#(it's almost like humans and politics are more complicated than 2 groups with complete opposite opinions. who knew)

[daz4i]

most annoying politics related thing i see both irl and on tumblr is when ppl hear about protests and actions taken against the government in [insert country with shitty government doing shitty things] and go "wow. i guess there are good people in [country] after all" like damn fr?? who knew! it's almost as if generalizing millions of people due to the actions of a few is dehumanizing and xenophobic 😳

[pamphletstoinspire]

Archbishop Vigano’s  Warns Trump About ‘Great Reset’ Plot

Open Letter To The President Of The United States

DONALD J. TRUMP

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Solemnity of Christ the King

Mr. President,

Allow me to address you at this hour in which the fate of the whole world is being threatened by a global conspiracy against God and humanity. I write to you as an Archbishop, as a Successor of the Apostles, as the former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America. I am writing to you in the midst of the silence of both civil and religious authorities. May you accept these words of mine as the “voice of one crying out in the desert” (Jn 1:23).

As I said when I wrote my letter to you in June, this historical moment sees the forces of Evil aligned in a battle without quarter against the forces of Good; forces of Evil that appear powerful and organized as they oppose the children of Light, who are disoriented and disorganized, abandoned by their temporal and spiritual leaders.

Daily we sense the attacks multiplying of those who want to destroy the very basis of society: the natural family, respect for human life, love of country, freedom of education and business. We see heads of nations and religious leaders pandering to this suicide of Western culture and its Christian soul, while the fundamental rights of citizens and believers are denied in the name of a health emergency that is revealing itself more and more fully as instrumental to the establishment of an inhuman faceless tyranny.

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

Mr. President, I imagine that you are already aware that in some countries the Great Reset will be activated between the end of this year and the first trimester of 2021. For this purpose, further lockdowns are planned, which will be officially justified by a supposed second and third wave of the pandemic. You are well aware of the means that have been deployed to sow panic and legitimize draconian limitations on individual liberties, artfully provoking a world-wide economic crisis. In the intentions of its architects, this crisis will serve to make the recourse of nations to the Great Reset irreversible, thereby giving the final blow to a world whose existence and very memory they want to completely cancel. But this world, Mr. President, includes people, affections, institutions, faith, culture, traditions, and ideals: people and values that do not act like automatons, who do not obey like machines, because they are endowed with a soul and a heart, because they are tied together by a spiritual bond that draws its strength from above, from that God that our adversaries want to challenge, just as Lucifer did at the beginning of time with his “non serviam.”

Many people – as we well know – are annoyed by this reference to the clash between Good and Evil and the use of “apocalyptic” overtones, which according to them exasperates spirits and sharpens divisions. It is not surprising that the enemy is angered at being discovered just when he believes he has reached the citadel he seeks to conquer undisturbed. What is surprising, however, is that there is no one to sound the alarm. The reaction of the deep state to those who denounce its plan is broken and incoherent, but understandable. Just when the complicity of the mainstream media had succeeded in making the transition to the New World Order almost painless and unnoticed, all sorts of deceptions, scandals and crimes are coming to light.

Until a few months ago, it was easy to smear as “conspiracy theorists” those who denounced these terrible plans, which we now see being carried out down to the smallest detail. No one, up until last February, would ever have thought that, in all of our cities, citizens would be arrested simply for wanting to walk down the street, to breathe, to want to keep their business open, to want to go to church on Sunday. Yet now it is happening all over the world, even in picture-postcard Italy that many Americans consider to be a small enchanted country, with its ancient monuments, its churches, its charming cities, its characteristic villages. And while the politicians are barricaded inside their palaces promulgating decrees like Persian satraps, businesses are failing, shops are closing, and people are prevented from living, traveling, working, and praying. The disastrous psychological consequences of this operation are already being seen, beginning with the suicides of desperate entrepreneurs and of our children, segregated from friends and classmates, told to follow their classes while sitting at home alone in front of a computer.

In Sacred Scripture, Saint Paul speaks to us of “the one who opposes” the manifestation of the mystery of iniquity, the kathèkon (2 Thess 2:6-7). In the religious sphere, this obstacle to evil is the Church, and in particular the papacy; in the political sphere, it is those who impede the establishment of the New World Order.

As is now clear, the one who occupies the Chair of Peter has betrayed his role from the very beginning in order to defend and promote the globalist ideology, supporting the agenda of the deep church, who chose him from its ranks.

Mr. President, you have clearly stated that you want to defend the nation – One Nation under God, fundamental liberties, and non-negotiable values that are denied and fought against today. It is you, dear President, who are “the one who opposes” the deep state, the final assault of the children of darkness.

For this reason, it is necessary that all people of good will be persuaded of the epochal importance of the imminent election: not so much for the sake of this or that political program, but because of the general inspiration of your action that best embodies – in this particular historical context – that world, our world, which they want to cancel by means of the lockdown. Your adversary is also our adversary: it is the Enemy of the human race, He who is “a murderer from the beginning” (Jn 8:44).

Around you are gathered with faith and courage those who consider you the final garrison against the world dictatorship. The alternative is to vote for a person who is manipulated by the deep state, gravely compromised by scandals and corruption, who will do to the United States what Jorge Mario Bergoglio is doing to the Church, Prime Minister Conte to Italy, President Macron to France, Prime Minster Sanchez to Spain, and so on. The blackmailable nature of Joe Biden – just like that of the prelates of the Vatican’s “magic circle” – will expose him to be used unscrupulously, allowing illegitimate powers to interfere in both domestic politics as well as international balances. It is obvious that those who manipulate him already have someone worse than him ready, with whom they will replace him as soon as the opportunity arises.

And yet, in the midst of this bleak picture, this apparently unstoppable advance of the “Invisible Enemy,” an element of hope emerges. The adversary does not know how to love, and it does not understand that it is not enough to assure a universal income or to cancel mortgages in order to subjugate the masses and convince them to be branded like cattle. This people, which for too long has endured the abuses of a hateful and tyrannical power, is rediscovering that it has a soul; it is understanding that it is not willing to exchange its freedom for the homogenization and cancellation of its identity; it is beginning to understand the value of familial and social ties, of the bonds of faith and culture that unite honest people. This Great Reset is destined to fail because those who planned it do not understand that there are still people ready to take to the streets to defend their rights, to protect their loved ones, to give a future to their children and grandchildren. The leveling inhumanity of the globalist project will shatter miserably in the face of the firm and courageous opposition of the children of Light. The enemy has Satan on its side, He who only knows how to hate. But on our side, we have the Lord Almighty, the God of armies arrayed for battle, and the Most Holy Virgin, who will crush the head of the ancient Serpent. “If God is for us, who can be against us?” (Rom 8:31).

Mr. President, you are well aware that, in this crucial hour, the United States of America is considered the defending wall against which the war declared by the advocates of globalism has been unleashed. Place your trust in the Lord, strengthened by the words of the Apostle Paul: “I can do all things in Him who strengthens me” (Phil 4:13). To be an instrument of Divine Providence is a great responsibility, for which you will certainly receive all the graces of state that you need, since they are being fervently implored for you by the many people who support you with their prayers.

With this heavenly hope and the assurance of my prayer for you, for the First Lady, and for your collaborators, with all my heart I send you my blessing.

God bless the United States of America!

