirely unrelated in any direct sense to the pivotal event helps set in motion the necessary prerequisites. Consider then how this necessarily plugs into the array of conditions, similarly required conditions having to do with the truncation of the business partner’s original travel.

In presenting this field of my research, I always utilize a dramatic example from my own life. In 1974 I was managing a record store and on a Thursday afternoon in late June a hold-up man walked into the store, robbed it, and, placing me face down in the backroom, shot me at point blank range. A month later I was headed for Vermont to escape my paranoia about the robber tracking me down to eliminate the sole witness to his crime. My plans to go to college were suspended, and I ended up cooling in Vermont for 18 years. There I met my friends, developed my interests, met my former wife, and, from this home base, had a handful of remarkable encounters with influential persons. In short, none of this transpires unless a robber walks through the door of the record store on that balmy June afternoon. Oh, and it’s critical that the point blank shot was issued by a cheap handgun and so the bullets disintegrates and only a fragment struck me 3 inches from my spinal column.

My own example, here very briefly rendered, rests on global factors such as my parents ending up in Cleveland in the first place, 25 years prior to the fated day. It’s most powerful for people to examine their own examples. When you do the drill down into your own example, you’ll learn quickly just how complicated and fragile to requisite are in their support of almost any pivotal life event. The arrays of contigencies woven into the pivotal event reflect threads that almost always stretch well beyond and so encompass parties other than the primary parties to the event.

It is fairly self-evident that this is not a culturally conventional, let alone hard wired (evolutionary,) way of reexaming the pivotal events in the human lifespan. Why look at the human life span this way? Let’s leave this question open for the time being. I will report the reasons I’ve discovered reinforce the value of looing at my own life span from a novel perspective.

What I term the transformative anthropology had its genesis in helping to train and debrief ‘street’ (i.e. informal,) anthropological interviewers engaged in a civic intelligence project in Lakewood, Ohio in 2005. It became clear in reviewing the interview data that the community was made up of a rich variety of people who had come to live in Lakewood for various reasons. The human encounter given by the interview methodology inspired me to reflect on how unusual it must feel to interviewees to be interrogated by our team members. Then I began to examine why this was really unusual. This inevitably led me to consider what literally had to come together, to necessarily come together, to initiate the encounter between subject and researcher. I was off and running, and next considered what was required to happen prior to my own involvement in the project. The short of it was: the best man at my Vermont wedding 23 years earlier was raised in Lakewood. But it’s the long of it which is truly amazing.

The basic method of inquiry is to include all of the robust data set offered by the subject, be attentive to the data, culminate by recognizing what are the fragile requisites, and, be attentive to the ‘epiphanic’ should it arise. In a ‘lower’ sense, the epiphanic result is equivalent to researcher or research subject answering for themselves the question, ‘why is it valuable to make an inquiry of this sort?’

Notes-in-progress

A model for interpersonal inquiry
1. INCLUSION
2. ATTENTION
3. CULMINATION
4. EPIPHANY

Conceptual Levels:

Depth Psychology
concern: unconscious; hidden (tacit); inferior factors

Adult Learning:
following: Bateson/Mezirow/Kolb

transformations vua experience; modification of familiar schemes; differentiation of novel ontic data

Kolb’s learning styles diagram

The Satir Model (also Mezirow)

Satir Change Model

———————————————————————————————

Anthropology & Phenomenology:

following (roughly) conception of the subject’s self (reflexive) report about the contents of their awareness

—

at different scales:

[subjective]

1. theory of their own mind

2. theory of other person’s mind

3. integration and extension to:

a. interpersonal

b. small group

c. community

d. the “most attractive” large scale (examples: nation, culture, planet, cosmos)

—

Three Rubrics:

FOLK [psychology, anthropology]

question: Which meaningful and effective schemas and models does the subject deploy to learn, analyze, synthesize, and understand their experience and the experience of others in their lifeworld?

INQUIRY [directed to one's self and to others; elaborated in the subjective terms given by experience]

“TAP-I”

Transformative anthropological phenomenology – Inquiry

Model of learning

Core concept: fragile contingency

—

Four Examples

1. Encounter on the sidewalk

2. “Narrow, rare” robust contingency

3. Actual experience of Stephen

4. Inquiry exemplified to evoke report about fragile contingencies

meta-question [frame]

What necessary and supporting contingencies did you have no decisive control over in coming to:

a. your focal point interests

b. where you reside

c. who you are partnered with

d. who are your closest friends

e. who are your colleagues

f. where you work

g. what is your particular view of yourself/other people/your community/other scales

h. what you tend to amplify

i. what you tend to discount

j. your concrete prejudices

—

Bowen:

Application, Acquisition, and Analysis

INCLUSION
Knowing by allowing the outer lifeworld ‘in’ as it presents itself
ATTENTION
Being as aware (“doing awareness”) as possible of the sense and conceptual data of the lifeworld
CULMINATION
integrating via reflection upon the received data the evidence of deterministic contingencies of this ‘other’ lifeworld
EPIPHANY
integrating via reflection upon the fragile contingency conjunct with the moment of learning about this ‘other’ lifeworld
—
As it happens and as it is easy to ascertain, what people are directed toward, what they come to understand, and how they view their embodied experience within the larger world/cosmos, is produced by a combination of their own sense and choice making, and, the dynamic confluence of contingencies about which they exercise no choice whatsoever. Those contingencies are almost always extremely fragile, which is to note their qualities of novelty, serendipity, and, happenstance.

This conjunction provides for decisive and deterministic praxis. However, and perhaps this is a matter of how awareness is wired and how it evolved, the obvious facts of this aspect of fragile contingency are not usually overt as a cognitive conceptual factor.

An inquiry trained to elicit such contingencies is hypothesized to allow a praxis for transformation precisely because of the hidden nature of this aspect of necessary contingency.

draft notes SC 2008-2009

Music is Kayyam, from my 2002 recording In Khorasan. It can be streamed in its entirety over at nogutsnoglory studios, at the bottom of the world hed music page.