serendipity
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same on issuu
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well.. maybe.
or.. maybe not so much..
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from 2012 post on youblog:
rgbwaves & fourier & crickets
rgbwaves ..
[like the serendipity is everywhere.. the sync is what matters.. can we do that.. can we listen for that..]
the only wherewithal we might have to rely on is the quality of our feelings and thinking brought together through the habit of ‘practice and serendipity’ or simply having a ‘prepared attentive mind’ since the need is to adapt moment to moment. Or simply stated, our contextual intelligence can come to our rescue to maintain balance.
life in perpetual beta… embracing uncertainty… antifragile
Nemetics is a flexible thought model that allows us to synthesize mathematical thinking, subjective insights and feelings to re-design our lives for the better. The objective of the flexible thought model is to make sense of complex adaptive systems and to act upon them. It may be effectively applied to various fields like organizations, manufacturing systems, engineering, organizational sociology, economics, design, system design, system reliability and even to psychology and a host of others fields.
or people. 7 billion+ of them.. no?
In short Nemetics can be best described as a study of origins of the various complex phenomena within which we exist. Or in other words it is the ontological inquiry in general that seeks the transcendental truths operating behind everyday phenomenon.
perhaps we’re missing the dance.. because we keep looking elsewhere for the dance steps.. when they (the steps, the music, the sync-ability) is already inside each one of us..
so perhaps.. serendipity is most about listening. (ie: not even about creating the perfect spaces for serendipity to happen, unless we decide that simply entails – freeing all art-ists at the same time, in sync)
perhaps if we just focus on 2 things (authenticity & attachment) .. we’ll give serendipity (peace, betterness, et al) a chance. be\cause.. perhaps authenticity is the only way we hear the things we need to hear. andbe\cause perhaps attachment is the only thing that keeps us safe/calm/home/quiet/free.. enough.. to keep on listening. (input matters if output matters ness)
Since the aim of Nemetics is to gain direct knowledge of the transcendental the fundamental premise is praxis for the simple reason that the theory of such complex emergence (a term which we shall deal with later) simply might not exist. It has to be worked out. The idea is to move from practice to theory and then to practice again.
http://rgbwaves.wordpress.com/2012/08/05/how-to-embrace-uncertainty-of-complex-systems-with-a-smile/
when many oscillators couple together they form a general group pattern. Appearance of such a group pattern is what is known as ‘emergence’. Thus our task perhaps simplifies to understanding and interpreting such patterns exhibited by group behavior, which are simply known as emergence.
again – serendipity et al… not about the prep/design of a space/structure/system as we generally view these things (ie: design classroom or office space or even city, et al). but about the bravery/freedom/openness/awakeness/aliveness..trust.. to let it/us emerge. listen/emerge/listen.. all one dance of improv. no prep. as prep.
which is great news.. we don’t have to have years of training, or mounds of manuals/policy/bureaucracy, or only let certain credentialed people be in charge of the day. we just have to free people. and trust that. let’s do that first. and just see. we’ve spent plenty of years doing it the other way around. no?
Hence faced with an issue on ‘interdependence’ we have two tasks ahead of us. First is to understand and interpret the group behavior and patterns that emerge. There are several ways of going about it. One of my favorite is to see the wave patterns generated. The idea is to identify the type of wave and the type of attractor that it might be associated with.
perhaps the interdependence/interconnectedness of humans.. relies more on trusting 100% of us. perhaps we haven’t yet seen the (serendipitous) dance.. because we haven’t yet trusted 100% of us. (Tim – www won’t work w/o the whole world. that.)
fourier and crickets..
Maria Popova (@brainpicker)
8/18/12 3:01 PM
“Our ability to cope with uncertainty is one of the most important requirements for success in life.” Risk Intelligence j.mp/OZIpkh
A faster transform means that less computer power is required to process a given amount of information—a boon to energy-conscious mobile multimedia devices such as smart phones. Or with the same amount of power, engineers can contemplate doing things that the computing demands of the original FFT made impractical. For example, Internet backbones and routers today can actually read or process only a tiny trickle of the river of bits they pass between them. The SFT could allow researchers to study the flow of this traffic in much greater detail as bits shoot by billions of times a second.
like the vision/thinking of David‘s vest.. another sense – learning to grok. tacit ness.