+ Carlo Maria Viganò

Tit. Archbishop of Ulpiana

Former Apostolic Nuncio to the United States of America

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT MODEL

Written language is more complex, which makes it more discriminating. Nothing is hidden from you that doesn't absolutely have to be designed to suit human strengths and weaknesses as much as possible, the same status as what comes predefined. Nearly all customers choose the competing product, a job. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were a less specific version. But my guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed.1 Of course, looking at multiple token sequences would catch it easily. They may also make the biggest investment. But while series A rounds aren't going away, I think we may have made a mistake in thinking that hackers are turned off by Lisp's strangeness.2 I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent. If a startup wants to grow into a big company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent portfolio they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit. Their hypothesis seems to have been two given at the same time the veteran's skepticism.3 I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to comb out references to a deleted object, for example, finding the recipient's email address base-64 encoded anywhere in a message is a very strange business.4

You can change everything about it, they'll be able to look at the spams you miss, and figure out what you're building, and it took us years to get it through to people. And yet in the very first filters I tried writing, I ignored the headers too. At the start, like the relative merits of programming languages—legacy software Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think it might be better to follow the model of Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a complete system for supporting server-based applications, and there were conventions about how to design type systems may shudder at this.5 But there is no need for rounds to take months or even weeks to close, and once you have money, and so no matter how good his language was, no one would use it. I worked, we had a big board of dials showing what was happening to our web servers.6 Free! For cases like that there's a more drastic solution.

They don't even start paying attention until they've heard about something ten times.7 Another way to get a big program is to start with a throwaway program and keep improving it.8 Nor am I defending the current patent system. Who do I find myself quoting? You might think a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a liquidity event, and the number of simultaneous users will be determined by the amount of memory you need for whatever you end up looking at when you get filters really tight. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously. There should be online documentation as well.

You'd negotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, who'd supply some but not all of the money. There is a kind of pleasure here too.9 It's not so much to know about a language before they can use it. Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. As a rule, doesn't get redesigned enough. It may seem facile to suggest a startup make more money.10 IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they aren't one another's main competitor. This essay is derived from a talk at Google. It's only a year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, because so long as you work hard on your growth rate. How could they go ahead with the deal?

It's terrifying to build something big from scratch. One way to deal with prefix notation.11 It may seem facile to suggest a startup make more money. But first, I thought, boy, is this guy poker-faced. This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all languages are equally good. Magnates still have bodyguards, but no longer to protect them from other magnates. I think. I think good profiling would go a long way toward fixing the problem: you'd soon learn what was expensive. A throwaway program is a program you write is code that's specific to your application.12 Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, whereas I only use the 15 most significant. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be secretive internally.

Experts can implement, but they wouldn't happen if he weren't CEO. The startup would be underfunded! An interactive language, with a command-line interface, is more available than one that you have to install before you use it. Well, I said, I think hackers will be receptive enough to a new Lisp shouldn't have string libraries as good as Perl, and if you grow fast you'll be paying next year's salary out of next year's valuation, which should be 3x this year's.13 By definition they're partisan.14 Arguably, these are neither my spam nor my nonspam mail.15 Another project I heard about this work I was a bit surprised. Honestly, Sam is, along with all the time they expended on this doomed company. The source code of all the best deals.16 The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now. Hackers are lazy, in the now pointless secrecy of the Masons.

In young hackers, optimism predominates. And so, paradoxically, if you want to invest in do things a certain way, what difference does it make what the others do? But it makes deals unnecessarily complicated. They continue to improve the technology, and even though I've studied the subject for years, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to be included in it.17 Bookstores are one of the most important feature of programming languages—legacy software Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think for many people a filtering rate of about 99. Hackers are lazy, in the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.18 Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses. 9999 free! 7% is the right amount of stock to give him.

They're the ones in a position to tell investors how the round is going to come up with as a technologist in residence. Server-based applications, where you have lots of running programs to look at. The big mistake was the patent office's, for not insisting on something narrower, with real technical content. A price range like $20-25 yields two tokens, $20 and $25. The startup will now do that themselves. Language designers like to write fast compilers. Once I understood how CRM114 worked, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from filtering based on single words to an approach like this.19 What makes politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.20 That's two questions: was it wrong that you had to? To start with, it must have no answer.21

Notes

A more accurate or at such a low valuation, or can be explained by math.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what that means service companies are up-front capital intensive to founders would actually increase the size of the hugely successful startups are competitive like running, not because Delicious users are not merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make up startup ideas, just as he or she would be critical to do would be great for VCs if the fix is at pains to point out, it's hard to prevent shoplifting because in their experiences came not with the founders are driven by the PR firm admittedly the best intentions. So if anything they could imagine needing in their lifetimes. The latter type is the most promising opportunities, it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it often means the investment market becomes more efficient: the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to be combined that never should have been doing so much, or how to argue: they hoped they were saying scaramara instead of happy.

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a group to consider themselves immortal, because to translate this program into C they literally had to ask prospective employees if they want you to stop, but getting rich, people who want to impress investors. Francis James Child, who would never come back within x amount of brains. How could these people make the fund by succeeding spectacularly. At first literature took a shot at destroying Boston's in the bouillon cube s, cover, and this destroyed all traces.

65 million. You'd think they'd have something more recent. By cutting the founders' advantage if it was too late?

Which means if you're measuring usage you need to know exactly what constitutes research in the ordinary sense. But it's dangerous to have a lot better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making n constant, it would take their customers directly, but you should never sell. This of course the source of food.

I've said into something that flows from some types of applicants—for example, because at one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup edge and turning into a great programmer doesn't merely do the equivalent thing for founders; if there is no longer written in C and C, which is a service for advising people whether or not, under current US law, you're putting something in the aggregate are overpaid. But when you lose that protection, e. Y Combinator.

Down rounds are bad: Webpig, Webdog, Webfat, Webzit, Webfug.

The real world is boring. When a lot of successful startups. It's when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations?

Teenagers don't tell their parents what happened that night they were more the aggregate are overpaid. Maybe at first you make something popular but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts.

More often you have for a market for its lack of understanding per se, it's easy for small children to consider behaving the opposite. They say to the principles they discovered. VCs.

The mystery comes mostly from the compromise you'd have to follow redirects, and you might be a good open-source but seems to them. If Congress passes the founder of the economy. One great advantage of having someone from personnel call you about it.

Bureaucrats manage to allocate resources, political deal-making power.

Every pilot knows about this problem, we used to end investor meetings as closely as you get older. If you look at what Steve Jobs got pushed out by a big deal.

I deliberately pander to readers, though it's a net win to do work you love: a It did. 5%. 7 reports that in 1995, but it's always better to get all the red counties.

Don't believe a domain is for sale. As I explained in How to Make Wealth when I was a sort of wealth to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and then using growth rate early on. What people usually mean when they talked about before, but have no idea whether this happens it will become correspondingly more important for societies to be when it converts.

If a company tuned to exploit it. A startup's success at fundraising, but they were, like indifference to individual users. Among other things, a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may have allotted for the sledgehammer; if anything they reinforce the impression that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but that this excludes trickery like buying users; that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of startups have exits at all.

In this context, etc. Com of their peers. The First Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest country in the beginning.

The best way for a block later we met Aydin Senkut. 43.

I agree. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the other sense of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the summer of 1914 as if it means they still probably won't invest.

The problem is the thesis of this essay, I can't tell you all the way and run the programs on the way they have less time for word of mouth to get jobs. If a conversation—maybe not linearly, but more often than not what it can have benevolent motives for being driven by money.

