Time complexity & Understanding time complexity with Python examples
Citeology: Visualizing Paper Genealogy - by Autodesk Research (2012)
Earth’s magnetic field fluctuations explained by new data - Research by Vincent J. Hare, John A. Tarduno, Thomas Huffman et.al (Uni of Rochester, 2018)
Weakening magnetic field is a recurrent anomaly. The new data provides more evidence that a region in southern Africa may play a unique role in magnetic pole reversals.
Related: Mysterious Anomaly Under Africa Is Weakening Earth's Magnetic Field (2018)
The wonders of a magnetic river - captured in this 1975 presentation by Eric Laithwaite (1921-1997), Professor of Heavy Electrical Engineering at Imperial College London.
Related: Presentation by Eric Laithwaitere. Related: Magnetic levitation (wikipedia).
A brief history of liquid computers - by Andrew Adamatzky (2019)
The dry history of liquid computers - by Andrew Adamatzky (2018)
"Dynamics Patterns in Water as Analogue Models" - talk by Rupert Sheldrake (2019)
Related: "Determinants of Faraday Wave-Patterns in Water Samples Oscillated Vertically at a Range of Frequencies from 50-200 Hz" - by Merlin Sheldrake & Rupert Sheldrake
"The figure of the dragon appeared within the modern boundaries of China at least 6,000 years ago. In 1987, at Xishuipo Cemetary Ruins in Puyang County, Henan Province, figures of a dragon and a tiger were unearthed in a tomb. Both of them were made from numerous shells. The dragon measured 1.78 meters (nearly 6 feet) in length and 0.67 (2.2 feet) in height. Dating back to over 6,400 years, it is presently the earliest image of a dragon uncovered in Chinese archeology. "
Found via "Dragons as Water Spirits" > found via "Dragon & Tiger - The Hun & Po Souls in Theory & Practice". #History #Science #Religion #Magic #Culture #China
"Education with inert ideas is not only useless: it is, above all things, harmful." - A.N.Whitehead on what he called "inert ideas" - ideas that are disconnected scraps of information, with no application to real life or culture.
"For Whitehead, education should be the exact opposite of the multidisciplinary, value-free school model – it should be transdisciplinary, and laden with values and general principles that provide students with a bedrock of wisdom and help them to make connections between areas of knowledge that are usually regarded as separate." (wikipedia)
"Imagination is not to be divorced from the facts: it is a way of illuminating the facts. It works by eliciting the general principles which apply to the facts, as they exist, and then by an intellectual survey of alternative possibilities which are consistent with those principles. It enables men to construct an intellectual vision of a new world." - A.N.Whitehead
The following quotes on "knowledge" are fascinating:
“The really profound changes in human life all have their ultimate origin in knowledge pursued for its own sake” - A.N.Whitehead
"Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them" - A.N.Whitehead
The Yijing, Whitehead, and Time Philosophy - by Yih-hsien Yu (PDF)
Whitehead and the Book of Changes - by Shih-chuan Chen, disciple of Thomé H. Fang
Time as Emotion VS Time as Moralization: Whitehead and the Yijing - by Linyu gu (PDF)
Process and Reality - by Alfred North Whitehead (PDF)
Organic Realism and Process philosophy (wikipedia)
Quantifying the World and Its Webs: Mathematical Discrete vs Continua in Knowledge Construction (PDF) - by Giuseppe Longo (2019) (Short video of Longo about his paper)
A Mathematical Critique of Computational Thinking in the Sciences of Nature - talk by Giuseppe Longo (1h, 2017)
Alphabets, Axioms, DNA: On Human Knowledge and the Myth of Alphanumeric Coding - talk by Giuseppe Longo (30min, 2019)
Prof. Dr. Günter von Kiedrowski - on "Chemical Self-replicating systems: Facts, goals, and visions" (7th European Conference on Artificial Life, 2003)
"Why replication at all? In the natural context, replication has the same meaning as integration in electronics. I mean, if you are able to do integrate electronic circuitry, you can establish Moore's Law and in chemistry this kind of replication was not addresses so far. But if it is possible to replicate objects, then it is possible to make things cheaper, to pay for complexity. - Prof. Dr. Günter von Kiedrowski
Related:
The "A Bifurcation called 2016" video by Mihai Nadin provoked a #Comment on time:
Mihai Nadin's entertaining 'bifurcation' model/theory is somewhat related to Terence McKenna's "Timewave Zero". I find it peculiar, that in all such "models of accelerating time/change" the critical singularity event is predicted to happen ("accidentally / conveniently") presciently during the life-time (or end of life, akin to the christian "armageddon") of the person stating the theory. Temporarily is the ultimate magic trick: As scientifically/objectively hardly approachable, it firmly is in the domain of the political, subjective and comedic. Paul Virilio's essay "Speed And Politics" on "Dromology" is an interesting read in this context. Within infinity, the distance from contemporary complex "Theories of Change" to ancient "Book of Changes" (I Ching) , is the same as the square root of negative one: Imaginary.
