Complexity Tools and Terminology.....

Why "Multiple Intelligence" Is a Better Way to Think About Having Smarts...

"When it comes to leaders of organizations, they not only need to have some blend of intelligence themselves, but it's very, very important for them to realize that not everybody who they work with is going to think the same way." (ie btw The Failure of The Obama Administration )


Howard Gardner

Life is not Linear - neither is the stock Market - Understanding Complexity, Chaos, Catastrophe, Cybernetics, Phase Transitions and Binary Moments in Valuation...

An expanded knowledge base and tool kit for the game of Life...

This Idea Must Die...

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck ( 1858 -1947) noted, "A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?

Ideas change, and the times we live in change. Perhaps the biggest change today is the rate of change. What established scientific idea is ready to be moved aside so that science can advance?

Hat tip ~ Edge.org, This Idea Must Die

Complexity

The notion that the economy is an evolutionary system is a radical idea, especially because it directly contradicts much of the standard theory in economics developed over the past one hundred years. It is far from a new idea, however. Evolutionary theory and economics have a long and intertwined history. In fact, it was an economist who helped spark one of Charles Darwin's most important insights. In 1798, the English economist Thomas Robert Malthus published a book titled An Essay on the Principle of Population, as It Affects Future Improvements of Society, in which he portrayed the economy as a competitive struggle for survival and a constant between population growth and humankind's ability to improve its productivity. It was a race that, Malthus predicted, humankind would lose. Darwin read Malthus's work and described his reaction in his biography.

     In October 1838, that is fifteen months after I had begun my systemic enquiry, I happened to read with    amusement "Malthus on Population", and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it once again struck me that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved and unfavorable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species.

Here then I had at last got a theory by which to work.


   Darwin's great insight into the critical role of natural selection in evolution was thus inspired by economics. It was not long after Darwin published his Origin of Species that the intellectual currents began to flow back the other way from evolutionary theorists to economists. In 1898, the economist Thorstein Veblen wrote an article that still reads remarkably well today arguing that the economy is an evolutionary system.