It seems to me that the history of humanity is littered with stories, both fictitious and true. Plato would have us believe that knowledge is a blend of belief and reality, in fact the whole notion of epistemology seems lost or foreign to the general public.
A little note about it here
I came across a sound bite today, it was a lecture given by a man by the name of Stafford Beer, nice name I know, he states that it's the only thing in the universe that involves physics, biology and sociology, he is of course referring to beer.
Download it now
Here's the rest of his links:
Fan Fare for Effective Freedom
Lessons from Stafford Beer
Memorial Website
Now I listened to the lecture, it's amazing, the man at 22 years of age ran an R&D department by sheer hard work and luck. However he mentioned his favorite publication here:
Chroncles of Wizard Prang
Since Beer was trained as a philosopher he ended up dispossessing himself for a period of his life and during this period wrote this book. I've only read bits of it but it reminds me of the gems of GEB and Dr. Seuss combined, how could any publisher in their right mind not publish this?
He also mentions that Cybernetics as a field of study has been around since the 1940's, I mean like any good internet gen general nerdie type person I tend to think Cybernetics, Like Cyborg? as in Kevin Warwick in I cyborg? You know direct neural interconnection with various bits of hardware so you can turn lights on and off at a distance with your mind? not that a light switch isn't cool, it's just a nice party trick.
Low and behold here's an entire form of managerial science aimed at improving productivity by utilizing statically based feed back loops that has a proven track record yet I have never heard of it, and I'm studying managerial and project management based sciences to make myself a more effective peer.
In his book I came across this chapter:
The Pompous Man
It's quite clear to me that this is a dialog that occurred between him and the local educational establishment's representative, and it's quite funny due to the fact that here is a man that was awarded his PhD at a young age, applied his knowledge from too much school stating that it is in fact the method of our madness we should question.
During my own not so illustrious scholastic career which reads more like a littany of failures than a glowing review of a star pupil I find myself questioning our education in the same manner as mentioned in Chapter Two of Beer's book.
His notion of not teaching them what we know but asking them what we don't know seems a novel throw back to the mentality of the 1960's, however I know for a fact that as an individual I work far better when I am interested in my content matter; as I am certain every student does. I also realize that I need a whole whack of learning skills and base skills to survive in today's world.
Which brings me to my point, it seems to me that the goal of this entire process of educating our young is to produce functional wholeistic people with enough bits of everything to allow them to decide what they love and then enable them to follow that passion. People change, passions change, time arguably yet another broadly adopted illusion changes all things. Yet in retrospect as the proverb goes, we learn more and more about less and less until we know everything about absolutely nothing at all.
Perhaps that's why Beer worked so much as a Cyberstitician? because he wanted to experence gems of everything all the time? Or perhaps he was just another rambleing bearded mad man.
Either way here's an excellent site on Cybernetics:
Cybernetics and Systems Thinkers
They are all worth a read if you'd like to learn how to improve any process.
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