Terence McKenna - Timewave Zero:
A far more pronounced example of the "acceleration fallacy" (almost bordering on the brute-force senseless & pointless speed-cult of Ray Kurzweil & co.) can be found in the following talk:
"Sense-Making in our Post AlphaGo World" - by John Seely Brown
Directional/Qualitative/Evolutionary views on temporarily are very wide spread. See the following on A.E.Whitehead's views:
"He then observes that the mark of higher forms of life is that they are actively engaged in modifying their environment, an activity which he theorizes is directed toward the three-fold goal of living, living well, and living better. In other words, Whitehead sees life as directed toward the purpose of increasing its own satisfaction. Without such a goal, he sees the rise of life as totally unintelligible.
"
The root of such "models of accelerating/progressing time/change" is essentially the illusive notion of the Afterlife (in Christianity, Islam, etc.), Enlightenment (in Buddhism, etc.) or more generally "the other" which "we are racing towards". It is truly peculiar, how this narrative tempted and confused thinkers across all ages, right up to the present day (the cult of optimization and objective functions in artificial intelligence, etc.). Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question" short story eloquently explores the nonsensical nature of of such narratives.
Interesting alternative perspective on temporarily ("non-directional", "static", etc.) can be found in Japanese Shintoism or Soto Zen, where practitioners do not actively seek Enlightenment, but rather seek to fully experience every moment; that is, to be acutely aware of every action in the here and now. As Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru once said, "Zazen has no object, it is purposeless, it only brings us back to ourselves." One doesn't need to worry about Satori. Or in other words: Stop trying to understand. There is nothing to compute. There is nothing to discover. This is it, here and now.
Finally, consider the following quote for a perhaps more relaxed and fun perspective on temporarily:
“In conclusion, there is no conclusion. Things will go on as they always have, getting weirder all the time.” ― Robert Anton Wilson
Context Matters. Illustration by Christophe Vorlet.
or "What is `creativity’ – and How Does It Work?":
and much more general fun weirdness to explore..
And he has a youtube channel:
Cultivating an appreciation for the deeply paradoxical nature of reality is healthy: In the west, paradoxes are still seen as side-effects or bugs, in an otherwise perfectly computable universe (even we know the universe is uncomputable, because any computation to emulate it won’t halt until the universe ends). Yet the list of paradoxes keeps growing. Chasing the white rabbit in infinity, is a recipe for madness.
Related: Post on this blog 2y ago & More Paradoxes - #Science #Philosophy #Mindful #Ideas
"iSquares bring information science into the Visual Information Age and create a richer multimedia genealogy for a beloved central concept. The study explores: 1) How do people visualize the concept of information?, 2) How do visual conceptions of information differ among various populations?, and 3) How do these images relate to conceptions of information made of words?"
Mihai Nadin is a scholar and researcher in electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, semiotics, human-computer interaction (HCI), computational design, post-industrial society, and anticipatory systems. His publications on these topics number over 200, and he has lectured throughout the world. Currently Mihai Nadin is a professor at the University of Texas at Dallas. He is director of the Institute for Research in Anticipatory Systems.