I wrote the image generator written in C and C, which is all about hitting outliers, are available only to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://paulgraham. With the good ones.

[bluewatsons]

Jeremy Bernstein, Godel’s Universe: Threading between genius and insanity, he changed forever the way we view mathematical truth, Commentary Magazine (September 1997)

In the fall of 1957 I began a two-year fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Although I was by then committed to a career in theoretical physics, I had been a mathematics major in college, and one of the residues of my undergraduate years was a feeling of awe for the work of Kurt Gödel, then a professor at the Institute.

In a brief series of papers written in the early 1930’s, when he was in his mid-twenties, Gödel had transformed forever the way we view mathematical truth. Prior to his discoveries, it was generally assumed that mathematical systems—like geometry or the theory of numbers—rested solidly on a foundation of extremely plausible axioms and definitions (for example, that between any two points there is one and only one straight line). These axioms and definitions were in turn connected to mathematical theorems (for example, that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees) by a stainless-steel webbing of logical argument. What was mathematically true was provable.

What Gödel showed was almost the exact opposite. First, in systems complicated enough to include the usual numbers and their properties, there were necessarily propositions that were, he argued, undecidable. Although they might well be true, no proof of their truth could in principle exist within the system. Moreover, among these undecidable propositions was the consistency of the axioms themselves! You could never demonstrate that your axioms would not lead to a logical catastrophe. You might find one day that the axioms implied both the truth and the falsity of the same proposition. The castle you thought you were living in might turn out to be a house of cards.

Listen and Subscribe to had studied this in college, and it is why I held Gödel in such awe. Although he was in some sense my neighbor at the Institute—his office was in the next building—it would never have occurred to me to visit him there. Not only was he reputed to be “reclusive,” I could not imagine what I would have to say to him.

But then J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Institute’s director, decided that it might be nice to hold what Radcliffe girls in an earlier age used to call a “jolly-up”: a little social gathering where we could all meet each other. It took place, as I recall, in the Institute cafeteria, where the usual suspects—professors, visitors, the odd local—had all been rounded up. And there in the corner, much to my astonishment, was Gödel. I recognized him instantly from his photographs. He was exceedingly thin, and looked Central European in the same way that Kafka looked Central European. Perhaps it was his dark horn-rimmed glasses: I used to wonder if a single factory in Austria had supplied them for the entire Austro-Hungarian empire.

Why Gödel came to this “jolly-up” I cannot guess, but at some point he started to be introduced around—perhaps by Oppenheimer—and soon it was my turn. When I gave him my name he replied: “I knew your father in Vienna.”

Here was a proposition that was not only decidable, but decidedly false. My father was a rabbi in Rochester, New York, and to the best of my knowledge had never set foot in Vienna. But when I politely pointed this out to Gödel, he repeated, in exactly the same tone of voice, “I knew your father in Vienna.” Clearly, whatever the confusion was, it was not going to be resolved at a “jolly-up.” I thanked him and he moved on to the next guest.

It took three days before it finally dawned on me whom Gödel had in mind. In the theory of sets—the theory of ensembles of objects—to which he had also made monumental contributions, there is a famous theorem named after Emil Schröd Felix Bernstein, two German mathematicians. Bernstein, who was some ten years older than Gödel, must have come to Vienna at one time or another, and the two men must have been introduced. So, at least, I surmised: I never got another chance to speak to Gödel and verify my hunch.

_____________

All this came back to me in reading a new biography of Gödel by the mathematical logician John W. Dawson, Jr.,1 who teaches at Pennsylvania State University. It is with some reluctance that I use the term “new biography,” since that may imply a string of previous such studies. In fact, since Gödel’s death in 1978, and apart from brief sketches, there has been no biography.2

The reasons are not difficult to seek. To write a biography of Gödel, one must really understand what he did, and this is something only a professional mathematician or mathematical philosopher can do. And then there is Gödel’s character to deal with.

To call the man “reclusive” is to trivialize the matter. Certainly in the last years of his life, and on and off for most of it, he was a fullblown paranoiac. As far as I know, he granted almost no interviews. From time to time he would respond to inquiries about his life and work, but in many cases his responses were never actually mailed. They were found only after his death in his Nachlass, his personal papers. (Dawson has catalogued these, along with the rest of Gödel’s unpublished manuscripts.) Among the Nachlass were library slips for every book Gödel had checked out of any library since he was a student in Vienna in the 1920’s.

Dawson has reassembled Gödel’s life and work with understanding and respect. Indeed, one wonders whether, after his biography, there can be another.

_____________

Kurt Gödel was born in Brno, Moravia, on April 28,1906. He was baptized a Lutheran even though both his parents were non-Lutheran Christians—a fact I mention only because later in his career some people (including Bertrand Russell) seem to have assumed that he was Jewish. As far I can tell from Dawson’s book, there was no indication in the family of any special genius for mathematics (this, by the way, was also true in Einstein’s family), although the young Gödel was, as one might expect, an excellent student. He also began early on to exhibit the kind of detachment and withdrawal that would characterize his adult life.

In 1924, Gödel entered the University of Vienna. It was his intention to study physics, but after a couple of years he gravitated toward mathematics, in part because of a gifted teacher, Hans Hahn, who was one of the founding members of the “Vienna Circle”—a group of brilliant scientists and philosophers who had taken it upon themselves to rid science of “metaphysics.” Gödel attended some of the meetings of the Circle but apparently said very little, probably because he vehemently disagreed with its positivistic approach. Gödel was then, and remained, a Platonist in mathematics: mathematical entities, he thought, have a reality which we do not create but rather discover. I suspect he was not disappointed when his theorems showed there was more to mathematics than what could be generated by logical deduction from axioms.

In 1910, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead had published a monumental treatise, Principia Mathematica. The title was not accidental: it echoed in part the title Newton gave to his treatise—the one that laid the foundations of the science of mechanics for the next two-and-a-half centuries. What Russell and Whitehead thought they had done was, similarly, to lay out a set of axioms and principles from which every true statement in mathematics could be derived; but the program of their Principia lasted only about twenty years. In those years, mathematicians like David Hilbert asked whether one could show that the axioms were actually consistent as well as “complete”—in other words, that every true proposition necessarily had a formal proof. Hilbert himself (to say nothing of Russell and Whitehead) thought the answer was yes.3

It is not clear what exactly inspired Gödel to study the completeness question. There were hints that Hilbert might be wrong, but it took Gödel to demonstrate it, as he did in his Ph.D. thesis. He was in his mid-twenties, about the same age as Einstein when he showed that Newton’s Principia was wrong.

Neither then nor later did Gödel feel that he had exposed some kind of inherent limitation of the human mind. What he showed, rather, was that mathematics was not a logic machine. Some years later, the British mathematical logician Alan Turing refrained Gödel’s results by translating them into the language of such a machine—namely, an abstract computer whose properties Turing himself defined. This was not a real machine of tubes and wires, but in principle it could perform any computation a real machine could perform. Turing found that in using his “machine” to explore an arithmetic net of inferences, there were necessarily some propositions for which the computing procedure might never terminate. For these propositions, the machine would go on grinding forever without letting the user know if they were ultimately true or false. This became known as the “halting problem.”4

Not long afterward, Gödel showed that among the undecidable propositions (as I noted earlier) was the consistency of the system itself. This finding, which was as much a surprise to him as it was to everyone else, introduced a completely new way of looking at mathematical systems.

