| Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 11:55:06 -0800 | 04 00067 61 01111301 |
Unfinished Revolution
unrev-II@yahoogroups.com
OHS DKR Project
SRI International
333 Ravenswood Avenue
Menlo Park, CA 94025
| Subject: | A Small Quiz with Big Ideas |
I greatly enjoyed your write up on Doug Engelbart's background and objective
for using technology to leverage human cognition, also, described as augmenting
intelligence.....
In particular throwing a few anchors in the record expedites communication and analysis, as Doug requested in his letter on October 25, 2000.
More attention is needed, however, to solve the "people" problem Jack Park raised on September 8, 2001, relative to enabling Doug's vision for a new way of working and thinking, since leveraging cognition expands span of attention, and this initially boggles the mind, noted by Eric Armstrong on January 25, 2000.
Doug has found since his letter on October 25, 2000, that people resist a new way of working due to ignorance, fear and denial, saying its overkill, not enough time, not enough diligence, until and unless they get experience to discover that working intelligently saves time and money because it is fast, easy and fun.
Resistance to gaining experience using intelligence presents and innovation loop, also, KM dilemma. A recent letter to the team on October 29 called on support by experienced educators, like you, to help us through the difficult transition from an information age to a culture of knowledge using continual learning.
Absent rallying toward a culture of knowledge by our experienced, senior people, it is difficult to see at this remove how the rest of us can muster the wisdom to give up the addiction of information and games enabled by IT to escape the Pandora's box of numbing complexity that dominates the current scene, noted by Eric Armstrong in his letter on October 3, 2001.
Education is the arena for helping people discover that a new way of working "intelligently" is the only solution to Eric's problem. You may recall, that Jack Park reported not having even a clue for a solution, despite having submitted a great many clues over the past two years. This is another big warning that IT overwhelms memory, thereby debilitating the core engine of human reasoning, as shown by research on March 19, 1990, and earlier on March 3, 1990.
In fact, if memory serves, you have addressed this very problem from time to time, noting that people are incapacitated by recalling only 5% of the gist of things. This seems to work okay, until the critical mass of too many people having too many problems explodes under the compounding effect of meaning drift noted by Aristotle in 400 BC, as occurred recently when intelligence failed causing a massive national security failure on September 11, 2001, and earlier on December 7, 2000 massive problems in the economy came to light. Recent economic data on October 31, 2001, and again on November 2 now confirm the warnings last December that too many people having too many problems has caused job losses to rise above levels not seen in two decades. This evidence shows people are frustrated and hurting because information overload creates a hopeless quagmire that paralyzes productivity, as Eric cried out on October 3.
So, education, as you are enabling with Fleabyte, is a critical ingredient.
Keep up the good work.
You might want to double check the excellent explanation of Fleabyte fundamentals at....
...which may have a small error in.....
"Fleabyte is my term of endearment for the pocket computer or, for that matter, any programmable computer that one can carry one the person as commfortably...."
The section on "Logs that Fit"....
...in my view is a very useful for addressing the urgent need to maintain alignment with fundamentals. It is well to work with technology, like a log table, that speeds consistent accuracy, yet there remains a profound need for people to build paths back to original understanding, like Hansel and Gretel who marked a path so they could remember the way back home, despite a foreboding forest of confusing trails.
Recently, Leon Fuerth gave an insightful lecture at George Washington University, broadcast by CSPAN. Fuerth was formerly Vice President Al Gore's national security advisor. His lecture during the CSPAN broadcast was on threats of the future, extrapolating implications from events on September 11, 2001. He layed out inevitable national security risks from expanding the pool of people with skills and resources for nuclear, chemical, and biological capabilities, and discussed nano technology that may lead to sentient machines, if microbiological circuitry is fully deployed. In the near term cloning poses at least a cultural danger of pitting people against one another on philosophical and religious grounds, which motivate, in part, current animosity manifested by terrorist attacks on September 11.
Mr. Fuerth related growing danger from gaining control over lower levels of organic structure that causes mistakes to escalate i.e., bumbling, when the complexity of information overload overwhelms human mental biology, as related by Eric Armstrong on October 3. Eric's feeling that this is a hopeless problem adds weight to Fuerth's concern about not reaching critical mass that ends in calamity, with institutions of government and business simply imploding, as explained in NWO.
Fuerth ended his remarks with a perspective on religion that encompasses the role of technology within a framework of philosophy for living as individuals, and as members of community (e.g., family, school, work, neighbors, friends, city, state, nation, culture). Mr. Fuerth seemed to indicate that without a sound framework, no meaningful progress can occur on moving beyond information technology that worried Eric on October 3. We will be stuck forever, until and unless we look deeper than the notion of information, to grasp the spectacle of knowledge. Perhaps the power of religion offers a path for this journey, as explained in NWO, which underlies traditions of Western jurisprudence, also, explained in NWO.
So, my recommendation to solve Eric's dilemma on October 3, asking for a better way of analyzing daily working information, is to start anew with fundamentals of knowledge proposed on January 20, 2000. This will lead to a new way of working explained on December 19, 2000 that strengthens handling of daily working information, which Doug Engelbart recommends, through a process of intelligence carried out as continual learning that links back to critical details illustrated by your excellent work on Fleabyte, discussed above.
Jack Park submitted this clue in his letter on November 30, 2000, supporting earlier clues you submitted on September 26, 2000. Putting all of the clues together, along with recent work by Eugene, Al, Lee, Peter and Paul's ideas will yield the answer. However, after you get it, there will still be the "people" problem that worried Jack, which I fear only education can address within the realm of religion, as pointed out by Leon Fuerth in his remarks at George Washington University. For that, we need clues on engaging an educator to foster a culture of knowledge that has faith to invest time for intelligence, rather than spend all of our time consuming information, as discussed recently in the letter to the OHS/DKR team on October 29, 2001.
Management expert Stephen Covey says faith is the foundation of highly successful people. Perhaps then faith is another clue for solving Eric's problem on October 3.
Thanks very much for sticking with us on the OHS/DKR effort. Though progress sometimes takes two steps back and only one step forward, all hands are needed for this task.
Happy holidays.
THE WELCH COMPANY
Rod Welch
rowelch@attglobal.net