Wholeness & Complexity
Basic Olicognograph: Wholism Problems
Normative Policies always ambitioned and anyhow Risk
The challenge is to try to convince readers - used to be told what they have to do and think - that essential concepts of economics have "intuitivelly rational reason" so that they should not be followed blindly. Of course media have diffused plenty of definitions of basic concepts and every "politiced anima" or common citizens, and their common sense can manage basic economics without having been trained, in many different ways, not so bad so that their budget with some difficulties that should not be confused by biased global concepts of interpreted economics. If common citizen could have been taught critical thinking with common sense of logic and mathematics, some management of complexities would help to give pratical applications to common economics tools, could avoid the discomfort of most formulations and genuine local cultures would have maintained better.
But common citizens are confused by bureaucracies of paradigmes and sometimes technocrats of economics, more concerned by advocating for themselves and their church, rather than having understood that economics wisdom is not reserved to specialists and that kinds of philosophy or arts of ideas may not blurred life's registers of knowledge and thinking. It is important to not miss that art of economics should not be a purified formalism pretending to be a science as actually exposed, but an artifice for coping with physical qualities and amounts, biological and ecologicals issues and balances with humane views; so dispose values and criteria to give postive sense to humans' teleonomic visions.
Observing how confusing can be plenty of simple economic jargon, fakelly managed by experts as well non experts and almost preventing socially consistent engineering issues; when not avoiding humanist allowances: such "useless" constraints; rather than expressing the forms and patterns of physics' information on which could be anchored reliable views (landscapes) of values framing energetics and matter relative maps, their potential so then have a proper communication, select values and allowing good decisions. This to provide a perspective of opportune engineering and care of needs for social or ecological issues, potential gains, managing costs of wise value.
You will have to wait that some computed assisted help with "enhanced reality glasses". Practically if social perspective is driven intellectually only by individualist purposes, it shares many characteristics with madness, lack of pragmatic, compulsions or obsession. So perhaps, individually, you will not suffer such pathologies, contrary to your society shom will inadvertently do so, especially if you pretend to lead it only since your intellectual "sulcii". Unlike social scientists, as circling dancing dervishes are generally harmless, at human scale, goals are used to reveal positive social attitudes, practical care of fundamental issues or criteria to drive them in good pathways. Meanwhile fundamentales issues also need attitude, expression of creativity, sort of partial madness called creativity for good social dynamics.
The reverse, normative policies pose also problems when pretending to exact determinism. Risky whence not ideological absurdy which have cost so much to avoid by socially good people. The aim is not to behave as stereotypically expected by normative paradigma. The norm is good to care when of basic physical science which is not any more as exact as previously imagined (out some universal physical formula). But technologies can also turn sad and socially wrong especially when managed as subjective arts of social government; counterproductive for caring of complex issues: distracting, biaising, mispecifying, forcing mistinterpretations, making phenomenological intelligence socially incorrect.
Wholeness as far as you can but Modestly
Wholesomeness is another reason of the experimental character of this website. Unperfect perspective, not corrected, delivered without pretending to set the perfection in contains and forms. Speeches can make actions more difficult but it is also a source of solutions, especially when it expresses clearly the agreed social heuristics used to solve complex shared problem. Previously, humans have organized the Art of verb into rhetoretic and dialectic. So social false sciences (or real arts) often turned uselessly redundant and circular on too short selection of parameters and policies. Think about that when you start such processes in a community, for creating social issues but never forget to relate objective actions and, after few but not unique, exploratory cycles, use all kinds of means and derivations to get out of short vicious circles of meetings.
In the aparently popular media sphere, the huge development of ludicrous and communicative virtual games, diffusion of pseudo sciences, or well-reasoned globally distant country reports which are often useless, overdominating modest uses of poor data. To these media, communication between communities and citizens as producers of democracy are much less attractive and this, can have the effect of disconnecting societies from essential needs of society. The media sphere has opened the space for pieces of culture that favor paradoxes, fallacies, rumors, lock-in syndromes or negative gordian knots. Social functions of utility are becoming hard to manage in a humane way and, thanks to that, terrorism, social anomy, and cultural sectarism found their ways into global society, not just surging from traditional societies.
Complexity is a term that increasingly appearing in popular commentaries, to mentione failures of determinist management. But it is not yet clear in people’s minds, despite many concepts are emerging as byproducts of its rhetoric. For example, the precautionary principle, impossibility, algorithms hard to calculate, etc. There are scientific definitions of complexity, like the ones managed in computer programming. In the social sciences, despite many sophisticated definitions, complexity remains a a sort of blackbox stuffed with discarded waste residues and failures; including lacks of comprehension and misunderstandings, more "normal" than smart precautions. Perhaps, if concepts of complexity can have the same fate as many human fashioned terms: after reduction, they are ignored. The wrong belief of determinism being the rejection to consider that most of our humane world can be more formalized, ruled, or constrained but not via linear programs neither with just words away from amounts.