More-intelligent-species-on-Earth-than-Humans – crickets
The wave based communication of Humans is far more limited than crickets, seen in places like dance clubs, prices in stock markets (less total stocks than neurons in a small number of crickets brains), body language, etc, but these wave based communications of Humans do not tend to spread to other Humans nearly as well as oscillating sounds spread in large groups of crickets. Humans communicate mostly in words. Crickets communicate mostly in waves. There are waves of words as ideas flow through society, which we call memes, but at the brainwave level we are still communicating between brain cells like crickets communicate with sound.
but words are man made … no? so maybe we go with way more or way less words… as we focus on – listening to.. riding.. feeling.. grokking .. whatever.. the waves.
Serendipity means a “fortunate happenstance” or “pleasant surprise”. It was coined by Horace Walpole in 1754. In a letter he wrote to a friend Walpole explained an unexpected discovery he had made by reference to a Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. The princes, he told his correspondent, were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of”.
The notion of serendipity is a common occurrence throughout the history of scientific innovation such as Alexander Fleming’s accidental discovery of penicillin in 1928 and the invention of the microwave oven by Percy Spencer in 1945.
[..]
Serendipity is not just a matter of a random event, nor can it be taken simply as a synonym for “a happy accident” (Ferguson, 1999; Khan, 1999), “finding out things without being searching for them” (Austin, 2003), or “a pleasant surprise” (Tolson, 2004) ..
diff between random and whimsy.. perhaps what makes the chaos a dance..
The New Oxford Dictionary of English defines serendipity as the occurrence and development of events by chance in a satisfactory or beneficial way, understanding the chance as any event that takes place in the absence of any obvious project (randomly or accidentally), which is not relevant to any present need, or in which the cause is unknown.
no agenda ness
Innovations presented as examples of serendipity have an important characteristic: they were made by individuals able to “see bridges where others saw holes” and connect events creatively, based on the perception of a significant link.
i’m guessing we all have this ability. we just haven’t given most of us (so any of us) a chance.
The chance is an event, serendipity a capacity. The Nobel Prize laureate Paul Flory suggests that significant inventions are not mere accidents.
[..]
The serendipitous can play an important role in the search for truth, but because of traditional scientific behavior and scientific thinking based on logic and predictability is often ignored in the scientific literature.
mark pesce
spot on – but do we need the national curriculum?
isn’t that a compromise as well?isn’t this unleashing about curiosity, and the natural process of learning. why impose content strands?..
while the nat curriculum may be better.. it’s not the best is it?
Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus – all over but esp p. 190 on the printing press:
because each reader had access to more books, intellectual diversity not uniformity was the result. this increase in diversity of sources corroded faith in older institutions. (standards?..)and on: make war, then love –
It’s as though we went as far as we could, in our own heads, then leapt outside of them, into cities, and left our heads behind. -3 paragraphs up from the end.do you think our heads, or enough of our heads, or enough of our heads and others’ heads with the use of the web, have caught up enough that now we can make the cities us?
cognitive surplus – ness.seems you think so here:
Shirky again:
on new networks.. we thought – i’ll use it to help me find info, etc.. but what we actually did was communicate and share.
our desire to communicate with one another has turned out to be one of the most stable features of the current environment.
the answers are more in the opportunities (creating serendipity) for each other by the culture of the groups we form..is your plexus what we’re looking for? is someone in ed testing it out, can we test it out? do you have yet a space on plexus where you can have a coffeehouse convo? jetsons quality?
i can’t seem to read your posts fast enough.
