I'm actively developing and socializing a thought pattern at this moment that directly addresses this called omnidisciplinary thinking (or Thinking OMNI). Omnidisciplinary thinking is a generic, holistic, nonlinear thought pattern that focuses on blending insights between two or more areas which seem unrelated yet actually share a thought pattern structure by focusing on the similarities between them. In essence, instead of trying to learn many things, learn the patterns of information and how to apply those patterns.
We do have the right math. It’s just that no one is using it. The planet is focused on differential and metric invariants (differential algebraic equations and statistics) and should be leveraging topological approaches to analyzing dynamical systems and networks. Almost no one is doing the latter yet there is already enough research to start applying the theory.
The classic is Eugene M. Izhikevich, Dynamical systems in neuroscience: the geometry of excitability and bursting, 1967. A lot more work by Bard Ermentrout. Topological methods are pretty well established in computational neuroscience, but there is still little overlap with the deep neural nets that are now commonplace.
You might have the wrong date. I have an edition of Dynamical Systems in Neuroscience from 2007 and, having met the author, I'd imagine he might have just been born in 1967.
The “shape-shifting” organization. At the moment, organizational dynamics are largely created and maintained by gut feeling, rules of thumb, and inertia. There will be a shift towards flexible organizations that can purposefully change form in response to needs internal and external.
Consider one common pattern. Startup CEO grows successful startup, then the board inevitably replaces said CEO with a more traditional CEO and organization structure. What made the company innovative then slowly goes away as it becomes entrenched in the same paradigm as the established companies the startup had been disrupting. Rinse and repeat.
Why must this evolution be so one-way and so rigidly predictable? Eventually, organizations will be able to flexibly shift to nearly any reasonable state, identifying which resources are needed to initiate such a change as well as when and where to apply them.
Interesting take. However, consider that if one could learn multiple lifetimes of knowledge in one, it might achieve the same result. I’ve been developing a mindset called omnidisciplinary thinking (or “Thinking OMNI”) which encourages us to Engage with the Root of ideas and thought patterns in order to recognize and leverage their interconnectedness. The Root assumptions we make influence heavily how we can express and explore ideas. One can only express in a given language what that language allows. Right now, we have a boundary- and disciplinary-driven engagement with both knowledge and organizational structures which while a valid way to see the world isn’t the only way. The Thinking OMNI thought pattern is being made rigorous as we speak, yet even an intuitive understanding of it can help you today to manage complexity and reduce uncertainty.
Check us out on YouTube—“Omni Artisans”. If one could reduce the amount of effort it takes to accrue knowledge and drive powerful experiences, would one need to live forever per se?
In “Culture’s Consequences”, Hofstede mentions five key aspects of culture based on extensive research.
1. Individualism (IDV)
2. Masculinity (MAS)
3. Power Distance (PDI)
4. Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI)
5. Long-Term Orientation (LTO)
Furthermore, there is a distinction made between values and practices. Practices are comprised of symbols, heroes, and rituals. Whereas values refer to the meaning to people of their practices. People can thus have the same practices (watching same TV shows, dressing similarly, leisure activities) while have drastically different values. Values and practices together define key aspects of the organization.
Values are more important as you move towards national identities whereas practices tend to dominate at the organizational level. Furthermore, values tend to be instilled earlier in life through family and community while practices are learned later in life, for instance, once one enters the workforce itself.
Some factors of practice include professionalism, distance from management, trust in colleagues, orderliness, hostility, and integration. Likewise, some factors in values include personal need for achievement, need for supportive environment, machismo, workaholism, alienation, and authoritarianism.
The main thesis of this comment is that if one understands the factors that go into culture, one can be better equipped to actually probe the organization thoughtfully and develop their own questions in order to do so.
I recommend “How to Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler. In short, not every sentence, paragraph, chapter, or even book is of equal informative importance. To read all literature as if everything is equally important is really a mistake. Once one recognizes this, it is then ideal to read only at the level of detail and focus as is required for the particular work.
What does it mean to have read a book? To read every single word and symbol? To understand the key ideas and points?
Is every book going to be one hundred percent new ideas to you or are there thematic riffs that allow you to shortcut portions of it without loss of understanding of the entire work?
> What does it mean to have read a book? To read every single word and symbol? To understand the key ideas and points?
To understand what the author thought at the time, what he was trying to say, what he had said really, how he came to his ideas, ... One cannot predict what he'll find in a book before book will be finished. You cannot know what you do not know. The only way is to read it through.
Sometimes I read books twice in a row. From the title to the last page. With all the "thanks", with the contents section, even leafing through a section of literature. Because you never know what you might find.
When I need just key ideas from a book I could find them in internet, because someone have them written in her blog. It would take, probably, 10 minutes to read, and why to bother myself with the book?
Agreed. I would not find this kind of life hack approach to reading satisfying. On occasion certainly but I pick up a book explicitly to inhabit it. I don't pick up books I don't wish to become apart of and have become apart of me. The first 200 pages of Moby Dick were phenomenal to me. The book really drops off when the chapters atomize into non-fiction and lose the story. But I was not going to miss one word of what happened to the Pequod or the friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg. It doesn't really pick that story up as I'd like but I wasn't going to risk it. Parts of 'Les Miserables' felt like a slog but it was worth it to truly inhabit the world. I'll probably never read a 1,000+ novel ever again but I wouldn't have read it any other way.
For a reference book sure. They are often best digested out of order.
