____________________________________
“The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over
and over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
p.289
It is the old conflict between the concepts of the open system and the closed, between the forces of centralized order and those of dispersed variety. The antagonists assume new forms, the general change, but essentially the same battles are fought over and over again.
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
“It is the old conflict between the concepts of the
open system and the closed, between the forces of
centralized order and those of dispersed variety.
The antagonists assume new forms, the general change,
but essentially the same battles are fought over and
over again.”;
── Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010, p.289.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
• “History is a wheel, for the nature of man is fundamentally
unchanging. What has happened before will perforce [ of necessity ·
inevitably · unavoidably ] happen again.”
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows
“Archmaester Rigney once wrote that history is a wheel,
for the nature of man is fundamentally unchanging.
What has happened before will perforce happen again,
he said.”;
── George R. R. Martin, A Feast for Crows;
Ranee Panjabi, History of Espionage, Memorial University;
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John's, NL
<------------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
____________________________________
Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom, The starfish and the spider, 2006 [ ]
p.42
We'll see this pattern repeat itself across different sectors and in different industries. We call this radical swing “the accordion principle”. Over time, industries swing from being decentralized to centralized to decentralized and back again. In response to overcentralized industries or institutions, people rebel and create open starfish systems.
p.42
At the extreme of decentralization, we encounter a gray zone where a very loose collection of people have a surprising amount of power.
(Brafman, Ori, The starfish and the spider : the unstoppable power of leaderless organization / Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom., 1. decentralization in management., 2. organization behavior., 3. success in business., 2006, )
____________________________________
Jerome Bruner, The culture of education, 1996 [ ]
p.122 “hermeneutic circle”
What is particularly interesting about a story as a structure is the two-way street that it travels between its parts and the whole. The events recounted in a story take their meaning from the story as a whole. But the story as a whole is something that is constructed from its parts. This part/whole tail-chasing bears the formidable name “hermeneutic circle”, and it is what causes stories to be subject to interpretation, not to explanation. You cannot explain a story; all you can do is give it variant interpretations. You can explain falling bodies by reference to a theory of gravity. But you can only interpret what might have happened to Sir Isaac Newton when the legendary apple fell on his head in the orchard. So we say that scientific theories or logical proof are judged by means of verification or test--or more accurately, by their verifiability or testability--whereas stories are judged on the basis of their verisimilitude or “lifelikeness.”
p.126
The process of science making is narrative.
(Bruner, Jerome S. (Jerome Seymour), The culture of education / Jerome Bruner. 1. education psychology. , 2. social psychology. , 3. educational anthropology. , 4. education--philosophy. , 5. discourse analysis. , 1996, )
____________________________________
(
http://www.ehow.com/
info_8699554_shakespeares-seven-stages-life.html
)
Shakespeare's Seven Stages of Life
By Tallulah Philange,
eHow Contributor,
last updated July 06, 2011
“All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances, and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.”
――Jaques, Shakespeare's comedy play ‘As You Like It,’ in Act II, Scene 7, written around Gregorian calendar 1600 by William Shakespeare, first published in 1623.
( The plot partly involves a duke who has been overthrown from power. In banishment, he's accompanied by the melancholy Jaques. Jaques delivers the speech that begins with "all the world's a stage," and outlines the seven stages of a person's life, from the helpless days of infancy to adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and aging and death. )
Stage 1: Infant
“At first the infant, mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.”
Stage 2: Schoolboy
“And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel, and shining morning face, creeping like snail, unwillingly to school.”
Stage 3: Lover
“And then the lover, sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad, made to his mistress' eyebrow.”
Stage 4: Soldier
“Then a soldier, full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard, jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel, seeking the bubble reputation, even in the cannon's mouth.”
Stage 5: Justice
“And then the justice, in fair round belly with good capon lined, with eyes severe and beard of formal cut, full of wise saws and modern instances; and so he plays his part.”
Stage 6: Advanced Age
“The sixth age shifts, into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon, with spectacles on nose and pouch on side, his youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide, for his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice, turning again toward childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sound.”
Stage 7: Dementia and Approaching Death
“Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Significance of Speech
The line "all the world's a stage" is one of the most quoted of Shakespeare. The "stage" referenced has nuanced meanings. First, there are the literal stages of life, from infancy to death. Then, there is the metaphor that mankind is merely performing a predetermined role as part of a grander production. Our roles, Shakespeare seems to be writing, are largely not of our own making. Mankind follows a similar path, and no matter how we act our parts -- our lives -- we all end up the same: in "mere oblivion." The speech is a dark moment is what otherwise is considered a comedic play, and contrasts the optimism of other characters with the defeatist, dour Jaques.
