This book does something I was not expecting: it directly relates, in a tight DNA-like spiral, the use of open space technology (process is really a better word) to the practice of peace. This is not a book on Quakerism–the author has made an original contribution that has moved me further down the road toward Evolutionary Activism (focus on connecting all humans to all information, not on arriving as specific answers)-but I better understand the value of such books as Practicing Peace: A Devotional Walk Through the Quaker Tradition as a result of this reading.
ALSO unexpected, I found this book to be a handbook for a “Whole Systems” approach to peace and prosperity. The author writes of “Multi-Factorial Development” attempting to do that, but i have the margin notation that putting a bunch of singular discipline experts (one from each discipline) in a room together does not create in any of them the ability to *do* systems thinking (or sustainable design). See Critical Path and The Philosophy of Sustainable Design.
I received this book in pre-publication form so as to offer a blurb for the jacket. Below is my take on this book.This book will simultaneously tease your brain, arouse your emotions, and motivate you as it probes deeply into the soul of man, society, and capitalism as the engine of Western civilization.
The author gifts us with a counter-culture manifesto that resurrects the goodness of capitalism while also connecting to the roots of humanity, of the human soul as a microcosm of the soul of society.
Be patient, the first third of this book will amuse, enlighten, & provoke, at which point it will grab you by the throat and shake your fundamental perceptions of life. The author is compelling in both a scientific sense, weaving psychology, biology, economics, and sociology together; and in an artistic sense, delivering theater of the mind, new visions, poetic turns of phrase page after page, and a massive amount of purpose-laden provocative minutia, all of which culminates in blinding flashes of insight that explain the mind-expanding role of circuses, the failure of religion, and the natural cycles of fission and fusion, splintering apart and coming together.
Of the two reviews, the second more critical review is more helpful.
I am not buying this book, which has a very engaging title, for three reasons:
1. The second review provides clear warning of a light-weight schoolkid apporach to the material.
2. The publisher has failed to provide adequate documentation which combined with the page count leads me to suspect, as a very heavy reader and frequent reviewer, that this is a lite work.
3) The other books tend to confirm this book does not fall into serious non-fiction.
In Its Niche Beyond a Six–In Larger Context a Four
October 11, 2009
Roger Martin
First off, what got me to buy this book does not appear in the book at all–the author on record as saying that Wall Street was not designed to make money for its investors, only for its mandarins–the same is true of how universities are designed, businesses, etc. but that one observation really got my attention. I bought the book before BusinessWeek featured it as one of four in the October 5th edition (Europe version), and after looking the others over, chose this one.
In the larger context of changes to the Earth that now take three years instead of ten thousand years, as an entire literature flourishes on The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, the book is a four for narrow-casting and lack of context, but you can use Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to search and sort among my other 1,400 reviews, so no penalty is warranted, This book will be scored Beyond 6 Stars at PBI/PIB for the simple reason that it addresses the core need of all eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental organizations), to re-design away from the Industrial Era waste (where Six Sigma stops), and to instead envision how the world could and should be, and set out to achieve that–a prosperous world at peace.
This book should be selling for no more than $39.95. I'd like to buy it, but not at this price. As a publisher I can tell you it costs a penny a page to publish a book like this. I am adding this book to my list of books I would buy and review if they were more reasonably priced.
Exquisite in Every Respect, Two-Fifths Equations & Charts, April 3, 2008
Martin A. Nowak
I don't do math, so I must disclose right away that the math was lost on me, except in the context of this equisitely presented book, I am compelled to recognize that mathematics as well as computation science is going to be a major player is the EarthGame, in modeling alternative outcomes for social and cultural complexity, and in cross-fertilizing disciplines by creating a common language.
I tend to be hard on publishers, so in this instance I want to say right away that the Belknap Press of Harvard University has done an absolutely phenomenal job with this book. The paper, the use of color and white space, every aspect of this book is exquisitly presented, and at an affordable price. I therefore recommend this book for content as well as for its artistic context, for both those who love mathematics, and those who do not, but want to understand the promise of mathematics for the future of life.
The text across the book is elegant, clear, easy to understand, and coherent. The summaries at the end of each chapter are in English, and for me at least, obviate the fact that I am mathematically-challenged.
I have a number of notes that merit sharing as encouragement to buy and read this book, one of just two that I found in the right context and price range as I venture into the intersection of modeling social complexity and doing real-time science in the context of an EarthGame where everyone plays themselves. The other book I bought and will read shortly is Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life (Princeton Studies in Complexity). Too many otherwise worthwhile books are grotesquely over-priced, and the authors should release free PDFs online in protest and to have effect on this exciting emergent inter-disciplinary endeavor.
The author stresses early on that Information is what evolves–errors are mutations, mutation plus selection in a noisy (i.e. natural) environment is evolution. I like that idea, and point the reader to Hans Swegen's “The Global Mind: The Ultimate Information Process” (Minerva UK, 1995)which first made the connection for be from DNA to World Brain.
The author inspires with his view that the field of evolutionary dynamics is “on brink of unprecedented theoretical expansion.” I must say, as one who is focused on connecting all people to all information in all languages all the time, I have been slow to understand that while that is a wonderful baseline, only models can project alternative scenarios into the future, and hence, the modeling of the past is but a prelude to the shaping of the future by displaying compelling alternative paths.
The author sees mathematics as a common language that can help disciplines interact, and when they do so, progress occurs. He speaks specifically of disciplinary “cultures” that must understand each other.