His website: https://www.nadin.ws/
His research: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mihai_Nadin
Research Paper: "Semiotics is Fundamental Science" - by Mihai Nadin (2013) (PDF)
Abstract: There is no way to acquire, store, and disseminate knowledge other than semiotically. Yet semiotics is hardly acknowledged in science, and not at all as science. Were it not for the fame of a few writers (Barthes, Derrida, and especially Eco), associated more with the semiotics of culture, few would even know that such a knowledge domain exists. In the age of computers, genetics, and networks—all of underlying semiotic condition—semiotics would at best qualify as pertinent to an obscure past, but insignificant for current endeavors. Gnoseologically, there is little to gain from acknowledging the shortcomings of semiotics. Epistemologically, quite a bit is at stake in grounding semiotics among the fundamental sciences. For this to come about, new interrogations become necessary: Why knowledge? What is knowledge? What kind of knowledge? How is knowledge acquired? One way or another, the answer will acknowledge semiotic processes as a necessary factor. The perspective advanced in this chapter relies on an understanding of the living, and, in particular, of the human being, that ascertains anticipation as definitory. The future is made part of the present via semiotic processes. This is significant because in the age of neurons, suggestive of brain activity and of attempts to emulate it, to distinguish between knowledge supporting human activity, embodied in new technologies, and knowledge essential to the unfolding of the living becomes very difficult
Quotes from the paper:
"Semiotics is the awareness of change captured in representations. In terms of its meaning, it is the actions it informs."
"Nietzsche (cf. Colli & Montinari, 1975, p. 3) observed that “Our writing tools are also working, forming our thoughts.” As we program the world, we reprogram ourselve. [...] Associated with meaning, data becomes information."
"Semiotic awareness, which instantiates metacognition (knowing what we know) is nothing other than the realization that acting upon representations enhances the outcome of human activity."
"The human being “reads” nature as a “language” expression, and, in the process of knowing, generates new representations. Let us recall Lewis Mumford’s observations: No computer can make a new symbol out of its own resources,” (1967, p. 29)"
"From the perspective of knowledge, the following needs to be stated: If we could aggregate all representations we would still not capture the reality in its infinite level of detail; nor could we capture dynamics in its openendedness (not to say without affecting it). The living unfolds beyond our epistemological boundaries. We are part of it. Our change is part of a broader change, which, again, influences our own. The sequence is infinite. Therefore every representation contains the observed and the observer. If the representation is only a sign, dynamics is left out."
“The human brain has not changed at the anatomical level, but now it works differently,” (Togo & Cantelmi, 2012).
Expressed differently, semiotics is relevant for “engineering” interactions: recipes are the “shorthand” of cooking. They carry explicit instructions and implicit rules, that is, assumptions of shared experiences. Semiotics embodies the sharing, but does not substitute for the experience. The informational level corresponds to “fueling” the process, providing the energy. [...] Semiotics encodes in generating representations, and decodes in interpreting representations.
In this respect, law is a repetitive pattern. Physical phenomena are acceptably described in mathematical descriptions called laws. This is what Windelband (1894) defined as the nomothetic (derived from nomothé in Plato’s Cratylus, 360 BCE). The same cannot be said of living interactions, even if we acknowledge repetitive patterns. No living entity is identical with another. The living is infinitely diverse. Therefore, semiotics could qualify as the attempt to acknowledge diversity unfolding over time as the background for meaning, not for scientific truth. This is what Windelband defined as the idiographic. [...] Semiotic knowledge is about meaning as process.
Signs are “alive,” interacting with each other, self-reproducing as the context requires. Consequently, one might be inclined to see interaction processes mirrored into sign processes—or what Peirce called semiosis. But interactions are more than sign processes. Better yet: sign processes describe only the meaning of interactions, but not the energy processes under girding them.
When vitalism, as the doctrine of the élan vital (which some equate with the soul) was debunked, the questions of causality associated with the realization that the biosphere is not reducible to the physical were simply brushed aside. Over time, every scientist claiming that the living and non-living have a different dynamics was eliminated from the list of potential Nobel Prize nominees (and avoided). In recent years, this has started to change
Focusing on signs caused semiotics to miss its broader claim to legitimacy: to provide not only descriptions of the meaning of interactions, but also knowledge regarding the meaning of the outcome of interactions, the future.
As information theory—based on the en-compassing view that all there is, is subject to energy change—emerged (Shannon & Weaver, 1949), it took away from semiotics even the appearance of legitimacy. [...] But there is also a plus side to what Shannon suggested: Information theory made it so much more clear than any speculative approach that semiotics should focus on meaning and significance rather than on truth.
Parallel to this recognition is the need to assess meaning in such a manner that it becomes relevant to human activity. So far, methods have been developed for the experimental sciences: those based on proof, i.e., the expectation of confirmation and generalization. But there is nothing similar in respect to meaning, not even the realization that generalization is not possible; or that semiotic knowledge is not subject to proof, rather to an inquiry of its singularity. The nomothetic comprises positivism; the idiographic is the foundation of the constructivist understanding of the world (cf. Piaget, 1955; von Foerster, 1981).
