Conscious Web of We: C…WOW
This post is for the super-smart AI specialists I’ve recently befriended, prompted by Barry Robson (CEO of Dirac Foundation; Strategic Advisor at IBM TJ Watson Research Center; and more) sending us all the link to the ‘Principles Versus Patterns’ paper by Carlo Pescio which highlights how the Feigenbaum Bottleneck affects our ability to collectively find solutions. This blog post is also related to Rob’s pointers on cross products and he’ll probably LOL when he sees what’s been distilling and mapping in my mind, byte size by byte size over 5+ years. Hopefully, Paul will also LOL when I offer my answer to the “Nature or Nurture?” question and special thanks to Pedro for reminding us of the power of language as re-imagined across cultures. Some of the best brains in the world and they’re generous in allowing me to add to the mix with my relative inexperience and ignorance.
It’s only in 2010 that I’ve allocated any time to the maths and technicalities behind my thinking; before I liked it being in conceptual free form that (like a magpie) I’d collect the super-shiny scintillating strands and commit to twaining together when the timing was better and when I met fellow protagonists who could and would enlighten me.
Now the Feigenbaum Bottleneck states: as domain complexity grows, it becomes more difficult for human experts to formulate their knowledge as practical strategies (as human “say-how”). It is easier to demonstrate by doing (“show-how”) and most people can also make good choices between alternatives (“say-what”).
Admittedly, this is the first time I’ve happened upon the Feigenbaum Bottleneck; this is what happens when a person doesn’t do a PhD in maths / computing and doesn’t have the opportunity of exposure to it during the course of their career………….until now that they happen upon exceptional thinkers.
Well, naturally, all this “show-explain” categorization referenced by Feigenbaum made me immediately think of first principles in film-making — whether we’re the scriptwriter, the producer, the director, the SFX supervisor, the makeup, the actor etc……………”SHOW + TELL”.
At this point, it may be worthwhile to provide context for Barry and other new friends. There is a running joke amongst friends of mine who’ve known me for a few years longer. There’s something called “SHOW + TWAIN“. This is my habit and practice of trying to make sense of multiple elements into some sort of coherent whole and putting that into pictographic form that’s actionable.
The pictographic habits are probably explained by my Chinese heritage and the fact that in the segments of visual spatial reasoning for IQ tests I do unusually well — for a female and we’re not supposed to be good map readers either :*).
Anyway, I do “show + twain” almost all the time. I can write reams of text and prose but I much prefer pictographic representations.
As a reference example, one of my closest friends met me randomly and serendipitously on a flight almost a decade ago. He’s a well-established figure in the hedge fund industry and he assumed that I was a Bohemian art student for the simple reason that I was doodling in my notebook — albeit it was like a project management version of all the Severinis, Dalis, Max Ernsts, modernism etc. that I’d just seen inside the Guggenheim Venezia, Accademia and Biennale.
So across 2 pages I’d creatively mapped out artworks into a differentiated perspective that made sense to me.
Partially, this habit arose because when I was 5 my father taught us how to play chess and years before my mother taught us how to play card games as a way to encourage us to count and do mental arithmetic. Therefore, as a kid I had to make sense of complex scenarios: board, pieces / 52 cards, rules of game, patterns, risks, strategies, trade-offs, seemingly random moves by the other competitor, reading human emotion (not necessarily via face), sportsmanship etc.
I developed these skills not via “say-how” text form (no chess books for child Twain) but by a cross-pollination of pictorial memory capture with context tagging and random referencing to other sports (basketball, hockey, netball) and other topics (e.g., watch a crowd crossing at a crossroads when the lights are still green, the cars are still go and……… navigation strategies and purpose emerge). The most efficient, safe route to the other side of the street is an analogy for pawn to Queen conversion, by the way.
“Say-how” to me is what happens before we set-up a chemistry or physics experiment: we list the apparatus and the instructions we’re going to follow but we have no idea of whether the results will concord with our planning because there are risks of random impurities affecting our experiment. In some cases, like in crystallization, these “random impurities” are actively encouraged / seeded. In other cases, we remove all possibilities of random impurities because we’re after specific results — so by extension, we’re already precluding the experiment to fit in with our “say-how” rather than allow it to be stochastic.
As an adult these childhood habits translated into a part of my career being dedicated to…….synergizing corporate strategy and transaction negotiations — of the type where I now classify the way Facebook is differentiated from what I’m doing like so:
Rest assured the way I classify and contextualize data for purpose is not to be found in most database sources or risk management solutions (from Bloomberg to VentureOne to CapitalIQ).
Anyway, I don’t always produce structured MBA-level strategy slides because sometimes breaking the professional norms / standards / conventions allows a person to be free, to be brave, to explore, to reflect, to appreciate the conflagration of other influences, to contextualize, and essentially to……………innovate.
So here’s some of that free form thinking and “show + twain”:
So within my lifetime I hope to help realize…….The Conscious Web of We (CWOW).
























