____________________________________
“Ducan, what if I told you that if you can leverage uncertainty and fear, you'll never be short three things: money, power, influence.”;--Cowboy Ninja Viking, 2010, AJ Lieberman, Riley Rossmo.
____________________________________
Frederick P. Brooks Jr. wrote in the software engineering book, "The mythical man-month : essays on software engineering" :
“Human history is a drama in which the stories stay the same,
the scripts of those stories change slowly with evolving
cultures and the stage setting change all the time.
So it is that we see our 20th century selves mirrored in
Shakespeare, Homer, and the Bible. So to the extent
'The [mythical man-month]' is about people and teams,
obsolescence should be slow.”;
── Frederick P. Brooks, The mythical man-month,
Anniversary edition, 1995, p.255
Russell L. Ackoff, Redesigning the future, 1974 [ ]
p.3
Like Rome most earlier societies that rose subsequently fell, at least partway. Not too long ago Spain was the richest and most powerful nation on earth. Later both France and England won and lost this distinctive position. Before Spain's dominance Syria, Egypt, Greece, and many other societies traveled through history like shooting stars, appearing on one horizon and disappearing on the other. Survival--let alone “thrival”--of a society is not assured by any historical law. If anything, history seems to indicate that the fall of an elevated society is inevitable. But the future is not completely contained in the past; much of it has yet to be written.
p.4
Sir Charles P. Snow identified it in his famous lecture on The Two Culture: “During all human history until this century, the rate of social change has been very slow. So slow, that it could pass unnoticed in one person's lifetime. That is no longer so. The rate of change has increased so much that our imagination can't keep up.”
pp.4-5
Sir Goeffrey Vickers, the eminent British social philosopher, put it another way: “The rate of change increases at an accelerating speed, with a corresponding acceleration in the rate at which further responses can be made; and this brings us nearer the threshold beyond which control is lost.”
p.7
A person's ability to manage his or his society's affairs depends more on his understanding of, and attitudes toward, the world that contains him than on his problem-solving methods. Put another way, his success depends more on his view of the world and the philosophy he lives by than it does on his science and technology. The reasons for this are neither complex nor obscure.
p.8
The problems we select for solution and the way we formulate them depends more on our philosophy and world view than on our science and technology. How we go about solving them obviously depends on our science and technology, but our ability to use them effectively also depends on our philosophy and world view. These, in turn, depend on the concepts and ideas we use and how we use them to organize our perceptions of the world. <skip the last sentence of the paragraph>
( Ackoff, Russell Lincoln, 1919-, Redesigning the future., 1. united states--social conditions--1960-., 2. social problems., 3. social change., 4. system theory., 1974, )
(Redesigning the future : a systems approach to societal problems, Russell L. Ackoff, University of Pennsylvania, 1974, p.3 )
____________________________________
Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010 [ ]
pp.9-10
But this book will focus on chronicling the turning points of the 20th century''s information landscape: those particular, decisive moments when a medium opens or closes. The pattern is distinctive. Every few decades, a new communications technology appears, bright with promise and possibility. It inspires a generation to dream of a better society, new forms of expression, alternative types of journalism. Yet each new technology eventually reveals its flaws, kinks, and limitations. For consumers, the technical novelty can wear thin, giving way to various kinds of dissatisfaction with the quality of content (which may tend toward the chaotic and vulgar) and the reliability or security of service. From industry's perspective, the invention my inspire other dissatisfactions: a threat to the revenues of existing information channels that the new technology make less essential, if not obsolete; a difficulty commoditizing (i.e., making a salable product out of) the technology's potential; or too much variation in standards or protocols of use to allow one to market a high quality product that will answer the consumers'dissatisfactions.
When these problems reach a critical mass, and a lost potential for substantial gain is evident, the market's invisible hand waves in some great mogul like Vail or band of them who promise a more orderly and efficient regime for the betterment of all users. Usually enlisting the federal government, this kind of mogul is special, for he defines a new type of industry, integrated and centralized. Delivering a better or more secure product, the mogul heralds a golden age in the life of the new technology. At its heart lies some perfected engine for providing a steady return on capital. In exchange for making the trains run on time (to hazard an extreme comparison), he gains a certain measure of control over the medium's potential for enabling individual expression and technical innovation--control such as the inventors never dreamed of, and necessary to perpetuate itself, as well as the attendant profits of centralization. This, too, is the Cycle.
(Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
(The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)
____________________________________
“If you watch the curve of science and everything we
know, it shoots up like a rocket. We're on this
rocket and we're going perfectly vertical into the
stars. But the emotional intelligence of humankind
is equally if not more important than our intellectual
intelligence. We're just as emotionally illiterate
as we were 5,000 years ago; so emotionally our line is
completely horizontal. The problem is the horizontal and
the vertical are getting farther and farther apart.
And as these things grow apart, there's going to be
some kind of consequence of that.”;
── George Lucas, a 1997 interview with Kevin Kelly,
published in Kevin Kelly's book, p.196,
What technology wants, 2010.
David DiSalvo, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite, 2011
p.113
“I can resist everything except temptation.”
--Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan
pp.137-138
Professor Laurie Santos is one of the leading primatologists in the country. As the director of the Yale University CapLab (aka, the Comparative Cognitive Laboratory), she has developed an understanding of capuchin monkey social systems that is challenging many of our long-held assumptions about monkey and human distinctions. At times, she explains, watching the capuchins is just like watching human soap opera (without the cheesy dialogue). Monkeys display jealousy, grief, worry, joy, and a range of other emotions that we used to think were exclusive to humans. They also cheat on their partners, steal, and alienate others, just like humans do. As it turns out, the dynamics of monkey society are not unlike our own--in some ways, they are startlingly similar.
What is not the same, Santos points out, is how we and our capuchin counsins navigate our way through our respective social landscapes. The reason for this disparity is that natural evolution and cultural evolution move at entirely different speeds. Santos comments: “Culture moves much faster than natural selection; too fast for natural selection to ever catch us up biologically.”1
Another way to state that observation is that our social infrastructure is far more complex than natural selection could prepare us for. When we observe monkeys, we see a species exhibiting emotional undercurrents similar to our own and addressing them with basic skills that fit the need. If an alien race were to observe us, on the other hand, they would see a species wrestling to manage social complexity that is frequently over our heads, threatening to drown us on any given day.
What this means is that our brains are in many ways at odds with our social environments. Happy brains are protective, predictive, and conservative--not the best fit for human societies that place high value on unpredictability, speed, and consumption. Nevertheless, this is where we find ourselves, and our social culture is ours to manage no matter how profound the difficulties--after all, we are the crafters of our societies.
p.282
1. Laurie Santos, PhD, in discussion with the author [David DiSalvo], January 2011.
(DiSalvo, David, 1970-, What makes your brain happy and why you should do the opposite / by David DiSalvo., 1. happiness., 2. logic., 3. desire., 4. neurosciences., 152.42 DiSalvo, 2011, )
··<---------------------------------------------------------------------------->
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Dan Ariely, Predictably irrational, 2008 [ ]
p.166
One of my colleagues at Duke University, Ralph Keeney, recently noted that America's top killer isn't cancer or heart disease, nor is it smoking or obsesity. It's our inability to make smart choices and overcome our own self-destructive behaviors.10 Ralph estimates that about half of us will make a lifestyle decision that will ultimately lead us to an early grave. And as if this were not bad enough, it seems that the rate at which we make these deadly decisions is increasing at an alarming pace.
10. Ralph Keeney, “Personal Decisions Are the Leading Cause of Death”, Operation Research (2008).
p.166
I suspect that over the next few decades, real improvements in life expectancy and quality are less likely to be driven by medical technology than by improved decision making. Since focusing on long-term benefits is not our natural tendency, we need to more carefully examine the cases in which we repeatedly fail, and try to come up with some remedies for these situations. (For an overweight movie lover, the key might be to enjoy watching film while walking on the treadmill.) The trick is to find the right behavioral antidate for each problem. By pairing something that we love with something that we dislike but that is good for us, we might be able to harness desire with outcome--and thus overcome some of the problems with self-control we face every day.
