Soup.GroundPlane.org

“ Value issues are at the heart of most conflicts, but if they are disguised as factual disputes, a situation of “dueling science” results and little progress can be made." ”

“ "When I'm talking about design, I'm not just talking about the visual layer that everyone seems to think of when they hear the word," Allen asserts. "We really believe that designer-founders need to be able to guide the product and organization through 'the full stack': user research, interaction design, information architecture, all the way to the interface, and everything in between." In other word's Allen's fund is seeking people who already have the vision and entrepreneurial spirit that any Silicon Valley founder has -- but just happen to self-identify as designers, too. Allen points out that designers have recently earned a rich pedigree in the Valley, having founded YouTube, Tumblr, Airbnb, Android, and Flickr, among others. ”

“

The points [Victor Klemperer makes in his book “The Language of the Third Reich”] are applicable to propaganda in the service of much more mundane endeavors, be it to pass health care reform or to increase or decrease taxes. The use of propaganda is not limited to a single political affiliation or intent.

As Klemperer writes propaganda “changes the value of words and the frequency of their occurrence … it commandeers for the party that which was previously common property and in the process steeps words and groups of words and sentence structures in its poison.”

”

“

Silencing extends to politics when outlandish claims are made about public figures. Suppose that President Obama really was a secret Islamist agent, or born in Kenya. In that case, he would be grossly insincere. We would have no reason to believe what he said in any situation. The function of disseminating such claims about the president is not to object to his specific arguments or agenda. It is to undermine the public’s trust in him, so that nothing he says can be taken at face value.

There are multiple purposes to political speech, only one of which is to assert truths.

”

“ Imagine a sci-fi universe in which every letter, word and sentence is a commodity. Companies make money off chunks of language. Bosses drive writers to make more words faster and for less pay. Readers then pay for exposure to these cheaply made words in the precious currency of their attention. ”

“ Philosophy of dialogue is a type of philosophy based on the work of the Austrian-born Jewish philosopher Martin Buber best known through its classic presentation in his 1920s little book I and Thou.^[1] For Buber, the fundamental fact of human existence, too readily overlooked by scientific rationalism and abstract philosophical thought, is "man with man", a dialogue which takes place in the so-called "sphere of between" ”

“ as Ted Levitt, Tony Ulwick, and others have argued, while customers are notoriously bad at coming up with solutions to their own problems, their actual difficulties and complaints – the problems themselves – are a goldmine for observant researchers. That’s why management gurus like Clay Christensen and Gary Hamel have advocated listening not only to your core (and presumably satisfied) customers, but to those on the fringe – the unhappy non-users and complainers. And the louder they whine, the better. ”

“ Although the generation of ideas is important, it ceases to be useful if there is not an effective process to transform inspiration into financial performance, i.e. value. [Ergo: the A-list can very easily skuttle a project by plausibly deniable cold-shoulders. --bdt] ”

“

Our brains are designed to create cognitive shortcuts — inference, intuition, and so forth — to avoid precisely that sort of discomfort while coping with the rush of information we receive on a daily basis. Without those shortcuts, few things would ever get done. Unfortunately, with them, we’re easily suckered by political falsehoods.

Nyhan ultimately recommends a supply-side approach. Instead of focusing on citizens and consumers of misinformation, he suggests looking at the sources. If you increase the “reputational costs” of peddling bad info, he suggests, you might discourage people from doing it so often. “So if you go on ‘Meet the Press’ and you get hammered for saying something misleading,” he says, “you’d think twice before you go and do it again.”

Unfortunately, this shame-based solution may be as implausible as it is sensible. Fast-talking political pundits have ascended to the realm of highly lucrative popular entertainment, while professional fact-checking operations languish in the dungeons of wonkery ...

”

“ There is one mind common to all individual men.
  Of the works of this mind history is the record.
Man is explicable by nothing less than all his history ”

“

In the end, truth will out. Won’t it?

Maybe not. Recently, a few political scientists have begun to discover a human tendency deeply discouraging to anyone with faith in the power of information. It’s this: Facts don’t necessarily have the power to change our minds. In fact, quite the opposite. In a series of studies in 2005 and 2006, researchers at the University of Michigan found that when misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation. Like an underpowered antibiotic, facts could actually make misinformation even stronger.

”

“ Sufi Saying: Because you understand 1 you think you understand 2 because 1 and 1 = 2, but first you must understand AND. ”

“ The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the minds of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned, but has never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest.

• “The Spirit of Liberty” - speech at “I Am an American Day” ceremony, Central Park, New York City (21 May 1944).

”

“ Every contradiction is a conflict of value as well as a conflict of interest; that inside every "need" there is an affect or "want" on its way to becoming an "ought". ”

“ In their book Interactive Architecture, Michael Fox and Miles Kemp described this more adaptive approach as “a multiple-loop system in which one enters into a conversation; a continual and constructive information exchange.” Emphasis mine, as I think that’s a subtle yet powerful distinction: rather than creating immutable, unchanging spaces that define a particular experience, they suggest inhabitant and structure can—and should—mutually influence each other. ”

“ Ricoeur, P. (1991) "From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics" -  By appropriations Ricoeur means “that the interpretation of a text culminates in the self interpretation of a subject who thenceforth understands himself better, understands himself differently, or simply begins to understand himself. This culmination of the understanding of a text in self-understanding is characteristic of the kind of reflective philosophy that on various occasions, Drummond has called ‘concrete reflection’, p. 18. ”

“ Zen has a unique way of pointing at the “thatness” of everything. Zen brings us face to face with the true original nature of things, undefiled by cultural conditioning and neurotic tendencies.

When this is applied to data, it simply means that data is. It exists in its own state, without our perspectives and views of it. It has a now and a whatness of existence. So it is this “presence or oneness” of data that we begin with and move toward discrete interpretations of how it can be shaped, molded, viewed, illustrated, structured, and understood. It is with this in mind that the book is titled Data Architecture: From Zen to Perceived Reality.

I wrote this book because something has been fundamentally lost in the last decade in the information technology world. We are no longer developing information stores that address the present and future needs; we are merely generating information stores that meet the current needs.
Like everything else over the last 15 to 20 years, new products are being designed from a tactical point of view with builtin obsolescence. There is no long-term view, no strategy, without which it is impossible to develop data stores that are built to last. It is time to revisit the basic principles from which we deviated to get to this point.
Instead of the evolution that was prophesied in the 1970s and early 1980s, what happened instead was a revolution where many good things were lost and destroyed at the expense of developing things rapidly and at low cost. This is not a polemic against what has occurred in the last 10 to 15 years but merely a commentary and observational review of some of the basic principles that were the basis of the initial evolution.

You see, the evolution started with a basic principle that knowledge is created from data by people for people to use for the greater good of all people. Modern business has somehow drifted away from people and quality and is now focused on money and speed.

The understanding of the overall structure is necessary if the goal is to be achieved. Too often we are trying to deliver the product and we set up metrics to find out why things are too slow. And too often the metrics involved become more important than the progress they are intended to measure. ”