Anyone who has studied revolutions will know it takes a number of factors to dramatically change the old way of doing things. I am of the opinion that no one will be able to change the state of our education system because it would take a massive societal level change to happen. We are currently going through a revolution in information but we have let the direction of that revolution slip out of our hands. I remember Francis Fukuyama saying in his book 'The Great Disruption' that societies generally sort their social and cultural structures out on their own. Look around you right now in society. The factors that make revolutions happen are falling into the hands of people that don't give a fuck about education at all. Some of the big factors are the following:
Technology: This is in the hands of the big corporations and the military/industrial complex. Open source technology is trying to counter it but look at the propaganda and legal issues against the open source movement. It won't happen cause money is power and the people with power want to keep the status quo.
Organisational Aspects: Look at organisations everywhere from schools to big business, they are hopelessly run with pathetic jungles of bureaucracy controlling them with little room for operational innovation. There is little room for change and change is enforced by those in power.
Culture: A societies culture is probably the biggest factor. Look at our culture. It's a culture dedicated to trivial nonsense. Historian John Ralston Saul once stated that we have become a society of answers (as is evident in pop-culture trivia shows and human tendency to break our world up into the answers of liberal and conservative politics) what will change our society is not one dedicated to answers but to questions. Questions demand hard thinking but quality questions get quality answers. Our culture is slowly evolving into a bunch of slobified arrogant no-nothings who want easy answers without the hard thinking.
Leadership: Look at leaders all around you. Our leaders are pathetic payed-off knuckle draggers who hate education because they realise it gives people an ability to question the system they are in.
To change all of the above you would have to make massive action against everything society stands for and it won't happen. People with the money won't let it happen. A possible way around this is to change the perception of those in power from one of 'school is a assembly line mentality' to a 'school can give us a money and information edge'. However I am of the opinion it is too late and the wheels are in action. You think change is hard during a massive societal upheaval like the info revolution that is happening right now? Wait till the system is in place. You'll never fucking change it.
I am confused. VERY VERY confused. Is this article the script for a porno film? A woman in the IT section, that's usually how the scenes begin, right? But there's no sex afterwards.
The Muslims figured out shit along time ago and put veils on em and made them sit in the backseat...its the right thing to do for their own good.
Jokes!
If a family member had this implemented I'd hack into this network and give off false information too the sensors that they had heart palpitations or leprosy or some weird exotic symptoms.
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes We roam around Microsoft looking for fights We're men, we're men with open-source bytes We rob from the rich and give to the slashdotters, that's right! We may look like sissies But watch what you say, or else we'll bring down your sites We're men, we're men with open-source bytes Always on guard, defending the programmers rights.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boilin. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
ITS NOT JUST A BLOCK OF METAL! It represents everything to us metric scientists!
Come with us quietly, Slashdotters. Don't argue or make a scene. Because if you say anything more about changing kilograms or debunking metric systems, we're gonna be forced to take you to a mental hospital. You don't want that, do you?
Clearly we need to lock an ipod in a room with the same scientists who discovered revolutionary psychic patterns in that little black box a couple of weeks back on slashdot.
Perhaps Ipod will predict when Hewy Lewis and the news will make a mainstream comeback?
If God were a nerd and he actually existed, he would look down upon you and shake his head in disgust as you turn him into a mockery with these shitty articles, polls et al instead of truly glorifying him with good news for nerds.
The reviewer's focus is too narrow...
on
Blink, Take 2
·
· Score: 0
To say it's all about intuition is a narrowly focused review. If you focus widely it's about a time based theory of decision making.
Gladwell's ideas are very similar to John Boyd's Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop. To anyone who has read military strategy, particularly maneuver theory, the section on Paul Van Riper and the millenium challenge demonstrates this very clearly that you must act swiftly or in military parlance - operating inside your adversary's time scale.
To those not familiar with the OODA loop it basically goes like this:
Observe - Observe enemy Orient - become oriented to the enemy action. Decide - make decision Act - take the action
Understanding the OODA loop enables a person to compress time, that is the time between observing a situation and taking action. The loop itself is much more highly complex than the above list and has multiple pathways that I couldn't discuss here. Anyway...
