That's
fascinating! Usually when the New Yorker does a long piece on some obscure
subject they really come through with a marvelous well told tale. Maybe I
should look again sometime, but this one really seemed
pointless. For all appearances, though, it seems like it
should be right down my alley, since 'observing everything at once'
has some similarity to my way of breaking with conventional
science. The British "Mass-Observation" movement of the thirties, however, goes about
turning ad-hoc community groups into 'universal observers', with no apparent
method I could see in it at all.
What I actually use as a method for
systems research could also seem to declare the main subject to be 'everything
that's meaningless'. I start by defining my subject
as everything that is left out of approximations, the large volume of
"wash water and shavings" left over from converting data into theory, carted out
of the science lab and dumped somewhere to be forgotten.
Yes, that's a large set, fun to puzzle about as a whole, but not very
useful that way. Then I switch strategies and 'go fishing' in
it, instead of explaining. Metaphorically, when you use a hook
designed to pull out things that have loops, what you pull out is a wide
variety of quite unexpected living things, because that's the kind of soil
in which they thrive! The stuff left out of
approximation is precisely where you find what's unstable and
misbehaves, which includes the half formed processes that are the beginning
and end of everything coherent and lots of other neat
stuff! It's a great resource.
Is
there any chance these flipped out British 'mass observers' had some notion of
that sort of thing?
Phil Henshaw ¸¸¸¸.·´ ¯ `·.¸¸¸¸
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-----Original Message-----At FRIAM today I was chatting with Mike (Agar) about the "Mass Observation" movement, an eccentric Enlish take on anthropolgy from the 1930s. Here's a link to a New Yorker article about it: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/content/articles/060911crat_atlarge
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Robert Holmes
Sent: Friday, September 15, 2006 11:39 PM
To: FRIAM
Subject: [FRIAM] Mass observation
Robert
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