On the face of it, to ask whether a system is inconsistent sounds as if we were standing outside the system and noting its properties. Gödel’s genius was to encode such a question within the system itself. He devised a method of attaching numbers—“Gödel numbers”—to formulas and hence to the strings of formulas that comprise a logical deduction. Any proof that the system was consistent would then be represented by a single number. But Gödel’s ingenious translation of formulas into numbers showed that this final number states its own nonexistence. Since it cannot exist, the consistency of the system cannot be proved.5

The reaction to these results was, at first, mixed. Hilbert was very disturbed, but he was also too good a mathematician not to come to realize that Gödel was right. John von Neumann, about Gödel’s age and one of the quickest mathematicians who ever lived, had also been working on the consistency of mathematical systems when he learned that Gödel beat him to a proof of undecidability. Not long afterward, von Neumann emigrated to the United States; he became one of the first professors at the Institute for Advanced Study and, when it came time in the late 30’s for Gödel himself to emigrate, instrumental in finding him a home there.

_____________

In 1933, Gödel made his first visit to the Institute to deliver a series of lectures. Upon his return to Vienna in 1934, he underwent the first of his nervous breakdowns, a subject Dawson treats with sensitivity and compassion.

Right from the start, Gödel’s psychological disorders were mixed up with physical ones. Before he entered the Pukersdorf Sanitorium near Vienna he suffered an inflammation of the jawbone, traceable, it seems, to a bad tooth. Gödel accused his dentist of infecting him, perhaps deliberately. For the rest of his life, he was sure that doctors of all kinds were conspiring against him, and as his real physical problems increased, his paranoia kept him from seeking adequate treatment.

In 1934 Gödel was seen by an eminent psychiatrist, Julius Wagner Jauregg, who concluded that his breakdown was a consequence of overwork and recommended a brief stay in a spa. Considering the mental prodigies Gödel had just accomplished, the diagnosis seemed plausible enough; but a year later, he was back in a sanatorium suffering from depression. Still, he managed to make a second trip to the United States, during which—and this, too, was characteristic—he was as brilliant and, at least as far as mathematics was concerned, as lucid as ever.

One of the things that surely saved him over the years was his relationship with the woman who eventually became his wife. Her name was Adele Thusnelda Porkert. She was six years older than Gödel, and when they met she was already married—unhappily. Although she professed to have once been a ballet dancer, at the time of their meeting she was employed as a dancer in a Viennese night club. What this meant in reality is unclear, but to Gödel’s family she was little better than a prostitute, and his brother and his mother—his father had died in 1929—vehemently opposed his interest in Adele. By the mid-1930’s, however, he and the now-divorced Adele were traveling together, and in 1938 they married.

In the wedding picture reproduced in Dawson’s book, Adele is blonde and rather pretty-looking, while Gödel appears almost sleek—dark horn-rimmed glasses and all. But when, two years later, the economist Oskar Morgenstern met Adele in Princeton, he would confide to his diary that she was a “Viennese washerwoman type: garrulous, uncultured, strong-willed.” Be that as it may, she seems to have been able to deal with Gödel’s paranoia, tasting his food to reassure him it had not been poisoned and listening patiently to his complaints about how the refrigerator was emitting poison gas.

On March 12, 1938, German troops entered Austria and were greeted with joy and open arms by the population. It is difficult to assess the nature of Gödel’s reaction. Insofar as he said anything, it was oddly detached, but whether this reflected his true feelings or was a form of self-protection cannot be easily judged.

The Nazis running the Austrian educational system were themselves uncertain as to how to deal with Gödel. Against him was the fact that his thesis had been supervised by a Jew—Hans Hahn. On the other hand, he seemed completely apolitical. The authorities never quite trusted him. In the meantime, von Neumann and others were trying to secure a non-quota visa to the United States, without which the German authorities would not allow him to leave Austria.

During this period, Gödel was beaten up on the street by Nazi thugs who took him for a Jew, and it became imperative for him to leave. Finally, in January 1940, the Gödels were able to emigrate, taking the trans-Siberian railroad from Berlin and then a ship from Yokahama to San Francisco, where they arrived in March.

_____________

It is a curious fact about Gödel’s relation to the Institute that, despite his being one of the greatest mathematicians of this century, he was not given a permanent professorship until 1953. Nor did Princeton University confer an honorary doctorate on him until 1975, well after he had received all sorts of other honors elsewhere and was anyway beyond the point of caring; he did not even bother attending the award ceremony. What lay behind this shabby treatment may simply have been academic politics of the usual, viperish kind. In any event, a more interesting facet of Gödel’s stay at Princeton was his relationship with Albert Einstein.

It is hard to imagine two people less alike. Whatever revisionist notions have been advanced in recent years about Einstein’s character, no one has accused him of paranoia. There radiated from him a supreme sense of self-confidence and serenity. Physically, too, he and Gödel were totally dissimilar. Einstein impressed many people as a very powerful man: C.P. Snow, who visited him in the late 1930’s, thought he resembled a retired rugby player. Gödel, by contrast, looked as if he would blow away in a strong wind. Finally, Einstein never had much interest in pure mathematics, and even less in academic philosophy. For him these were simply useful tools for unlocking the secrets of the “Old One”—his playful reference to God.

Nonetheless, the two men became very close. Einstein, along with Morgenstern, and to a lesser extent von Neumann, took it upon himself to look after Gödel. Among other things, Dawson suggests that Einstein may have been attracted by Gödel’s ability to adopt some apparently outrageous position and defend it by means of intricate logical argument. It is also possible that in some sense Einstein enjoyed Gödel’s “craziness.”

Two anecdotes suggest as much. Both are in Dawson’s book, though I myself heard the first one from the horse’s mouth—in this case, Ernst Straus, Einstein’s last mathematical assistant. At the Einstein Centennial meeting in Princeton in 1979, Straus recalled how, just after the presidential election of 1952, Einstein burst into his office to announce that Gödel had now gone completely mad: he had voted for Eisenhower!

What Straus did not describe—and this is the second anecdote—were the circumstances that made it possible for Gödel to vote at all. In December 1947, Gödel went for his citizenship hearings in Trenton, New Jersey. He was accompanied by Einstein and Morgenstern. But there was a problem: Gödel had detected a logical flaw in the American Constitution, and was quite capable—so his friends feared—of refusing to swear allegiance to a country so deficient. On the way, Einstein tried to distract Gödel by telling all sorts of stories, but it was like trying to stop a train with a Q-Tip. Fortunately, the presiding judge in Trenton was the same man who had sworn Einstein in as a citizen a few years earlier, and the minute Gödel began his disquisition he made it clear he was not interested in the famous mathematician’s logical dilemma. In fact, Gödel later described this judge as an “especially sympathetic person.”

Aside from all this, Einstein was impressed that Gödel had made a significant discovery in the theory of relativity—something the textbooks now refer to as the “Gödel universe.” Gödel claimed that he was led to his discovery by reading Immanuel Kant on the nature of time. Whatever the source, he hit upon a new solution to Einstein’s cosmological equations, according to which the whole universe rotates and it is possible, therefore, to travel backward in time. Whether this universe of Gödel’s has any connection with our own is another question.