Two important concepts guide the OODA loop.
Firstly guiding all these actions is a implicit intent, or as Boyd put it-Schwerpunkt, the main focus of effort or a common outlook of the decision maker/s.
Secondly, and MORE importantly related to the book blink, is the concept of Fingerspitzengefuhl (roughly translated to fingertip feel). It means a leaders instinctive and intuitive sense of what is going on or what is needed in battle. When one has fingerspitzenghefuhl you can bypass the loop and observe and act simultaneously. The speed must come from a deep intuitive understanding of one's relationship to the rapidly changing environment. According to Boyd to shape and understand the environment you need to manifest four qualities: Variety, Rapidity, Harmony, and Initiative. Anyway I've rattled on too much...
I guess the main point is that the reviewers focus is way to narrow and doesn't encompass what the entire book is trying to say. The book should probably be read with some form of hard, longer term, decision making skills as well, something along the lines of Neustadt and May's Thinking in Time: The use of history for decision makers. That might be better for you guys who have a bias against 'new-agey' stuff.
With this whole blogging beats established journo's and the Wisdom of Crowds, blink-malcolm gladwell stuff coming out lately does anyone think that this open source version of information gathering-blogging-works well because bloggers are inside the decision making cycle of the larger news conglomerates?
It's obviously one facet of blogging's effectiveness but the time factor in getting the news out en masse' matters. Bloggers Observe, Orient, Decide and Act faster than the news corporations decision making cycle. Technology obviously helps with this speed but the defining factor is the orientation process, that is, the coalescing of blogging minds with the same intentions all over the planet to bring their own niche opinions-sorta like the long tail concept- to the game. THat's something the large news corporations don't have.
Microsoft are masters at playing the game of business strategy on three levels:
1) Disciplined overt politics--staying on message
2) Underlying messages that are legal but misdirecting
3) Underlying dirty tricks that are out and out unethical.
This was ripped from a Robert D. Steele post on amazon in reference to Karl Rove's political strategy. The above could be used for microsoft strategy as well.
We are talking about search technology not medicinal technology. Therein lies your fallacy.
Search technology is supposed to help find valid information from the query one enters. The better the query entered the more efficient the search.
I read an interesting essay once from New Scientist that stated that in an information age our questions are more important than our answers. Our society has become a culture of answers. Look at pop-culture for an example. We have an abundance of quiz shows, facts on demand etc. Our society demands good answers to our questions. Not matter how stupid the question. This demanding of 'better search engines' isn't the problem it's people not asking good questions of the search engines. If you want a good answer ask a good question.
A simple example of this would be to start using advanced operators in google like site: or filetype:. I have a sneaking suspicion that these 'tests' these companies are using are nothing more than single words entered into the search engines. Talk about an ambigious query.
tracing the location of an incoming connection and displaying a map showing where the remote system geographically resides
Awesome. I can see the army of nerds piling into their parents cars with whiffle bats and slingshots with a road trip invasion that would make uncle ghengis proud, then finding out their target was some persons zombie-bot machine.
People are the problem. What's needed is for people to get off their butt and learn to exploit the technology to it's full capability. These people could learn how to use Google more efficiently if they read something like Johnny Long's Google Hacking. Link: http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/Google_H acker0704.pdf
However this will never happen because the average joe is inherently lazy so we'll have to spoonfeed all the techno-numpty's with technological updates until they stop complaining.
Zapp: So, a plan to assassinate some weird looking aliens with scissors. How very neutral of you. It was almost the perfect crime, but you forgot one thing. Rock crushes scissors!...But paper covers rock...and scissors cut paper. Kif, we have a conundrum! Search them for paper, and bring me a rock.
I know this is a technological site and the nerds are on the side of the robot overlords but these robots won't replace men having to kill other men or men being killed by other men. Men are needed to deal with other men. I will actually rephrase that statement and say professional soldiers are needed to protect some members of society because of the nature of other sociopathic men.
There will be constant fighting for the next 50 to 100 years or so in Central Asia, the Middle East and South East Asia whether we like it or not and REAL human beings, as in the professional soldiers of the world, are going to be there policing on the ground against the tribal warlords, drug dealers and militias that rape and pillage these areas.