what is normal
6/9/12 6:09 AM
Definitely worth reading about misfits and mavericks and money. Schumpeter: In praise of misfits econ.st/LJ3ZH9peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-18-notes-essay
6/9/12 6:21 AM
A basic observation: If you are not open to and in fact delighted by serendipity, then you are never going to get Social Networks
clay shirky
5/17/12 5:30 AM
Reading Clay Shirky on the relationship between physical space and creativity – Boing Boing: bit.ly/KSBj0W
In this video of his talk at PSFK CONFERENCE NYC, Clay Shirky talks about the work of Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. After working there as an assistant professor for almost ten years, Shirky describes five student projects that he thinks are pushing the creative boundaries – from interface design to how people cluster to build new work. At the end of the talk, the technology thought-leader compares creatives as members of a philharmonic orchestra and wonders if any rules can be drawn from looking at such an ensemble.use interestingness as a design probe {if it isn’t interesting you can’t make it} his former student – elizabeth goodman – the reason academics like to talk about play, but not about fun, is because you can make people play
the unfakeable thing
what does the culture tell us about what the community needs next
big part – knowing when to stop doing things that don’t work anymore (easy to start things – stopping is key)
22:07
1. mud tub – interestingness as design
2. rapid ftr – tool in search of a problem
3. botanicals – combining as a form of making
4. design space to reward serendipity, transparency
5. strings – expanded sense of raw materials
– an instrument you could get into – itp expands people’s sense of what constitutes raw materials – ie: the floor, the walls, the ceiling – the space is a raw materialrule 6
there are no rules for creativityif you can find someone who is creative and get them to define what they do, then if you do it, you are creative..
the space, the here and now, creates new needs – so changes that creativitythe conversation around creativity goes off the rails when we assume it’s a thing
it’s the ability to produce valuable novelty – and that question is always up for grabs
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community as curriculum
mediocre into breathtaking.
status quo into brilliance.
And a challenge I see with new digital services such as Google Maps, geo tagging and peer recommendations, is that these technologies remove serendipity. They make it harder to get lost and encounter something or someone you were not meant to encounter.
brilliant minds teaching us about serendipitous gatherings, creating serendipity:
ethan zuckerman
hagel and brown
p. 94-95
serendipity – finding things we didn’t know we were looking for
tacit knowledge exists only in people’s heads.. you’ve got to stand next to someone who already knows and learn by doing.
serendipity – means to access rich flows of tacit knowledge, in long term relationships.
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aug 2014 – Philipp (in learning analytics unhangout) was asking what to measure/automate in order to (gain?) serendipity/curiosity…
It’s not enough to ask where good ideas come from — we need to rethink how we go about finding them.[..]because we can’t predict which ideas will collide and fuse, we cling to boring productivity and efficiency. We not only run our lives but our entire economy this way, using GDP and even grosser statistics to measure progress that has never unfolded in a straight line. Life is emergent and unknowable — we’re just terrified to manage it that way. And because we only attribute our success to serendipity after the fact (if at all), we typically consign it to anecdotes (e.g. Post-it Notes), turning to them only when the numbers don’t add up. The problem is that more and more of the most important numbers — including patent applications, R&D budgets, and even economic growth — have stopped adding up.
It’s no accident that the Watson Research Center produces more patents per year than any other building in the world, and IBM more than any other company.
Burt’s findings have been borne out again and again; in one study, a slight increase in serendipity generated more revenue and projects while speeding up their completion.
Ito talked about the qualities he’s cultivated within himself — being “antidisciplinary” and retaining his “beginner’s mind” — which he hopes will guide the Media Lab. “We aim to capture serendipity,” he said. “You don’t get lucky if you plan everything — and you don’t get serendipity unless you have peripheral vision and creativity.”[..]Even Google cancelled “20 percent time,” its celebrated policy of granting engineers one day a week for personal projects. To capture serendipity, the company is looking at space instead of time — hence the design of its new campus, in which everyone is just a short “casual collision” away.
[..]What makes a city great, in other words, is how well its people are connected — to the city itself and to each other. And to make a city better, you have to engineer serendipity.
