Year One

It has been a year since Heretic's Toolbox began. It is a mysterious evolving and unpredictable thing. Thanks for being a part of it.

Problem Solving Time Traveller

We humans use our temporal lobe to time travel. We use our imagination to work backward through our memories or forward through our predictions. This is valuable for problem solving. The more we understand our memories, the better predictions we make. The more we understand our desired future outcomes the better decisions we make in the present.

Think about a problem you have. Tell yourself the story of how it came about and see if you see underlying patterns. Your memory may not always be accurate, but your storytelling speaks to your present needs. Imagine a future where the problem is solved. What does it look like? Now step back from that future state to the present and think about the steps you will need to take to get there.

Driving Problems

Beware Existential Problems

For more on Complexity vs Complication, read Harold Jarche.

Supported by Faulty Assumptions

When dealing with a wicked problem, look for the faulty assumptions that support the continuation of the problem. It is in that same place that you will find a solution.

Formulate Your Ideas

Formulate your ideas by playing with them in quiet empty places.

Seeing Possibilities in Imperfections

Stage Magic and Learning

Why Do We Want to Learn

Seeking the Emptiness

The Tao the Ching

Sampling of Tweets

I'd rather speak up and be corrected than be quiet and remain mistaken

You can navigate a sailboat but you cannot control the wind.

We must constantly recreate our picture of reality in order to survive.

People invested in stasis fear disruptors and so they attempt to marginalize them

In an infinite universe it is impossible to define anything exclusively.

I still think reality is done with smoke and mirrors

You can accomplish anything you want but not everything you want.

Procrastination is just an alert that you have a scaling problem with your task at hand.

Bad rules always create the situation they were designed to avoid

If you need to beg for a seat at the table maybe you need to think more about what you bring to the table.

Control is an illusion, even if it appears in a policy manual.

You can't learn without failure and you can't be successful without learning

Learning has to be playing. How else does it work?

Use fewer words, own fewer things, set fewer expectations, do fewer tasks, use fewer apps, answer fewer emails. Live more life.

From @weisblatt

Google Refine

Humans are really good at interpreting data but they aren't fast. They can see the context in disjointed information and find the patterns to make it into a structured and usable whole but if they have to do repeated corrections it can be very labor intensive,

With the recent attention to Big Data, incredibly large datasets produced as a byproduct of worldwide online activity, there is a concern that messy data will be impossible to resolve at that volume.

I've recently seen Google Refine which puts the power of human meaning making into large datasets. It provides the user the ability to find patterns and apply global changes to them to easily create more robust data. 

When I was a computer consultant I was often asked to help clean up dirty data. I knew all sorts of tricks in Microsoft office but they pale in comparison to what I see in Google Refine. I'm going to experiment with it and see where it can be an advantage to Heretics who are looking for Big data as a powerful new tool.

NOTE: Google Refine has been changed to an open source project named Open Refine. You can view the documentation here: https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine

The Erosion of Meaning

My father has always been a big proponent of “common” sense and practicality. He is a very concrete thinker and so as a son/employee and as an abstract thinker, he and I were often at odds with one another. In my frustration as a young artist working in my father’s electrical contracting shop, I latched onto an idea about my father and his business that has stayed with me in various forms since then.

My father was a good and fair businessman and his practicality served him well for the most part. However, there was one place where it broke down. In the shop where he kept his tools and supplies, there was a conflict of my father’s ideas: 1) Don’t throw anything out because it could be valuable at a later date. 2) Keep the men in the field where they produce value instead of in the shop cleaning up.  The result is that the shop was glutted with piles of unorganized tools and materials. What I spotted was that the value that my father was trying to maintain started to quickly erode as the material became inaccessible because of the disorganization. A $5000 coupling used in rare circumstances was on the floor in a pile with $2 coupling used every day. Once the object was placed in storage without regard to its purpose or meaning, it lost its value.

At the time I was studying the Dada movement in art and it resonated with me. The artists at the time were reacting to the horrors of World War I, and how technology had destroyed meaning. They made art out of objects that had specific purposes and then stripped them of that purpose and repurposed them for art. This worked perfectly with my frustration with my father’s monolithic insistence that everything must be of practical use in light of the de-practicalization of his shop. And so I began building abstract sculptures with his materials. The more old and decrepit the object, the better. Sometimes the finished pieces would have some human or animal look to them but that was part of my take on searching for meaning. For the most part, the sculptures purposefully had no meaning.

After time though, I began to run into the same problem that my father had. Since no one saw meaning or value in the sculptures, they began to accumulate in storage and lose their value. Since I couldn’t justify the ongoing resources needed to continue, I threw everything out.

That was 20 years ago. Since then I have had hundreds of notebooks filled with doodles of sculptures. This idea still has a hold on me.

Now I am working on a website that talks about the process of using and questioning tools for the establishment of meaning. I’m feeling the old tug of wanting to contrast the discussion by building things without meaning.

The impracticality of creating large meaningless things has been helped in the last 20 years with the advent of photoshop. We’ll see…

Input/Output

Fluxite:

Saturday morning, go to Home Depot and watch the line at the register for a while. Then go to the dump and watch what is tossed.

Then find a place where you can scoop up a handful of soil. Think about the countless micro-organisms that have been in there for countless eons converting death into life.