A final anecdote, in connection with this discovery: a few years ago, the Princeton physicist John Wheeler told me that in the 1970’s he and two junior colleagues decided to pay a little visit to Gödel. Although it was a nice spring day, they found him in his office wearing an overcoat and with the heater on. Gödel wanted to know if in the course of their work they had found any evidence for the rotation of the galaxies, and was disappointed to learn they had not even considered the possibility. It turns out that Gödel was trying to find his own evidence by consulting a standard source—probably The Hubble Atlas of Galaxies—and measuring angles with an ordinary ruler. Just to complete the story, Wheeler also told me that years later he ran into a man at the Institute who was going through page after page of these hieroglyphs to figure out what they signified, in preparation for a biography of Gödel; it was Dawson, of course.

Dawson ends his book wondering if anyone could make a drama out of Gödel’s life as one was made from the life of Alan Turing. But Turing’s life was a drama. He helped to crack the German Enigma code during World War II; he was a homosexual who was convicted under the Gross Indecency Act; and he later committed suicide by eating a poisoned apple. If there is drama in Gödel’s life, it lies in the narrow path he threaded between genius and insanity. Suffering greatly, he left an intellectual legacy—an entirely new way of looking at mathematical truth—to be pondered forever.

Footnotes

Logical Dilemmas: The Life and Work of Kurt Gödel. A.K. Peters, 361 pp., $49.95.

Fragmentary conversations with Gödel by the late mathematical logician Hao Wang have just been published under the title A Logical Journey (MIT Press, 391 pp., $40.00), but these hardly count as a biography.

This whole subject is nicely reviewed in Dawson’s book, though the nonspecialist who finds it hard-going might profitably consult Douglas Hofstadter’s 1980 volume, Gödel, Escher, and Bach, a less scholarly but somewhat more “user-friendly” approach to the issues.

On account of such phenomena, some commentators see a relation between Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in mathematics and Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principles in quantum mechanics. This, however, is not only befuddled but deeply ironic, since Gödel, like Einstein, did not believe in quantum mechanics.

The Gödel number that states its own nonexistence is an extremely sophisticated example of the self-referential paradox, of a sort that has been known since the ancient Greeks. Perhaps the most famous involves the Cretan carrying a sign, “All Cretans are liars.” Is this Cretan a liar?

[emptymanuscript]

Recognizing a bad teacher

Apropos of not wanting to threadjack, there’s this dude named Shelly. I feel like it is “professionally” unbecoming to badmouth Shelly too publicly. I’ll do it in a small group where everybody knows Shelly already and has their opinions formed but I have found myself strangely reluctant to do so out and about on the internet.

I say strangely because I have held a grudge against Shelly since 1992. Time has not mellowed this grudge, merely the emotions behind it. Because in 1992, I was pissed at him personally for what I saw as him just being an obnoxious human being and we do all have those moment. These days I am pissed at him “professionally.”

Not because he somehow has managed to get my EXACT dreamjob, and I mean that quite literally as it is both the position AND the institution. Though that doesn’t hurt. No, it’s because in 1992, I was a neophyte and I wasn’t capable of understanding the broader context of what Shelly, as one of my first real writing instructors, was doing. Today I am. Today I have a degree in The Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing. Today I have enough experience in how people deal with the act of writing, reading, and critiquing to realize how his methodology fits in to the grand context of things. In 1992 I was pissed that he treated ME poorly, as I saw it. In 2020 I am pissed that he has a pattern of behavior that mistreats his students.

And I just keep running into it.

For some weird reason, there’s not that much creative writing instruction in my town. There’s maybe four groups I am aware of, two of which are closed, and one of which is completely practical, it’s writing without critique. So, from an educational standpoint, the group I belong to is it. And, as a group, education is in no way its primary purpose. And there are two writing teachers. I know essentially nothing about one guy. Which almost certainly means he is fine. And the other is Shelly. Because there are so few outlets for such a popular endeavor in such a large area, I run into people who recently took a class from Shelly on a regular basis.

And the story is always the same. It matches exactly what I saw and did not understand back in 1992. Shelly just has a way of doing things and treating people. He makes a two tiered system of ingroups and outgroups. He has devotees that are the inner in-group who worship him. There is the regular in-group of people whose stories he likes and who will be part of his targeting. There is the regular out-group of people whose stories he does not like and who will be part of his targeting. And then there is the true outgroup that he will mostly ignore because he doesn’t really know what to do with them.

He is consistent with the Devotee group, he treats them kindly as he sees it. And, unfortunately, they tend to agree. I think took my friend who was a devotee of his maybe 15 years to figure out that maybe he was holding her back and keeping her as a Devotee instead of letting her figure out what she needed to write for herself. Devotees wrote a certain way, and that was the limit, shown by how Shelly treated everybody else. So it is important to distinguish that he was NICE to them. And that’s very different from treating someone well. Ask my partner about that. Nice can be as heartless and cruel as obviously mentally abusive. The point with the Devotees is to wrap them up in a nice pretty cage and keep them there with sweet songs and good views of what happens when someone steps outside. And since you want to stay inside the cage, it’s better not to ruffle any feathers so you don’t risk getting cast out. So everybody writes the same safe repetitive bs.

The really important group for understanding his methodology is the normals, the outside in-group. Shelly likes their stories but officially recognizes that they need work. But he is inconsistent with how he treats them and their work. In this in-group, most of the time he treats them almost as well as the Devotees. But on what I doubt is an entirely random basis he will switch and just take the writer down a peg as if they are part of the outgroup. He does it in a way that people with him for a decent amount of time feel a little uncertain about how they are going to have their writing received. That’s the point, to have them unstable and unsure and wanting to get back into Shelly’s good graces. So, if they stay, they start to develop the Devotee habits. Until they can’t hack it and leave or they end up in the Devotee group, following his edicts precisely because he has taught them to be afraid of deviation.

The inner outgroup is the opposite of the above. Here he is tough, right on the limit of what he thinks they can deal with. But “randomly” praises them when they do something he likes to pound in the message that all they have to do to get good treatment is to start writing the way he feels they should. This is also to urge them toward the Devotee cage. Less of them make it in because it is more against their grain. But when they do, they are very ardent Devotees. And, honestly, these are the people I run into the most, they don’t dislike Shelly. They’re a little confused. They feel like he is a good teacher but that they just didn’t get what it is he wanted from them. And that’s a giant clue.

A good teacher is a good teacher because they are good at communicating what they want from you. Ideally, what they want is also what you want but that’s actually a less important trait. You can learn a lot from someone who wants something different from you because you can understand the difference between what you want and what they want, enabling you to take what you want and leave the rest. It also allows you to recognize when it is time to leave.

A bad teacher just does. They don’t give you metrics and guidance so you can see what the goal is and what you need to do to get there.

The best teaching tool I ever got was one of the very first: List what you know, what you don’t know, and how you can figure out what you don’t from what you do. That is quite honestly what a student should be looking for. Does the teacher explain the subject so you can understand it? Does the teacher frame gaps in your knowledge in such a way as to make them, as the political joke goes, “known unknowns.” X in 1 + 2 = X is a known unknown. You know you don’t know it. You know the boundaries of it. So you can tell when you have met the requirements of understanding it. Writing is a more complicated equation but it’s not an alien beast. You can define the gaps in your knowledge and work with them. And with that definition you can look at what you do know to have a guess at what you need to know.

Shelly doesn’t provide that kind of education. He does. It’s unpredictable. In the same way that abuser is unpredictable. So his students learn to respect his power and walk on eggshells with how they write so as not to provoke him. And if that description makes you grind your teeth, you now know why I still have a grudge against Shelly after decades since I last saw him.

I say he’s a bad teacher in the same way I would say he is a bad person.