Confidence also feels a certain way. When you are confident, there is a certain tightness in your chest that you “hang from” in a sense. You should feel confident that you could physically hang from this confidence were it to physically manifest. There’s a stability in stance, a sureness. And when your confidence wavers, this sureness and stability wavers.
While balance is key, there is merit to taking steps to stay in this confident body language as it translates to the confidence you have in your beliefs, actions, and statements. People can and do tune into this. When they are feeling a lack of confidence in whatever you are conveying, you surety can put them at ease. The only other thing for you to do is to make sure you are actually correct in being confident, because we should be confident and correct.
Actually, there are only finite ways to fail. It just happens to be a large number. Thinking of interactions of the world as propagations of signals and considering Kolmogorov-style descriptions of entropy would lead one to this conclusion of finiteness. See: "Kolmogorov complexity"
Further, there are a finite number of patterns of failure, which is of course less than the number of absolute ways things could fail.
The biggest detriment is not that things can fail, but that people get overwhelmed by believing that such things are infinite in scale.
As an example, there are only 16 categorical manifestations of software exceptions based on the following categories:
- Synchronicity, Scope, Origin
For Synchronicity we have:
- Synchronicity
- Asynchronicity
For Scope we have:
- Process-specific
- Cross-process
For Origin we have:
- Data origin
- Temporal origin
- External origin
- Process origin
Then you combine them such as "Synchronous-CrossProcess-Temporal Origin." The total is 16 ways. Even if something were somehow to be missing from this categorization scheme, it would only add a finite amount of possibilities to the permutations. Yet this taxonomy seems quite complete as is.
See: “Error Handling in Process Support Systems” by Casati & Cugola.
Desired Position: Chief of Staff (or similar executive role)
Location: USA
Remote: Yes
Willing to Relocate: No
Applied Philosophies: Organizational Psychology, Behavioral Psychology, Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Art & Expression, B2B Consulting, Category Theory
~~~~~
About: I have developed a novel thought pattern called omni-disciplinary thinking (“Think OMNI”) which helps companies and individuals better engage with complexity by blending philosophies in order to lower the energy/effort required to deal with them.
Results in:
- risk mitigation
- innovation in saturated, complex markets
- identification/integration of holistic talent
- pooled insights between industries, disciplines, and domains
- "Think inside of _all_ the boxes"
This Think OMNI thought pattern is exactly what modern companies need to drive their organizations forward in our complex and interconnected world. I would like to help you steer your organization with powerful and internalized insights.
To answer this question, one must first operantly define what mastery is. So what is mastery? To start, mastery is something on which one can be on the path towards, yet mastery is also a thing which has been achieved. So we need to talk about flow along a path and achievement of the objective.
PATH
The path to mastery is characterized by humility and child-like exploration combined with an intrinsic drive to integrate learning a and take paths that make individual sense to one on the apprentice’s path towards mastery. It is concerned with thoughtful action and adaptation. The ultimate focus is on the seeking of truth (an intrinsic reward) rather than and sometimes at the detriment to receiving external rewards (accolades, financial renumeration, and other materialistic artifacts). Such sacrifices and focus is made early in the mastery process and pay off once one inevitably achieves it. This is a pattern common in most individuals we would consider to be masters and the difficulty lies in staying on such a path despite internalized intuitions and the listening to an internal voice/drive pulling us away from society, the majority of who are not on the path at any given time. Mastery is high risk because it a deviant process often focusing on long term rewards rather than instant gratification or even short-term survival.
ACHIEVEMENT OF
What can a master do? Why is that beneficial?
Mastery is the seamless ability to fuse the intuitive with the rational while performing and understanding at a high level of competency in a given discipline or domain. It manifests as as such a deep internalization of a domain that one is able to spend cognitive effort on seamless cross-pollination between other disciplines, sculpting domains at will. Mastery is only achieved through embracing the humane, which means internalizing the fact that what makes us human is the blending of the rational (a step-by-step-step process) with the intuitive (a distributed and probabilistic process).
MASTERY IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
What is engineering? What is software? What commonalities do they share?
Given a definition of mastery, we see that the question of what engineering and software are next to be defined. These three questions should serve to form a foundation for discussion.
Engineering is the process of designing reliable processes and systems given constraints on resources, tools, and available thought patterns. It is also fundamentally concerned with risk management on the path to achieving an objective.
Software is a system which interfaces with either humans, machines, or both to achieve an objective. It serves as a medium for sending conceptual communicative signals across, within, and between various levels of abstraction to include physical computing done at the level of hardware.
As an aside, it must be stated that the delineation we place between software and hardware is an arbitrary though sometimes useful fiction to allow us to get tasks done. With this being stated, such a simplification is often over-used to our collective detriment.
The master software engineer understands hardware and software deeply at both the intuitiveness rational levels in order to design systems and process to specifications and with clarity to both machines and humans alike. This ability to provide and communicate with clarity is especially important when we consider that our colloquial models of machines themselves are over-simplified, a fact that one will quickly become aware of when trying to design applications across platforms that perform “low level” file system operations. In this case, it becomes apparent that even operations such as opening and closing files, tasks which one would think are stable and solved problems, have such variability that cross-platform development is more challenging than it should seem.
Not only does a master software engineer have the ability to communicate at different levels of abstraction of hardware and software—such a master also recognizes that communication is the operant word. Communication is signal propagation, filtering, and more, occurring at the personal, interpersonal, and organizational level as well. The master software engineer is seamlessly able to apply all principles of software development to psychological phenomena as well. To such an individual, there is no difference conceptually from a root pattern perspective.
