Types of hierarchies

Ken Wilber makes an interesting distinction between types of hierarchies:

• Growth hierarchies are means of growth. They transcend and include, e.g., particles, atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, ...
• Dominator hierarchies are means of oppression. 

Original distinction seems to be from Riane Eisler in The Chalice and the Blade.

Engine Problems vs Crime Scene Problems

Anand Giridharadas makes an interesting distinction about types of problems:

• Engine problems are problems that need some adjustment to the engine to fix the problem. Problems such as mismatched skills in an organization, different interface plugs for the same function (common standards)
• Crime scene problems are problems that have a history that caused them. You need to find out who did what to whom, why, when, where, ... A lot of our social problems are crime scene problems. For example, race issues, poverty, health care, drug problems, ....
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Theatre of the Absurd

We are reading Ionescu's "Exit the King" or "Le Roi se meurt". It is a play of the genre of theatre of the absurd. The notion derives from existentialism with the idea the life and death have no intrinsic meaning. It occurs to me that we classify as absurd that which we don't understand. It is a form of dogmatism that seems to indicate that which is not understood by us is absurd. The meta model in science is more that understanding is a journey, a process without end and that we live in an inherently cause and effect universe. That certain phenomena are not understood simply indicates that our current models are missing some basic understanding of the structures deriving the system whose behavior we don't understand. This is particularly applied to human behavior. So a true believer can be very confused as to why everybody else doesn't believe as he or she does.

If

If ∞ has no limits, what does it do:

• Nothing
• Something
• Somethings
• Everything

Isn't the answer obvious?

Pattern from The Little Prince

Our book club read The Little Prince by Saint-Exupery. As we were discussing the book, a new pattern emerged for me:

Know Thyself and its context

I am taking an online MOOC on mindfulness via Coursera. One of the questions to answer was:

• Purpose: to reveal and reflect on our existing opinions about the connections between mindfulness and Buddhism.
• Task: to challenge ourselves to consider our own views on the meaning of 'real mindfulness' and to explore our aspirations for this concept today.
• Respond: write a post that reflects upon your intuitive sense of the connection between mindfulness and Buddhism and also expresses your hopes and fears about this connection.

Measures and their discontnet

In conversations with friends who had read Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature and how we have less violence now. The implications of this view and others along these lines is that things are getting better and we are not aware of this trajectory, in part  because of the amount of information that we now have easily available to us. The measures used justify the claims. However, it seems to me that there is a general pattern with measures, in this as well as other domains. We create measures that justify our narrative. In this case it justifies a sense of optimism which seems to me is part of American culture. With any metric we choose, we leave out the larger part of the system we are talking about as that does not fit the narrative we want those measures to justify. In this case the measures declining violence leave out the measure of species extinction, destruction of ecologies, measures of pollutions, .... These are all forms of violence against the larger system of which we are a part.