Robots, IMO, are a pipe dream of the generals of the US army and goes to show that they have no idea of what goes on at the killing level of conflict. The generals, scientists and engineers need to interact more with the soldiers. The soldiers are the guys who know the reality of conflict. The Generals and scientists view of conflict are abstractions. The generals make conflict an abstraction by seeing it as grand strategy and the scientists view war as a playground for new technology. Throughout history man has attempted to counter the brutality of war through weird ways because of this level of abstraction and complete detachment from the fact that men slaughter each other. An example here http://www.jonronson.com/goats_04.html
This isn't a new idea and many a strategist in the last twenty years has pointed it out. Do google search of "Ralph Peters" Parameters or "Martin Van Creveld" "The transformation of war" for an example.
Even some of the public are starting to get 'it', war nerd as an example.
Whenever a Microsoft bashing article comes up on slashdot we need a little video song clip to come on with pasty aggressive nerds emerging from their basements in homemade rockets with the lyrics blaring:
SLASHDOT! FUCK YEAH!
Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah,
SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH!
Linux is the only way yeah,
Microsoft your game is through cause now you have to answer too,
SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH!
So lick my slanted posting, and suck on my trolls,
SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH!
What you going to do when we come for you now,
it's the open-source dream that we all share; it's the hope for tomorrow.
FUCK YEAH!
OpenBSD, FUCK YEAH!
Spybot S&D, FUCK YEAH!
Beowulf CLusters, FUCK YEAH!
Neil Stephenson, FUCK YEAH!
MMORPG, FUCK, YEAH!
Obviously to fix the problem we need some amalgamation of courage and heart in electronic form pronto.
Is there any engineers here whose work includes hiding behind curtains and appearing to his co-workers in giant green mask form?
It's more of a very impressive controlled fall.
Can the wing suits be used in conjunction with parachutes so as to have a back up in case of a failed opening?
Slashdot Mirror
I might get things going a bit by submitting some of yesterdays stories.
Anyone who has studied revolutions will know it takes a number of factors to dramatically change the old way of doing things. I am of the opinion that no one will be able to change the state of our education system because it would take a massive societal level change to happen. We are currently going through a revolution in information but we have let the direction of that revolution slip out of our hands. I remember Francis Fukuyama saying in his book 'The Great Disruption' that societies generally sort their social and cultural structures out on their own. Look around you right now in society. The factors that make revolutions happen are falling into the hands of people that don't give a fuck about education at all. Some of the big factors are the following:
Technology: This is in the hands of the big corporations and the military/industrial complex. Open source technology is trying to counter it but look at the propaganda and legal issues against the open source movement. It won't happen cause money is power and the people with power want to keep the status quo.
Organisational Aspects: Look at organisations everywhere from schools to big business, they are hopelessly run with pathetic jungles of bureaucracy controlling them with little room for operational innovation. There is little room for change and change is enforced by those in power.
Culture: A societies culture is probably the biggest factor. Look at our culture. It's a culture dedicated to trivial nonsense. Historian John Ralston Saul once stated that we have become a society of answers (as is evident in pop-culture trivia shows and human tendency to break our world up into the answers of liberal and conservative politics) what will change our society is not one dedicated to answers but to questions. Questions demand hard thinking but quality questions get quality answers. Our culture is slowly evolving into a bunch of slobified arrogant no-nothings who want easy answers without the hard thinking.
Leadership: Look at leaders all around you. Our leaders are pathetic payed-off knuckle draggers who hate education because they realise it gives people an ability to question the system they are in.
To change all of the above you would have to make massive action against everything society stands for and it won't happen. People with the money won't let it happen. A possible way around this is to change the perception of those in power from one of 'school is a assembly line mentality' to a 'school can give us a money and information edge'. However I am of the opinion it is too late and the wheels are in action. You think change is hard during a massive societal upheaval like the info revolution that is happening right now? Wait till the system is in place. You'll never fucking change it.
I am confused. VERY VERY confused. Is this article the script for a porno film? A woman in the IT section, that's usually how the scenes begin, right? But there's no sex afterwards.
The Muslims figured out shit along time ago and put veils on em and made them sit in the backseat...its the right thing to do for their own good. Jokes!