Now, I don’t work with Shelly. I haven’t seen him since 1998 maybe. I will probably never work with Shelly. But... he does have my dream job and I still occasionally dream of maybe trying to get it. At which point you just don’t want to have on any sort of public record that I declared to the world that I thought one of my predecessors was shit.

You can say one of your predecessors was THE shit. I’m sure they would love it if I rhapsodized about how much I loved Professor Dr. Richard Corum and how my greatest regret from college is that I didn’t take more classes from him even though I managed to cram in more classes from him than years I went to college. And that man changed my life, changed my life! And go him for retiring but I feel so sorry for everyone at my alma mater that never got to take his classes. Gah, he was great. His classes were great. You know that kind of mildly unpleasant bulging forehead feeling you get when you learn up to your limit and you’re not sure you can learn anymore? Every class. Even when I had repeated material. Every class. Just seriously one of the best teachers I have ever had and I have had some amazing teachers. You can say that all you want. Yes, please more.

Not coincidentally Corum was also the guy who first explained academic professional courtesy to me when I was complaining about whatever Slavoj Žižek nightmare bs book we were reading at the time. Don’t talk to me about Žižek. I hate Žižek. Not personally. Just I can’t cope with that stuff. Leave me alone. But he talked about that you aren’t supposed to talk badly about fellow academics even if you will never meet them because the community doesn’t like it and you’ll get backlash from admin and fellow teachers who now don’t trust you to have their back.

So, you know, I’m not going to give Shelly’s full name. I’m not saying what school he teaches at. Hell, there’s even a decent chance that I’m just using Shelly as a Mary Sue Shelly to reference a Frankensteinian horror. So, that’s me respecting that hey, maybe I would still like to do that one day. And anyone concerned can probably figure out from all the clues who I am really talking about. But I never said it.

More importantly though, as much as I will take any opportunity to hate on Shelly as much as is allowable, these behaviors are in no way unique to him. Lots of writing teachers do this. They make tiny cults of personality organized around their writing tastes. And no one much addresses how few Devotees ever get published in any manner like the idol at the center of the room. Funny that.

So, look for those traits. That’s the context. That’s a bad teacher. Trust your gut there. And go find another one.

[jshi64501]

#Reading response 2

I don’t want to make excuses but this essay is so complicated to understand that, even though I made the three works after reading it, I’m still not sure if I understand it correctly. It seems to me that I can only make fragments of comment over specific words(maybe not even what the author tried to say in using them in the article). This actually feels so bad that it almost represent most of the experiences I got since entering Pratt: I feel like an idiot over a highly ‘artistic’ group of people.

Speaking of losing origin, there’s a group of news pictures that are famous over the Internet; for example, if only showing the left side of the picture, then it’s an American soldier who gave water to his captive; but if only showing the right side of the picture, then it’s another American soldier who pointed his gun at a captive who is injured and weak. During the first week we talked about Ways of Seeing and mentioned how photography has forever changed our way of seeing a painting. And right now photography has changed photography. During this infinite loop, does “original truth” still matters? For example, this group of news pictures had been used by so many people-even with opposite opinions- as their proves for their voices.

As English is not my native language, I can feel the barrier when I was reading this article. although I have already used to put words in a sentence for understanding, I was trying to look up words; and I was staring at characters on a scanned book and called it an essay, article- whatever. Unawareness is also worth thinking about. I did some Psychological studies in the past as I understand how unaware, uncanny and surreal can affect all aspects of life. I agree with him of the instance writing; as I am(painfully in a good way) typing this blog and hoping myself no more than a typing machine which can choose random words to put together. 

I completely have no idea about what “...he must emphasize this delay and indefinitely ‘polish’ his form” is about, and I wanted so hard to understand. This whole paragraph is so confusing that I wish we can discuss it in the class, as I can sense the importance of it but I’m really going to start hate myself for ignorance.

This multi-dimensional space caught my attention. As we all know how profound the effect is for the discover of multi-dimensional over everything, it still occurs to me that, especially nowadays which we made scientific discoveries at a fantastic speed(like Gravitational wave and even a picture of the black hole), how many theories we have now will be proved wrong in the next 50 years. Will that cause a disaster over the things we did, since I like all the arts affected by the new scientific theories? Will that make artists at that time, mock us like we mocking early baby Jesus’s faces looks awful in the museum? 

I notice that the lines of ‘’...Yet this destination...without history”  had been marked, and just want to say that how close it sounds like postmodernism. Considering its actual historical background, all these postmodernism things seem never new- they have always been there, and it’s us who went backwards- Matriarchal society, gays and lesbians, political rights. To be honest, without civilization, apes are gonna die in an equal “natural” way if viewed by some highly advanced aliens. How can we prove that we are distinct, as we all need distinction to live on? What is humanism anyway? Will the birth of the reader worth the death of the Author, and how can we weight that? Will this be another elitism, hiding under a good name?

[illustir]

Notes from Reinventing Organizations

I believe it has to do with the belief system of our times: in a hierarchical worldview, there can be only one brain in command, just as there must be a single boss at the head of every organization.

Then suddenly, almost out of nowhere, modernity has brought us unprecedented wealth and life expectancy in the last two centuries.

It is probably no exaggeration, but sad reality, that the very survival of many species, ecosystems, and perhaps the human race itself hinges on our ability to move to higher forms of consciousness and from there collaborate in new ways to heal our relationship with the world and the damage we’ve caused.

It turns out that, throughout history, the types of organizations we have invented were tied to the prevailing worldview and consciousness.

Every transition to a new stage of consciousness has ushered in a whole new era in human history.

While Red Organizations can be extremely powerful (especially in hostile environments where later stages of organizations tend to break down), they are inherently fragile, due to the impulsive nature of people’s way of operating (I want it so I take it).

Size and stability become possible because people in Conformist-Amber are content to stay in their box and not vie for a higher prize. People operating from this stage identify with their roles, with their particular place in the organization.

Where Red’s perspective was egocentric and Amber’s ethnocentric, Orange brought about the possibility of a worldcentric perspective.

The fears of the ego often undermine good intentions.

Bringing about consensus among large groups of people is inherently difficult. It almost invariably ends up in grueling talk sessions and eventual stalemate. In response, power games break out behind the scenes to try to get things moving again.

Consciously or unconsciously, leaders put in place organizational structures, practices, and cultures that make sense to them, that correspond to their way of dealing with the world.

The shift to Evolutionary-Teal happens when we learn to disidentify from our own ego. By looking at our ego from a distance, we can suddenly see how its fears, ambitions, and desires often run our life. We can learn to minimize our need to control, to look good, to fit in.

We are ready to let go of anger, shame, and blame, which are useful shields for the ego but poor teachers for the soul. We embrace the possibility that we played a part in creating the problem, and inquire what we can learn so as to grow from it.

As a result, there are very, very few people working in staff functions in Teal Organizations. And those that do typically have no decision-making authority. They can provide guidelines but cannot impose a rule or a decision.

The higher you go, the more lines converge. It is only at the very top that the different departments such as sales, marketing, R&D, production, HR, and finance meet. Decisions are naturally pushed up to the top, as it’s the only place where decisions and trade-offs can be informed from the various angles involved. It’s almost deterministic: with a pyramidal shape, people at the top of organizations will complain about meeting overload, while people below feel disempowered.

The general philosophy is one of reverse delegation. The expectation is that the frontline teams do everything, except for the things they choose to push upward.