( Dan Ariely, predictably irrational : the hidden forces that shape our decisions, revised and expanded edition, 153.83 Ariely, (pkb.), 2010, )
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.92
Five hundred thousand plus three hundred thousand: That was getting close to a million, in the very real contingency of Chinese entry. But even without the Chinese involvement, figures in the neighborhood of a million had been mentioned earlier that summer. According to David Halberstam, the president asked General Wheeler in June what he thought it would take to do the job. Wheeler replied: “It all depends on what your definition of the job is, Mr. President. If you intend to drive the last Vietcong out of Vietnam it will take seven hundred, eight hundred thousand, a million men and about seven years.” In a discussion with Clark Clifford [one of Johnson's closest personal consultants, Clifford later replaced McNamara as SecDef, secretary of defense] and the president later that month, Wheeler used the figures 750,000 and six or seven years.
p.185
There was the fast turnover in personnel and the lack of institutional memory at any level.
p.168
But about a year later, when I was back in the States, I saw a long article in the New York Times Magazine describing the difficulties of pacifying a VC district, Rach Kien. At first I thought it was reporting the operation I had been in. But it was about a different battalion, 8 months later. All the problems and experiences sounded very familiar. The article said that Rach Kein had always been a Vietcong district up till then, and this was the first time American troops had tried to operate there.
pp.185─186
; an operation eight months later in the same paddies that was not even aware American troops had ever visited them before. AS Tran Ngoc Chau said to me in 1968, “You Americans feel you have been fighting this was for seven years. You have not. You have been fighting it for one year, seven times.”
p.251
What I read in 1969 was that an exactly comparable written accord had been violated eight years earlier, in 1946, by the French.
p.251
Ho Chi Minh's somber plea to Jean Sainteny in September 1946 in France, at the close of his abortive negotiations: “Don't let me leave this way; arm me against those who seek to surpass me.” (In Vietnam, Ho's colleagues and rivals were bitterly criticizing his concessions in negotiations that he had made in the interests of avoiding a settlement by war.) “You will not regret it .... If we must fight, we will fight. You will kill ten of our men, but we will kill one of yours. And in the end it is you that will tire.”
p.253
Ironically, as Vu Van Thai pointed out to me at RAND, it was just at this time that the French effort at reconquest had become, in Thai's term, “Sisyphen.”
When Communist forces reached the border of Vietnam in late 1949, the border became open to Chinese communist aid to the Viet minh independence movement.
As Thai put it, “From that time on it became impossible for the French to defeat the Vietminh forces.”
The French had become disheartened (realistic) about their prospects about the same time and wanted out.
•─‘’“”
p.253
But at the same time,
it became politically “impossible” for a u.s. administration to allow the French to be defeated or to withdraw (since the united states was not anxious to send its own troops).
p.276
read the Pentagon papers.
p.347
I said that I thought strongly that he should, at least to read the summaries, which were only a few single-spaced pages at the start of each volume. He could have an assistant read the texts and pick out passages that seemed especially pertinent. But the summaries alone added up to about sixty pages. “They make a very readable story. You really should make the effort.”
“But do we really have anything to learn from this study?”
p.284
(That was how the French had sounded to us in 1964: “What we couldn't win, you can't win.” But the French had been right!)
p.291
analyses that presented our Vietnam policy not as an aberration or misadventure but as being in line with unacknowledged u.s. objectives and covert activities elsewhere in the third world.
pp.19─20
Pham Van Dong
Then he had said that the prospect for the United States and its friends in South Vietnam was “sans issue”: no way out, a dead end. Now, in the aftermath of the American raids, he said that the United States had found “it is necessary to carry the war to the North in order to find a way out of the impassed ... in the south.”
He had gotten the message. (It remained a secret from the American electorate, and from Congress, for the next 8 months.) A wider war on the way.
p.193
I soon got a crucial commentary on this Kennedy paradox, as I thought of it, from his brother.
pp.193─196
I was glad to have the chance to tell him what I had seen and what I thought should be done, but I also wanted to ask him about the period I was investigating for the McNamara study, the Kennedy decision making in 1961.
I told him briefly why I had picked that year to study and how I was now more puzzled than ever by the combination of decisions I found the president had made. In rejecting ground troops and a formal commitment to victory, he had been rejecting the urgent advice of every one of his top military and civilian officials. With hindsight, that didn't look foolish; it was the advice that looked bad. Yet he did proceed to deepen our involvement, in the face of a total consensus among his advisers that without the measures he was rejecting, in fact without adopting them immediately, our effort were bound to fail.
I told Bobby it was hard to make sense out of that combination of decisions. Did he remember how it came out that way? I felt uneasy about describing the problem that way to the president's brother, but I knew it might be my only opportunity ever to get an answer, and his manner with me encouraged me to take the chance.