If a family member had this implemented I'd hack into this network and give off false information too the sensors that they had heart palpitations or leprosy or some weird exotic symptoms.
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
We roam around Microsoft looking for fights
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
We rob from the rich and give to the slashdotters, that's right!
We may look like sissies But watch what you say, or else we'll bring down your sites
We're men, we're men with open-source bytes
Always on guard, defending the programmers rights.
Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies. Rivers and seas boilin. Forty years of darkness. Earthquakes, volcanoes. The dead rising from the grave. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria.
ITS NOT JUST A BLOCK OF METAL! It represents everything to us metric scientists!
Come with us quietly, Slashdotters. Don't argue or make a scene. Because if you say anything more about changing kilograms or debunking metric systems, we're gonna be forced to take you to a mental hospital. You don't want that, do you?
Gram is dead, Hail Kilo!
Clearly we need to lock an ipod in a room with the same scientists who discovered revolutionary psychic patterns in that little black box a couple of weeks back on slashdot.
Perhaps Ipod will predict when Hewy Lewis and the news will make a mainstream comeback?
If God were a nerd and he actually existed, he would look down upon you and shake his head in disgust as you turn him into a mockery with these shitty articles, polls et al instead of truly glorifying him with good news for nerds.
To say it's all about intuition is a narrowly focused review. If you focus widely it's about a time based theory of decision making.
Gladwell's ideas are very similar to John Boyd's Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loop. To anyone who has read military strategy, particularly maneuver theory, the section on Paul Van Riper and the millenium challenge demonstrates this very clearly that you must act swiftly or in military parlance - operating inside your adversary's time scale.
To those not familiar with the OODA loop it basically goes like this:
Observe - Observe enemy
Orient - become oriented to the enemy action.
Decide - make decision
Act - take the action
Understanding the OODA loop enables a person to compress time, that is the time between observing a situation and taking action. The loop itself is much more highly complex than the above list and has multiple pathways that I couldn't discuss here. Anyway...
Two important concepts guide the OODA loop.
Firstly guiding all these actions is a implicit intent, or as Boyd put it-Schwerpunkt, the main focus of effort or a common outlook of the decision maker/s.
Secondly, and MORE importantly related to the book blink, is the concept of Fingerspitzengefuhl (roughly translated to fingertip feel). It means a leaders instinctive and intuitive sense of what is going on or what is needed in battle. When one has fingerspitzenghefuhl you can bypass the loop and observe and act simultaneously. The speed must come from a deep intuitive understanding of one's relationship to the rapidly changing environment. According to Boyd to shape and understand the environment you need to manifest four qualities: Variety, Rapidity, Harmony, and Initiative. Anyway I've rattled on too much...
I guess the main point is that the reviewers focus is way to narrow and doesn't encompass what the entire book is trying to say. The book should probably be read with some form of hard, longer term, decision making skills as well, something along the lines of Neustadt and May's Thinking in Time: The use of history for decision makers. That might be better for you guys who have a bias against 'new-agey' stuff.
With this whole blogging beats established journo's and the Wisdom of Crowds, blink-malcolm gladwell stuff coming out lately does anyone think that this open source version of information gathering-blogging-works well because bloggers are inside the decision making cycle of the larger news conglomerates?
It's obviously one facet of blogging's effectiveness but the time factor in getting the news out en masse' matters. Bloggers Observe, Orient, Decide and Act faster than the news corporations decision making cycle. Technology obviously helps with this speed but the defining factor is the orientation process, that is, the coalescing of blogging minds with the same intentions all over the planet to bring their own niche opinions-sorta like the long tail concept- to the game. THat's something the large news corporations don't have.
The Million Dollarman Ted Debiase would approve of this.
Microsoft are masters at playing the game of business strategy on three levels:
1) Disciplined overt politics--staying on message
2) Underlying messages that are legal but misdirecting
3) Underlying dirty tricks that are out and out unethical.
This was ripped from a Robert D. Steele post on amazon in reference to Karl Rove's political strategy. The above could be used for microsoft strategy as well.
We are talking about search technology not medicinal technology. Therein lies your fallacy.