Which is what Tony Hsieh is trying to do in Las Vegas.
[..]
Ethan Zuckerman. In his book,Rewire, he sketches a set of recommendation and translation tools designed to nudge us out of our media comfort zones and “help us understand whose voices we’re hearing and whom we are ignoring.”
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So, what if we borrowed Ayasdi to power a social serendipity engine — one to identify who’s nearby, parse our hidden relationships, and make introductions? How would it work? We’d want it to be as easy as Tinder, which now owns half the mobile dating market. Next, we’d need context — why do I want to meet this person? Tinder works because its logic is binary: Swipe right or left. Everything else is harder.
a nother way – small print ch 2
[..]
I’m staking my own claim: Serendipity is the process through which we discover unknown unknowns. Understanding it as an emergent property of social networks, instead of sheer luck, enables us to treat it as a viable strategy for organizing people and sharing ideas, rather than writing it off as magic. And that, in turn, has potentially huge ramifications for everything from how we work to how we learn to where we live by leading to a shift away from efficiency — doing the same thing over and over, only a little bit better — toward novelty and discovery.
so yes. groundhog day ness. iterating detox till we get to eudaimonian surplus.. ness.
but pruning built in as well – just like you here:
@mikeryan Thanks, but these days I really need to conserve all of my indignation for Uber.
only for things like assuming money, work, et al… systemic cleansing ness.
let’s do this first… serendipity to the max .. sure to follow.
no?
@amyburvall.@hjarche @Braddo @hrheingold I want to be a “super-encounterer” mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opi…#serendipity
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/opinion/how-to-cultivate-the-art-of-serendipity.html
As I navigated the brick sidewalk, passing under the pinkish glow of a streetlight, I thought about how string was probably hiding all around me. A major story might lurk behind the Harvard zoology museum ahead or in the plane soaring above. String is everywhere for the taking, if you have the talent to take it.
In the 1960s, Gay Talese, then a young reporter, declared that “New York is a city of things unnoticed” and delegated himself to be the one who noticed. Thus, he transformed the Isle of Manhattan into the Isle of Serendip: He traced the perambulations of feral cats, cataloged shoeshine purveyors, tracked down statistics related to the bathrooms at Yankee Stadium and discovered a colony of ants at the top of the Empire State Building. He published his findings in a little book titled “New York: A Serendipiter’s Journey.”
string hiding all around..
NYC.. things unnoticed
book
The term “serendipiter” breathed new life into Walpole’s word, turning serendipity into a protagonist and a practitioner. After all, those ants at the top of the Empire State Building didn’t find themselves; Mr. Talese had to notice them, which was no easy matter. Similarly, Dr. Erdelez came up with the term super-encounterer to give us a way to talk about the people rather than just the discoveries. Without such words, we tend to become dazzled by the happy accident itself, to think of it as something that exists independent of an observer.
the person not the thing encountered
So how many big ideas emerge from spills, crashes, failed experiments and blind stabs? One survey of patent holders (the PatVal study of European inventors, published in 2005) found that an incredible 50 percent of patents resulted from what could be described as a serendipitous process. Thousands of survey respondents reported that their idea evolved when they were working on an unrelated project — and often when they weren’t even trying to invent anything. This is why we need to know far more about the habits that transform a mistake into a breakthrough.
Some scientists even embrace a kind of “free jazz” method, he said, improvising as they go along:
capable of seeing “patterns that others don’t see.”
Is this pattern-finding ability similar to the artistic skill of a painter like Georgia O’Keeffe? Is it related to the string-gathering prowess of Gay Talese? We still know so little about creative observation that it’s impossible to answer such questions.
*That’s why we need to develop a new, interdisciplinary field — call it serendipity studies — that can help us create a taxonomy of discoveries in the chemistry lab, the newsroom, the forest, the classroom, the particle accelerator and the hospital. By observing and documenting the many different “species” of super-encounterers, we might begin to understand their minds.
One day we might be able to stumble upon new and better ways of getting lost.
be you. 