Early on he delimits the book, and in the process notes that mathematical biology includes:
+ Reproduction
+ Mutation
+ Selection
+ Random Drift
+ Spatial Movement
Terms of interest (all explained in English not just mathematics):
+ Sequential space
+ Fitness landscape
+ Error threshold
+ Neutral versus random drift
Thoughts that grabbed me across the book (all from the author):
+ Evolutionary game theory is the most comprehensive way to look at the world.
+ Natural selection favors the defectors over the cooperators BUT if there are repeated interactions, cooperation is not assured, but is made possible.
+ Models show alternative scenarios–inclulding coexistence of all.
+ Evolutionary graph theory yields a remarkably simple rule for the evolution of cooperation.
+ Under natural selection the average fitness of the population continuously declines [we're there!]
+ Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation (the collective intelligence world has been calling for reciprocal altruism and a shift to a gift economy with open money and an end to scarcity–I see all this converging).
+ War and peace strategies CAN be modeled (as my own books suggest, the problem is the information asymmetry that Charles Perrow speaks of. Elites make decisions that have consequences for all of us, but they lie to us (935 lies leading to the war on Iraq) and they also externalize costs into the future.)
+ A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL can move an entire population from war to peace.
+ 10 cooperators in a string comprise a sustainable “walker,” and is two such cooperative walkers meet, they can induce a “big bang” in which cooperatives sweep the game away from defectors.
+ Cooperators and defectors can co-exist for near-eternity.
+ Evolutionary graph theory can plot relationships (I think to myself, not only of people to people, but costs to things, time, and space).
+ Language makes infinite use of finite media–bulk of progress in last six hundred million years has been cultural, using language, not genetic.
+ The author credits Noam Chomsky with the Chomsky hierarchy relating language to mathematics. I read most of what Chomsky publishes, and had no idea he had done original work in mathematics back in the day.
+ Learning differs from memorization in that the learner is enabled to acquire generalizations that can then be applied in novel circumstances. I strongly believe that we must radically redirect education toward team learning, project learning, learning to learn, and learning in vivo, one reason I want to map every person, every dollar, every thing, every language, every idea, in Fairfax County.
+ Mathematical analysis of language must combine three fields (at least):
– Formal language theory
– Learning theory
– Evolutionary theory
The author concludes that mathematics is a way to think clearly. I cannot disagree, but as I put the book down, VERY PLEASED with the complete package of such very high quality, I was not convinced that mathematics can do intangible value and cultural nuance is multi-cultural context under stress and with time limitations.
The author provides both a bibliographic essay and a superb extensive bibliography, but if I could change one thing and one thing only in this book, it is that I would integrate the two. I have neither the time nor the inclination to look up each cryptic (Bloom, 1997) in the longer list. I would have preferred to see the actual bibliography organized by chapter, with all books on, for example, “Evolution of Virulence” listed there after the explicatory section. This is a nit.
I learned enough from this book to budget for and demand the full inclusion of evolutionary dynamics in all that the Earth Intelligence Network will strive to accomplish in the next twenty years.
Kudos again to the publisher. Nothing gives me more pleasure, apart from intelligent content, than very high-quality materials, thoughtful editing and lay-out, and honorable pricing. This book is a gem in all respects. BRAVO.
I did not appreciate Stephen Wolfam's A New Kind of Science but treasure the book (another enormous gift to mankind at an affordable price) and urge the mathematically-gifted to take a close look at that work.
I would also point the reader toward Pierre Levy's Information Economy Meta Language (IEML) as one approach to creating a universal dictionary of concepts, easily found on the Internet, and also Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS), easily found at the Bootstrap Institute.
Best in Class Overview–Follow On Volume Warranted, July 23, 2008
Duke Center for Integrative Medicine
Below I list links to two other “alternative” or natural medicine books, and above I post a slide that I created as I contemplate a new book on Health Intelligence.
Unlike the other two books, this book is an overview book that integrates both conventional and “alternative” or natural medicine as commonly developed by both the Chinese (more structured, easier to access and exploit) and the Indian (more verbal and not as documented).
For this book to come out of Duke University (the “Harvard” of the South, but a powerhouse in its own right) is easily worth a fifth star, as Duke appears to be, along with the University of Washington, one of a tiny handful of institutions that is committed to balancing a very unreliable, wasteful, and often deceptive “conventional” medicine program (big phrama and lots of elective surguries that are not evidence-based), with natural cures including lifestyle and behavior or preference patterns that have been proven over centuries in China and India, but deliberately repressed, censored, subverted and scorned by the American Medical Association, which exists largely to protect a very badly broken medical “practice” that is closer to witch doctoring than it is to evidence-based holistic health.
I am very pleased to see that the publisher and Amazon have made it possible to “look inside” this excellent book, so my normal remediation is not necessary. This book is a “class act” in every possible sense of the word, from content to organization to presentation to glosary and index. It is true that “encyclopedia” may not be completely appropriate, “overview” might be a better term, but I have to give all those associated with this book real credit for taking the giant leap forward in integrating Part I, a Catalog of Health Conditions with Part II, Complementary & Alternative Therapies.
The book earns one of its stars for its emphasis on Prevention. I fear that more critical reviewers are missing the paradigm-shift in the forest due to their micro-focus on a specific condition about which they have deep knowledge. I regard this book as a true pioneering endeavor, one with huge credibility, and one extremely meritorious and worthy of follow-up.
The volume I would really like to see next from Duke would examine the true costs to society, and the true costs to heal (with an emphasis on the cost of prevention and the cost of natural cures), for each of the diseases covered in volume one. If we can articulate, in cold hard proven numbers, the costs, the common sense of the public will take us to the next leve.
Peace Through Open Space