Search technology is supposed to help find valid information from the query one enters. The better the query entered the more efficient the search.
I read an interesting essay once from New Scientist that stated that in an information age our questions are more important than our answers. Our society has become a culture of answers. Look at pop-culture for an example. We have an abundance of quiz shows, facts on demand etc. Our society demands good answers to our questions. Not matter how stupid the question. This demanding of 'better search engines' isn't the problem it's people not asking good questions of the search engines. If you want a good answer ask a good question.
A simple example of this would be to start using advanced operators in google like site: or filetype:. I have a sneaking suspicion that these 'tests' these companies are using are nothing more than single words entered into the search engines. Talk about an ambigious query.
People are the problem. What's needed is for people to get off their butt and learn to exploit the technology to it's full capability. These people could learn how to use Google more efficiently if they read something like Johnny Long's Google Hacking. Link: http://www.securitymanagement.com/library/Google_H acker0704.pdf
However this will never happen because the average joe is inherently lazy so we'll have to spoonfeed all the techno-numpty's with technological updates until they stop complaining.
Zapp: So, a plan to assassinate some weird looking aliens with scissors. How very neutral of you. It was almost the perfect crime, but you forgot one thing. Rock crushes scissors! ...But paper covers rock ...and scissors cut paper. Kif, we have a conundrum! Search them for paper, and bring me a rock.
Kif: Why?
After the robots done performing it's primary objective is the secondary objective becoming a fat, cocaine snorting Hedonismbot?
I know this is a technological site and the nerds are on the side of the robot overlords but these robots won't replace men having to kill other men or men being killed by other men. Men are needed to deal with other men. I will actually rephrase that statement and say professional soldiers are needed to protect some members of society because of the nature of other sociopathic men.
There will be constant fighting for the next 50 to 100 years or so in Central Asia, the Middle East and South East Asia whether we like it or not and REAL human beings, as in the professional soldiers of the world, are going to be there policing on the ground against the tribal warlords, drug dealers and militias that rape and pillage these areas.
Robots, IMO, are a pipe dream of the generals of the US army and goes to show that they have no idea of what goes on at the killing level of conflict. The generals, scientists and engineers need to interact more with the soldiers. The soldiers are the guys who know the reality of conflict. The Generals and scientists view of conflict are abstractions. The generals make conflict an abstraction by seeing it as grand strategy and the scientists view war as a playground for new technology. Throughout history man has attempted to counter the brutality of war through weird ways because of this level of abstraction and complete detachment from the fact that men slaughter each other. An example here http://www.jonronson.com/goats_04.html
Fighters will find a way around this technology like they always have e.g http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/wartech/nature.html.
This isn't a new idea and many a strategist in the last twenty years has pointed it out. Do google search of "Ralph Peters" Parameters or "Martin Van Creveld" "The transformation of war" for an example.
Even some of the public are starting to get 'it', war nerd as an example.
http://www.exile.ru/archive/by_author/gary_brecher .html.
I'll finish with the wise words of COL. John Boyd "People and ideas first then followed by technology."
Whenever a Microsoft bashing article comes up on slashdot we need a little video song clip to come on with pasty aggressive nerds emerging from their basements in homemade rockets with the lyrics blaring: SLASHDOT! FUCK YEAH! Coming again, to save the mother fucking day yeah, SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH! Linux is the only way yeah, Microsoft your game is through cause now you have to answer too, SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH! So lick my slanted posting, and suck on my trolls, SLASHDOT, FUCK YEAH! What you going to do when we come for you now, it's the open-source dream that we all share; it's the hope for tomorrow. FUCK YEAH! OpenBSD, FUCK YEAH! Spybot S&D, FUCK YEAH! Beowulf CLusters, FUCK YEAH! Neil Stephenson, FUCK YEAH! MMORPG, FUCK, YEAH!
Obviously to fix the problem we need some amalgamation of courage and heart in electronic form pronto. Is there any engineers here whose work includes hiding behind curtains and appearing to his co-workers in giant green mask form?
It's more of a very impressive controlled fall. Can the wing suits be used in conjunction with parachutes so as to have a back up in case of a failed opening?
I sure hope he hasn't used wax and feathers as the material for his incredible man flying machine.