Given the epistemological condition of mathematics, new evidence is not in the jargon of mathematics. A new mathematical concept or theorem is evidence. Probably more than science, mathematics is art. It is idiographic, not nomothetic knowledge. As we know from Turing and Gödel, it cannot be derived through machine operations (Hilbert’s challenge). If there is a cause for mathematics, it is the never-ending questioning of the world appropriated by the mind at the most concrete level: its representation. The outcome is abstraction. This is what informed Hausdorff (alias Paul Mongré) as he described human nature. There is, of course, right and wrong in mathematics, as there is right and wrong in art. But neither a Beethoven symphony nor Fermat’s conjecture (proven or not) is meant as a hypothesis to be experimentally confirmed. Each has an identity, i.e., a semiotic condition. Each establishes its own reality, and allows for further elaborations. Not to have heard Beethoven’s symphonies or not to have understood Fermat’s law does not cause bridges to collapse, or airplanes to miss their destinations.
Semiotics is not a discipline of proofs: The ambiguity of disease is reflected in the ambiguity of representations associated with disease. Better doctors are still “artists,” which is not the case with software programs that analyze test results. Diagnosis is semiotics, i.e., representation and interpretation of symptoms. They are both art and science. Machine diagnosis is information processing at work. Human diagnosis is the unity of information and meaning.
The goal is to make the reader aware of why even the most enthusiastic semioticians end up questioning the legitimacy of their pursuit.
15. INSIGNIFICANCE IS THE RESULT OF FAILED PRAGMATICS.
There are no evaluation criteria to help distinguish the “wheat” from the “chaff.” In the democratic model of science (semiotics and other fields), “Anything goes.” [...] What strikes the possible reader is the feeling that semiotics deals more with its own questions than with questions relevant to science, philosophy, or to today’s world.
Take only the still not concluded attempts to prove Fermat’s Theorem (most recently Colin McClarty, 2013). Fundamentally, the approach extends deep into the notion of representation. The very elaborate mathematical apparatus, at a level of abstraction that mathematics never reached before, makes the whole enterprise semiotically very relevant.[...] A question that begs the attention of semioticians is, “How far from the initial mathematical statement (Fermat’s Theorem) can the proof take place?” That is, how far can the representation of representation of representation, and so on extend the semiotic process before it becomes incoherent or incomprehensible?
Never before has language—in its general sense, not only as the language we speak—been as central to research as it is today. [...] Natural language is the most ubiquitous medium of interaction. It is involved in knowledge acquisition, in its expression, communication, and validation. Semiotics, if founded not around the sign concept—quite counter-intuitive when it comes to language (Where is the sign: the alphabet, the word, the sentence?)—but with the understanding of the interactions languages make possible, would contribute more than descriptions, usually of no consequence to anyone, and post facto explanations.
The subject ought to be understood as broadly as possible. This means that within the realm of the living, there is a whole gamut—from the mono-cell to homo faber—of representations to consider. Is there anything that qualifies as semiotically relevant across the various forms of the living? As already stated in the preliminaries, interaction is probably the most obvious aspect. At a closer look, the making of the living consists of integrated interactions—from the level of the cell to that of organisms. At all these levels, representations are exchanged. Therefore, semiotic processes appear as a characteristic of the whole (organism), but also as one among organisms (same or different).
Success and failure depend decisively more upon interpretation than upon the amount of data. An infinite amount of data cannot compensate for an error in interpretation. Machines are, by many orders of magnitude, better in processing information, but not really better than humans in interpreting it. They can handle way more data than the people who build them; but quantity does not automatically lead to improved comprehension. In a changing context, interpretation becomes consubstantial with dynamics. Machines do not change; humans (the living) change.
No information process (e.g., computer, sensor-based information harvesting, intelligent agents-based activities) is possible without representation. Representation is the definitory subject of semiotics. While electrons move through circuits, and while logic is emulated in hardware (circuits performing logical operations), operations on representations are the prerequisite for any information processing.
Brain imaging revealed that taxi drivers in some of the big cities (London was the first address researched), difficult to navigate, developed in the process measurable new faculties Indeed, the plasticity of the brains of those who navigate under the influence of GPS data changes (not always for the better). Of course, these changes are semiotic in nature: Understanding of representations and the ability to match goals and means (a request such as “Get me to Piccadilly in the shortest time,” involves quite a number of parameters) are semiotic processes. The emergence of GPS-based navigation might lead to the loss of some faculties. Semioticians should be aware of the fact that the world before maps and the world after maps became available are very different realities.