All societies manage some degree of uncertainty. With modern virtual complexities created by anthropization (calling so human settlement, ocupancy and transformations of our environment) and our ability to cope together with complex problems; to fix problems for a while, enough time to sell the product, and betting on the fact it cannot have adverse effects. Those will eventually reveal afterwards, probably after major culprits have taken their benefit and put themselves safe out of the game of rights and duties, up to their employer to assume the responsibilities of their wrongdoings.
Mechanisms of regulation of excess of uncertainty exist, but with globalization it is easy to override them. Globalization can magnify adverse effects. Inconvenients should come only from a few technical problems, but more systemic ones can emerge; affect entire communities in their essential dimensions and where these communities they will hardly be able to manage this whole world complexity induced by distorsions, for example where interfering stupid geopolitics of greed. Now, community has not necessarily clear cuts, a sense of global community should exist too.
Having clear the types of problematic or mathematical representative behaviors like: unexpected, probabilistic, chaotic and understanding on how they are universal and essential, this can, perhaps, prevent illusions. Difficulties created by complexity justify reasonable human distance and density (concentration) of resolution. Somewhere set between good local communities and inputs from scientific providers networks. This needs efficiency in the management of complexities, tolerance and social flexibility; positive solidarity and options to prevent major conflicts in in humane issues. Olicognography has this major purpose: to face complexity with more flexibility, tolerance and concern for social efficiency. It does not pretend to make only science, substitute itself for local “executives,” or impose definitive values.
Simplexity or Manageable Complexity
Conceptual qualified measure of complexity (“criteria,” kind of “operations”), situations (like of the "observer" or “ex post / ex ante”) or some property (“partial,” “commensurable”). Then “range,” kind of “interval,” or “domain of trust.” Key words here are derived from fundamental concepts of measure, we intend to interpret under a perspective of complexity. For example, in “reserve of sensibility,” in some way we imagine that the sensitivity of a given measure to develop can be of nonlinear kind (mathematical “chaos”). Nonlinearity is a typical “surprising” effect of complexity. In the example of “cautionary principle,”. Bear in mind the ecological corresponding term when measuring the experiment to provide wide coverage, so as to include most situations and values. Finally, have the perspective of a “topological nature” of complex phenomena and probable issues of the concept.
What if I cannot ? or : how should I prevent unexpected effects ? The reviewal can be modulated according to purpose. In general, there are complexities you have to cope with; what is more, you have to think that social diversity can help to simplify and find a solution. Help to: 1) Make more explicit the maximum limits of constraints; 2) Promote delegation and trust (but do not trust yourself all the time); 3) Allow more flexibility and autonomy; and 4) Detail reserves and responsibilities, etc.
In mathematics, complex numbers are well defined, do not confuse them all with complexity, our intent is a metaphysics where they play not alone. Complex number sets are a special kind of domain where the numbers are made of two parts: a real and an imaginary. These parts can be realistically and relatively interpreted as different or with opposed virtues or complementary directions. Any 2 parts can be real, like in fundamental physics the concept of matter and antimatter, or, for example, two electric currents in opposition of phase.
"Spongy sciences", incorporating many subjective issues (mixed with applied ones) are driven by the need for discipline holiness. But in facts the high level of formalism, needed by scientific quality, is paved with many unconscious shortcuts, filled also filled with manipulations and financial ambitions. Qualitative speeches on integral development or policies issues of sort often turn often practically empty. They are inflated collections of ethical tautologies only receiving poor respect. Too extented social qualification and detailed quantification help transgressions and arbitrary simplifications. At end, of plenty good analysis and sincere intentions there many causes of corruption. Very sophisticated and determined laws and rules of society, be them Laws of Justice, Economics, Politics, and so on, tend to confuse the simple ethical interpretations of individuals.
Since completeness is, in absolute terms not possible: in relative terms, it will be necessary to find some closure, assessment of limits or cuts (not in a blind way). So, when with a social problem any community should be able to: 1). Dispose and display, 2). Assess the required discipline, 3). Set a minimum of means to solve it, 4). Integrate or adapt to the place with a sense of wholeness or overview, 5) Define economically an multi or interdisciplinary task force, 6) Be able to drive coherence and synthesis (or able to obtain it from its taskforce).