He thought about what I'd put to him for a moment and then said, “We didn't want to lose in Vietnam or get out. We wanted to win if we could. But my brother was determined nver to send ground combat units to Vietnam.” His brother was convinced, Bobby said, that if he did that, we'd be in the same spot as the French. The Vietnamese on our side would leave the fighting to the United States, and it would become our war against nationalism and self-determination, whites against Asians. That was a fight we couldn't win, any more than the French.
pp.195─196
But what wasn't clear to me was how Kennedy could have been so prescient in 1961, or where he would have gotten such a strong personal commitment, as to draw an absolute line against American ground combat in Vietnam. Bobby had not said that his brother had already decided in 1961 to withdraw from Vietnam; he had simply told me that JFK preferred and intended to do that rather than to send ground troops, if it came to the point where those seemed the only two alternatives to imminent military defeat. I hadn't heard any American ── among those reluctant to get out of Vietnam, for cold war reasons ── advancing that precise point of view before 1964 (though some, notably George Ball, didn't want to send even advisers). Obviously none of Kennedy's most senior advisers shared it. I also hadn't thought of JFK as having idiosyncratic opinions, let alone a conviction like that, about Indochina. I asked, a little impudently, “What made him so smart?”
Whap! His hand slapped down on the desk. I jumped in my chair. “Because we were there!” He slammed the desktop again. His face contorted in anger and pain. “We were there, in 1951. We saw what was happening to the French. We saw it. My brother was determined, determined, never to let that happen to us.”
pp.196─197
<start of block quote>
Kennedy told Taylor about his own experiences in Vietnam, which he had visited for a day in 1951 as a young congressman on an around-the-world tour. He had begun that day in Saigon with the commander of the 250,000 French troops fighting Viet Minh guerrillas. General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny had assured him that his soldiers could not lose to these natives. He had ended the evening on top of the Caravelle Hotel with a young American consular officer named Edmund Gullion. The sky around the city flashed with the usual nighttime artillery and mortar bombardment by the Viet Minh.
“What have you learned here?” Kennedy asked the diplomat.
“That in 20 years there will be no more colonies”, Gullion had said. “We're going nowhere out here. The French have lost. If we come in here and do the same thing we will lose, too, for the same reason. There's no will or support for this kind of war back in Paris. THe home front is lost. The same thing would happen us.”
<end of block quote>
Ask the right person the right question, and you could get the picture pretty fast.
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers, 2002
p.134
Along the road was an unusual succession of abandoned the fortifications, of varying constructions, that dated from different periods successively further back in time. There were recent Popular Force outposts. WE had supplied the wages for the local militia that had built them and the cement, if there was any. But basically these were mud forts, very primitive little outposts along the road supposedly to protect local hamlets. They had been recently abandoned because of the regional nonviolent uprising against the Saigon regime, which had been paying the troops out of the U.S. aid. Posts like these I'd seen all over Vietnam.
But next to one of them was a pill box of another kind, better constructed and made out of concrete, a cylindrical box with narrow portholes. The interpreter driving with me, a young Vietnamese lieutenant, explained that this had been built by the French. I recognized that it looked like one of the smaller pillboxes I had seen in pictures of the French Maginot Line at the outset of the German invasion of France. We drove by several of those. Most were from the 1946─54 war by France to regain its colony, during which it had run a pacification program very similar to ours. But some of them, the lieutenant pointed out, went back much earlier, to the twenties and thirties (when the Maginot Line had been built) and even much earlier in the French pacification of Vietnam.
In the midsts of these, along the road, were some pillboxes of a distinctly different sort, also concrete but rounded, like ovens. I recognized those from pictures of the Pacific island fighting by the marines in World war II. They were Japanese, built when the Japanese had pacified the area of what was now I Corps in their occupation of Vietnam during the war. Finally, we came to a massive knoll, overgrown with grass and studded with very old stones. I was told it was an ancient Chinese fort, constructed when the Chinese had pacified Vietnam, starting with what was now I Corps, over a period of a thousand years. When the interpreter told me that, I was reminded of that Tran Ngoc Chau had once said to me: “You must understand that we are a people who think of ourselves as having defeated the Chinese though it took us a thousand years.”
(Secrets : a memoir of vietnam and the pentagon papers / daniel ellsberg., 1. vietnamese conflict, 1961─1975──unitd states., 2. pentagon papers., 3. ellsberg, daniel., DS558 .E44 2002, 959.704'3373──dc21, 2002, )
____________________________________