Indian Buddhism and Brahman-ism, the Christian infatuation with signs (St. Augustine’s De Doctrina Cristiana, 397 CE, and St. Anselm’s Monologion, 1075-1076; see Hopkins, 1986), and Avicenna’s explorations in medicine and theology remain documentary repositories of the many questions posed by two very simple questions: How can something in the world be “duplicated” in the mind? Take note: the question is not about signs, but about re-presentation.
Edward O. Wilson (1984) came up with a provocative statement of significance to semiotics: “Scientists do not discover in order to know, they know in order to discover.”
22. TAROT CARD READING IS NOT (YET) AN ACADEMIC DISCIPLINE. But it might become one. [...] Semiotics became the stage for literary critics, art historians, confused structuralists, and even for some linguists, mathematicians, and sociologists. Some philosophers also ventured on the stage. Before too late, we had the semiotics of feminism, multiculturalism, human rights, sexuality, food, and even the semiotics of wine; we had gay and lesbian semiotics, environmental semiotics, and even global warming or sustainability semiotics. But no semiotics!
23. THERE IS MORE TO INTERACTION THAN LANGUAGE
Preoccupation with what is called natural language affected the focus on the sign. It informed the reading of past attempts in semiotics in such a manner that what actually lies behind the sign is cast aside, never really recognized. All this rendered the notion of sign captive to an ideology that dominated semiotics from its beginnings. Simply stated, this ideology is logocratic. That is, it ascertains that every sign can be reduced to a language sign; moreover, that any interaction is language dependent.
If, finally, semiotics could in our days free itself from the obsession with sign-based language as object of its inquiry, it could help debunk quite a number of dogmatic positions.
The broad agreement that knowledge is expressed more and more in computational form could translate into a well-defined goal: express semiotic knowledge computationally. As such, the goal deserves attention because even though deterministic machines are inadequate for capturing nondeterministic processes, we can work towards conceiving new forms of processing that either mimic the living or even integrate the living (hybrid computation).
Computational semiotics (making reference to Dmitri Pospelov and Eugene Pendergraft, to James Albus, to “language games” behind which Wittgenstein is suspected, to Luis Rocha and Cliff Joslyn, and even to Leonid Perlovsky and his intelligent target tracker) is more than looking for justification for AI research, or for some computer-based terminology associated with signs. It would be encouraging to engage those interested in foundational aspects of semiotics in a computational effort. One possible result could be a semiotic engine conceived as a procedure for generating representations and for supporting interpretation processes. [...] However, if machine-generated representations were to trigger the claim of replacing the living processes leading to comprehensive dynamic representations of a changing world, we would face a real danger. In representing something, the living simultaneously re-presents itself. This contributes to the knowledge the outlook and the sense of future derived through human representations. Each representation, after all, embodies anticipation. Machines, regardless of their level of sophistication, do not anticipate.
24. IS THERE A SEMIOTIC METHOD? [...] This is an opportunity, as good as any, to spell out the alternative to the semiotics focused on the sign. I suggest that, instead of the atomistic view of a sign obsessed with semiotics, we adopt a dynamic view, of events succeeding in time. The notion that each event—such as perceiving an image, hear-ing a sound, experiencing a texture, etc.—is “made up” of signs is less important than the determination to integrate successive experi-ences. Narration is a historic record: event1, event2, event3. .
In this view, the series is made up of suc-ceeding signs. While each event is relevant, the focus is on the integrated series, more precisely, on its meaning. But more on a narration-based semiotics in the concluding part of this study.
27. NARRATION AND STORY: The most intuitive description of the narra-tive is the following: the record of a sequence of events as they succeed in time. The word (from the Latin narrare) means to recount. It suggests that a record of succeeding events in time, a time series, describes what individuals or groups accomplish and how. Therefore, each narrative adds up to knowledge, at least in the sense of documenting successful and less successful activities.
With the exception of Windelband (1915), almost no one has tried to define the distinction between narrative knowledge, corresponding to a historic record of change (idiographic), and scientific knowledge (nomothetic), cor-responding to our attempts to describe how reality works. The idiographic captures patterns of events; the nomothetic focuses on scientific law. Of course, those who accept the religion of determinism would like to transform the uniqueness of experience captured in the narration into laws, thus opening the avenue towards automating whatever we do.
Thesis 1: Narration is a record of change.