Also, it is not to ignore that there is commonness in disciplines that should eventually be evidence. Today, major changes in disciplines often come from integration of methodological tools and/or from exchanges between disciplines. In any register there is often the fundamental mistakes to integrate for the diversity of common humans and heterogeneity of contexts but; since specialists' point of view, more at ease for trying to convince "benevolent dictator": the Ibn Kaldhun's caliphate's trouble is not just the historical defect of one man; leadership modernity is prone to that. With multidisciplinairty, since the leader of a task force is or was a specialist, biases respect to set of problems of the community are strong and not always liable to communities' will which are let with a lack of many essential trainings. Past and present policies are still automatically applied according programs not designed by beneficiaries, but by experts making both reasons, ends and interpretations of needs.
To suggest an integration of quantitative methods from the beginning of processes, communities have to appropriate with “their results" into phenomenological evidence of scientific management. It is important to provide them with kinds of aids and supports to democratize their uses of formulas, help in them to review systematic panels of indicators and repeat practical applications of formal methods; not focused by the production of numbers, to adapt wisely development of communities. Now, with world wide web, there are no obstacle to the development of virtual communities, allowing stronger peer to peer and frienship drives. But plenty of mobility and flexibility with concepts is constrained by inefficient social organizations and non pertinent interference of globalization. Excess of flexibility makes social confusion, approximations, efficiencies, and weak efficacy of democracy, and many other partial social mechanisms sensible to bias. That is why we need locally more social comprehension, more individual cautiousness, and less techno-bureaucratic arrogance. To observe also that same dimensions can play negatively, promote free negative riders, informal abuses, and so on.
Formal sciences developed tools to study integrative structures. Linguistic structures are mainly grammatical structures, uneasilly socially semantic ones, but source of inspiration to manage olicognography. Mathematics has concepts like structures of domains of definition, integration / derivation, fractal and constructal dimension(s), etc. Close past decades kinds of “strange structures” formally rigorous and looking like complexity have started to be introduced by scientists eventually turned philosophers like Benoit Mandelbrot, René Thom, Ilia Prigogine. Roger Penrose, Alain Connes, Steven Wolfram, Adrian Bejan have more recently provided complementary clues, but still to the disgust of many rationalists of reasons of positivist economy.
Social Values as pathways to good Economics
Quantitative efforts in social sciences are like weather forecasts. Noticeable resources of calculus, are assigned to the construction of huge and very sophisticated models. Global social planetary phenomena are better understood and feed with hypothesis, but of limited utility for societies. Good forecast only last a few days for whole regions, not for places. Global trends are not very practical to humane direct use. Plenty of statistical averages turns meaningless to modest perspectives of management most have. Plenty of common public resources are spent for the benefit of few. Common audience may feel well informed with so many states of the World reports and lots of other international documents of vision, but are they really positive part of their solutions? For them, it will probably be enough to stay the abducted subjects of the design of policies with poor connections to positive solutions. Many studies of such sort: large for narrowness, distort and promote asymmetries of information between people; far away from proper humane solutions and legitimate people, invited to waste their time listening or bearing the social costs of these policies. May be social approaches, could be a bit better, if models were no more than plastic and flexible frames, to vary explanations and effects social commitments. Practically, it could also be better if, at first, “experts”, rather than just waiting and wasting research funds, could survive directly as “formators of scientific knowledge aids and pedagogic tools”, “disposers of stimuli” or “communicators of doubts” not missing to support as citizens' themselve, citizens' commitments, smartly disposingthe “empowerment of sustainability” in all social structures they cover at humanwise distance.
Another democratic management to improve is with the levels of social definition of range of actions for making the disposal of information and its treatment significant where, the legitimate local actors, think relevant the unit of concentration of logic. Informal conversion have also to exist, even for policies purpose, far from aggregated national levels and closer to community own levels. Of course, with the problem of too many levels, too extended and non complete. This does not mean that communities have to turn autarchic, but that partial realistic and consistent dynamics, like technological means, can do better with communities if disposing adapted pieces of innovations or information in enough specified, well distributed qualitative and quantitative margins of absorption of change and innovation of active communities. Not like so often observed as superior, painful and harmfull injections, (dis)ordering programs, disturbing communities with global schemes.
The display and development of olicognographic tools must be conceived as social processes, to conduct with the community, knowledge exchange and inputs. They are means to share practical as well as essential knowledge. Very often, you will discover that popular communities have valuable, qualitative and quantitative information. Many called scientific studies can do no more than repeating what has been already pictured. The problem is more often to find social mechanisms that could integrate the community in social works. Imagine that sessions with the olicognograph can bring in studies already done, identify sources of information, show the processes of recollection and treatment of disasters' information and shape synthesis. One purpose of working together is not to impress modest communities with all the sophisticated techniques that can exist but to show that even with poor “working conditions,” many things can be done properly and also to impress them with the knowledge they already have and can share.