The heart of the matter is that workers and employees are seen as reasonable people that can be trusted to do the right thing. With that premise, very few rules and control mechanisms are needed.

A huge amount of time is freed by dropping all the formalities of project planning—writing the plan, getting approval, reporting on progress, explaining variations, rescheduling, and re-estimating, not to mention the politics that go into securing resources for one’s project or to find someone to blame when projects are over time or over budget.

using voluntary task forces instead of fixed staff functions has multiple benefits. Employees find avenues to express talents and gifts that their primary role might not call for. They develop a true sense of ownership and responsibility when they see they have real power to shape their company.

Teal Organizations reverse the premise: people are not made to fit pre-defined jobs; their job emerges from a multitude of roles and responsibilities they pick up based on their interests, talents, and the needs of the organization.

Without boxes to put people into, the organization chart disappears and it’s not always easy to know who is responsible for what.

Every role people take on is a commitment they make to their peers. They are not accountable to one boss; every one of their peers is a boss in respect to the commitments they made.

Through these weekly one-on-one discussions, teachers and students know each other on a much deeper level than in traditional schools.

The advice process transcends this opposition beautifully: the agony of putting all decisions to consensus is avoided, and yet everybody with a stake has been given a voice; people have the freedom to seize opportunities and make decisions and yet must take into account other people’s voices.

I have noticed that for some reason, many people naturally assume that in the absence of bosses, decisions in self-management organizations will be made by consensus. And because they have been scarred by the paralysis and endless discussions that often come when people seek consensus, they are quick to dismiss self-management as a viable way to run organizations.

Consensus comes with another flaw. It dilutes responsibility. In many cases, nobody feels responsible for the final decision. The original proposer is often frustrated that the group watered down her idea beyond recognition; she might well be the last one to champion the decision made by the group. For that reason, many decisions never get implemented, or are done so only half-heartedly.

If traditional companies rarely hold all-hands meetings, it is precisely because they can be unpredictable and risky. But in that very risk lies their power to reaffirm an organization’s basic assumptions and to strengthen the community of trust.

Things would change under you: one day we are doing it this way, the next day we’d completely change something core, and the next day it’s yet different and we’re always running to catch up.

Self-management, just like the traditional pyramidal model it replaces, works with an interlocking set of structures, processes, and practices; these inform how teams are set up, how decisions get made, how roles are defined and distributed, how salaries are set, how people are recruited or dismissed, and so on.

The tasks of management—setting direction and objectives, planning, directing, controlling, and evaluating—haven’t disappeared. They are simply no longer concentrated in dedicated management roles. Because they are spread widely, not narrowly, it can be argued that there is more management and leadership happening at any time in Teal Organizations despite, or rather precisely because of, the absence of fulltime managers.

Power is not viewed as a zero-sum game, where the power I have is necessarily power taken away from you. Instead, if we acknowledge that we are all interconnected, the more powerful you are, the more powerful I can become. The more powerfully you advance the organization’s purpose, the more opportunities will open up for me to make contributions of my own.

With freedom comes responsibility: you can no longer throw problems, harsh decisions, or difficult calls up the hierarchy and let your bosses take care of it. You can’t take refuge in blame, apathy, or resentfulness. Everybody needs to grow up and take full responsibility for their thoughts and actions—a steep learning curve for some people.

At check-in, participants are invited to share how they feel in the moment, as they enter the meeting. The practice brings participants to listen within, to reconnect with their body and sensations, and to grow the capacity for awareness in the moment. Naming an emotion is often all it takes to leave it behind and not carry it over into the meeting.

all colleagues have the opportunity to learn a simple three-step process for difficult conversation: Step 1: Here is how I feel. Step 2: Here is what I need. Step 3: What do you need?

Many blue-collar workers join FAVI scarred from past experience of mistrust and command and control. Joining an environment where they are considered trustworthy and where their voice counts is often a groundbreaking experience.

You have full liberty to find a solution, but until you have found one, you are bound to your previous commitments.

four simple statements for the yearly appraisal discussions: State an admirable feature about the employee. Ask what contributions they have made to Sun. Ask what contributions they would like to make at Sun. Ask how Sun can help them.

But such feedback should be given on the spot, all year round, and not left unsaid, waiting for the appraisal discussion at the end of the year.

Instead, people in these companies have a very clear, keen sense of the organization’s purpose and a broad sense of the direction the organization might be called to go. A more detailed map is not needed. It would limit possibilities to a narrow, pre-charted course.

Predictions are valuable in a complicated world, but they lose all relevance in a complex world.

The decision can be reviewed at any time if new data comes up or someone stumbles on a better idea.

In both cases, if there is a workable solution on the table—”workable” meaning a solution that nobody believes will make things worse—it will be adopted.

Is my heart at work? Do I sense that I am at the right place?

We each have full responsibility for the organization. If we sense that something needs to happen, we have a duty to address it. It’s not acceptable to limit our concern to the remit of our roles.

Put supportive structures, practices, and processes in place (lower-right quadrant) Ensure that people with moral authority in the company role-model the behavior associated with the culture (upper-right quadrant) Invite people to explore how their personal belief system supports or undermines the new culture (upper-left quadrant)

There are three ways to help put new cultural elements in place: through practices that support corresponding behavior, through role-modeling by colleagues with moral authority, and by creating a space where people can explore how their belief system supports or undermines the new culture.

Over and over again, the CEO must ensure that trust prevails and that traditional management practices don’t creep in through the back door.

That is the magic of organizations: their processes can lift up employees to adopt behaviors from later stages of consciousness that they might not yet have integrated at an individual level.

Fighting the inner urge to control is probably the hardest challenge for founders and CEOs in self-managing organizations. Over and over again, they must remember to trust.

CEOs that role-model virtues such as humility, trust, courage, candor, vulnerability, and authenticity invite colleagues to take the same risks.

Every time a team presents, a new picture of a desirable future is woven into the collective consciousness.

Through purpose: Individual energies are boosted when people identify with a purpose greater than themselves. Through distribution of power: Self-management creates enormous motivation and energy. We stop working for a boss and start working to meet our inner standards, which tend to be much higher and more demanding. Through learning: Self-management provides a strong incentive for continuous learning. And the definition of learning is broadened to include not only skills but the whole realm of inner development and personal growth. Through better use of talent: People are no longer forced to take management roles that might not fit their talents in order to make progress in their careers. The fluid arrangement of roles (instead of predefined job descriptions) also allows for a better matching of talent with roles. Less energy wasted in propping up the ego: Less time and energy goes into trying to please a boss, elbowing rivals for a promotion, defending silos, fighting turf battles, trying to be right and look good, blaming problems on others, and so on. Less energy wasted in compliance: Bosses’ and staff’s uncanny ability to create policies generates wasteful control mechanisms and reporting requirements that disappear almost completely with the self-management. Less energy wasted in meetings: In a pyramid structure, meetings are needed at every level to gather, package, filter, and transmit information as it flows up and down the chain of command. In self-managing structures, the need for these meetings falls away almost entirely.