Thesis 2: Story is an open-ended process of interpreting narration.
Thesis 3: Narrations are representations of change.
Thesis 4: Stories are interpretations of the narration of change.
Thesis 5: The clock of narration and the clock of interpretation are different.
28. SEMIOTICS IS ABOUT THE MEANING OF CHANGE
Premise: Complement the cause-and-effect description of physical reality by a description characteristic of living systems. In living systems, the current state is determined not only by past and present, but also by their possible future states. Scientists are discovering more and more the significance of anticipatory characteristics (from the molecular level to the level of complex systems). As scientists try to endow matter and various mechanisms with intelligence, anticipation becomes more important, involving new forms of computation. Anticipation can be seen as a "second Cartesian revolution." (via http://anteinstitute.org)
Why is it a subject of research? Anticipation occurs in all spheres of life. It complements the physics of reaction with the pro-active quality of the living. Nature evolves in a continuous anticipatory fashion targeted at survival. The dynamics of stem cells demonstrate this mechanism. Through entailment from a basic stem cell an infinite variety of biological expression becomes possible.
Sometimes we humans are aware of anticipation, as when we plan. Often, we are not aware of it, as when processes embedded in our body and mind take place before we realize their finality. In tennis, for example, the return of a professional serve can be successful only through anticipatory mechanisms. A conscious reaction takes too long to process. Anticipation is the engine driving the stock market. Creativity in art and design are fired by anticipation. “The end is where we start from,” T. S. Eliot once wrote. Before the archer draws his bow, his mind has already hit the target. Motivation mechanisms in learning, the arts, and all types of research are dominated by the underlying principle that a future state—the result—controls present action, aimed at success. The entire subject of prevention entails anticipatory mechanisms. (via http://anticipation.info)
Anticipation and the Aging Car - Interview with Dr. Mihai Nadin'
A Theory of Change - The Acorn and the Stone - talk by Dr. Mihai Nadin (2014)
Related: Anticipation in Artificial Intelligence (wikipedia)
#KM #HCI #Science #Philosophy #Design #Creativity #Art #Architecture
Retrospective Rationality
Excerpt from "Karl Weick Keeps You on Your Toes" - by Jordi Comas: "Karl Weick’s work is an influential example of the open systems approach. In grad school, it was a treat to read The Social Psychology of Organizing (still in print since 1967). Not least because he points out that organizations are never stable. They are always organizing. And because he used cartoons! Like this one.
Weick also built his understanding of organizations from the cognitive, the individual, not from the structure down. What I took from our discussion was that there were two ideas Weick covers that we wanted to describe not in conceptual terms, but in empirical terms. These were retrospective rationality and enacting the environment.
Retrospective rationality is the idea that we act in a myriad of ways and then “make sense” of our actions in cognitive and linguistic terms that attempt to make them rational. This is not because humans are dumb or lazy. We act and then think because the unending flow of activity of the world demands it of us. The ways in which we act are also due to a myriad of past reasons and contingencies. In other words, there are always more reasons we have acted or that may explain are actions than we need.
There is equivocality in the world. We don’t always know why things are. Hence retrospective rationality is about reducing equivocality; reducing the welter of contradicting reasons why we may have acted or that may explain why the world of human affairs is as it is. To be adaptive to this environment, to be open, requires tolerating some messiness, some disorder. For example, in SPofO, he writes:
…the inability of organizations to tolerate equivocal processing may well be the the most important reason they have trouble. It is the unwillingness to meet equivocality in an equivocal manner that produces failure, nonadaptation, autism, isolation form reality, psychological cost, etc. It is the unwillingness to disrupt order, ironically, that makes it impossible for the organization to create order (41).
But what about examples? In his 1995 book, Sensemaking in Organizations, Weick offers tow research-based examples (29-30). One involves asking film executives about the future of the film industry after they look at financial reports for the preceding three years. Logical approach, right? As it was reported, the exercise reflected how much variation in understanding there was about what had happened in the past. Hence, any attempt to understand the present and future was beset by equivocality. Something explained past performance? But what? Consumer tastes? Directors’ abilities? Cultural zeitgeist? A second example was a control group psychology experiment (very classic in style) where people were randomly assigned to groups that would be arbitrarily assigned low or high performance status (irrespective of actual results). Those in high performance groups reported that in most areas of group function, guess what, they scored higher than low performing groups."
"Retrospective Rationality" plays an important role in "sense-making":