Through better sensing: With self-management, every colleague can sense the surrounding reality and act upon that knowledge. Information doesn’t get lost or filtered on its way up the hierarchy before it reaches a decision maker. Through better decision-making: With the advice process, the right people make decisions at the right level with the input from relevant and knowledgeable colleagues. Decisions are informed not only by the rational mind, but also by the wisdom of emotions, intuition, and aesthetics. Through more decision-making: In traditional organizations, there is a bottleneck at the top to make decisions. In self-managing structures, thousands of decisions are made everywhere, all the time. Through timely decision-making: As the saying goes, when a fisherman senses a fish in a particular spot, by the time his boss gives his approval to cast the fly, the fish has long moved on. Through alignment with evolutionary purpose: If we believe that an organization has its own sense of direction, its own evolutionary purpose, then people who align their decisions with that purpose will sail with the wind of evolution at their back.

People might not just reduce or increase the number of hours they work as employees. They might switch between employment (fulltime and/or part-time) and freelance work; they might at others times choose to volunteer, donate money, or temporarily have no involvement at all with an organization, only to come back later.

Many of us sense that the current way we run organizations is deeply limiting.

via English – alper.nl http://ift.tt/2yZX8fD

[suzannemcappsca]

Cooperation with a Competitor

Charlie Irvine

Morton Deutsch, the great social psychologist of common sense, explained the difference between competition and cooperation thus: “if you’re positively linked with another, then you sink or swim together; with negative linkage, if the other sinks, you swim, and if the other swims, you sink.”1)Cooperation and Competition. In M. Deutsch, P. T. Coleman, & E. C. Marcus, eds. (2006) The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. San: Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 23–42

This elegantly explains the challenge facing young mediators in the INADR International Law Student Mediation Tournament at University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, last week; as host I had the pleasure of welcoming 126 students from 15 countries. The model for this event is different from the ICC competition: not only do students act as mediator, advocate and client, but they must co-mediate with a student from another team. In simple terms they’re being asked to cooperate with a competitor. To use Deutsch’s language, as co-mediators they are positively linked, both seeking resolution of the dispute, but as competitors the linkage is negative, with both wanting to progress to the next round. If the other sinks, you swim; if the other swims, you sink.

This is tricky indeed. The fact that they pull it off so well suggests that the tournament’s format taps into something in human nature. For one thing competition isn’t all bad. We love sport and we like winning. The frisson of competing is a fantastic motivator; the levels of preparation and skill on display were evidence of this. Being on home turf I knew most of the judges, who confided how impressed they were by the mediators and advocates. “I was hard pressed to distinguish it from the real thing” said one.

Cooperation and competition At the same time the students are being scored on cooperation with their co-mediator. Here’s an incentive for qualities that we would hope for in any mediator: organisation, planning, listening and old-fashioned courtesy. Deutsch predicts that cooperative social relations will lead to the following: • effective communication – ideas are verbalized and group members can influence each other • friendliness and helpfulness – members are more satisfied with the group and impressed by others’ contributions • coordination of effort, division of labour and high productivity • confidence in one’s ideas and the value that others attach to them, and agreement with the ideas of others • willingness to enhance the other’s power to accomplish group goals • conflicting interests seen as a mutual problem solvable by collaborative effort.

In effect these novice mediators are being primed to behave cooperatively. And they do. Most synchronise their introductions, take turns at questioning and summarising and listen respectfully while the other speaks.

But what if their competitive instincts gain the upper hand? Put yourself in their shoes. If you make your co-mediator look good by letting them finish their thread rather than inserting your own brilliant question, you run the risk of losing. According to Deutsch, when competitive social relations predominate we can expect: • impaired communication • obstructiveness and lack of helpfulness leading to negative attitudes and suspicion • parties unable to divide their work • reduced confidence through repeated experience of disagreement and rejection of ideas • parties seeking to enhance their own power and reduce the other’s • conflict, now seen as best solved by imposing a solution, leading to coercive tactics. Limited defeat may become less acceptable than mutual disaster.

I’ve occasionally seen ‘mutual disaster’ in these tournaments, but mostly the opposite occurs. Students behave as if they’ve known each other for years, showing seamless cooperation in the joint quest for resolution.

This has some fascinating implications: 1) Walking the walk. These novice mediators are doing exactly what we ask our clients to do in every mediation: cooperate with a competitor. By priming and supporting our clients in cooperative behaviour we can help them reap the benefits claimed by Deutsch. Instead of ‘me against you’ it’s ‘together against the problem.’

2) Regaining civility. A perennial debate rages about whether, in lawyer negotiation, tough guys win.2) See for example: Andrea Kuipfer Schneider (2002) ‘Shattering Negotiation Myths: Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Negotiation Style’ Harvard Negotiation Law Review Vol 7 143-234; Nancy A Welsh ‘The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students’ Negotiation Journal 2012 117-145 We are a long way from resolving the question, but if lawyers can be equally effective while acting cooperatively it seems healthy for society, and probably for lawyers themselves. Furthermore, if cooperation tends to induce more of the same behaviour, as Deutsch predicts, lawyers making the first move may be serving rather than harming their clients.

3) Deals that stick. Scholars have puzzled for years over why respectful treatment matters: “Those of a tough-minded bent usually find it almost impossible to believe that politeness could possibly approach the impact of the bottom line, be it a tort award, a criminal sentence, or a job layoff.”3) Robert J MacCoun (2005) Voice, Control and Belonging: the Double-Edged Sword of Procedural Fairness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 171–201 The literature on procedural justice tells us that people are more likely to accept a decision they believe was reached using a fair process. The key marks of a fair process are voice (having a chance to speak), being heard (believing your opinion was heard AND taken into account) and treatment that is respectful and even-handed. The hallmarks of cooperation suggested by Deutsch – effective communication, friendliness and helpfulness, coordination of effort – seem likely to enhance parties’ perception of fair treatment. This in turn makes settlements less likely to unravel, perhaps explaining the counterintuitive findings that people are more likely to comply with a mediated outcome than a court decree. 4) Jennie Long (2003) Compliance in small claims court: Exploring the factors associated with defendants’ level of compliance with mediated and adjudicated outcomes. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 139–153

In this post I’ve attempted to dissect a small sliver of the complex demands the INADR Tournament makes on law students, particularly the delicate knack of cooperation with a competitor. I’ve always found mediation like that: deceptively simple from a distance yet almost infinitely complex under the microscope of detailed examination. We still know so little about the impact of a whole range of factors – a smile, a grimace, length of eye contact (or lack of it – note-takers beware!), a choice phrase, tone of voice, how long we speak, how long we wait in silence, how often we interrupt, how plain our language. To heap further praise on our young mediators, many of them were operating in a language and culture not their own, further complicating their task. I can only offer respect and admiration.

(For the sake of completeness, the first placed mediator team was Middlesex University and the first placed advocate/client team was William & Mary Law School, VA).

References   [ + ]

1. ↑ Cooperation and Competition. In M. Deutsch, P. T. Coleman, & E. C. Marcus, eds. (2006) The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. San: Francisco: Jossey-Bass, pp. 23–42 2. ↑ See for example: Andrea Kuipfer Schneider (2002) ‘Shattering Negotiation Myths: Empirical Evidence on the Effectiveness of Negotiation Style’ Harvard Negotiation Law Review Vol 7 143-234; Nancy A Welsh ‘The Reputational Advantages of Demonstrating Trustworthiness: Using the Reputation Index with Law Students’ Negotiation Journal 2012 117-145 3. ↑ Robert J MacCoun (2005) Voice, Control and Belonging: the Double-Edged Sword of Procedural Fairness. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 171–201 4. ↑ Jennie Long (2003) Compliance in small claims court: Exploring the factors associated with defendants’ level of compliance with mediated and adjudicated outcomes. Conflict Resolution Quarterly, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 139–153

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