Checking in with Martin Gurri...............

 Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.

And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.

That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”

These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.

Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.

In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.

-as culled from this effort

Let's not stop now...............

 

Humanity's capacity to invent solutions to its problems and to identify how to make things better has proven to be far more powerful than all of its problems combined.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

Ownership......................

 

Does the world happen to you, or do you happen to the world?

Most people wait for permission to solve problems. The subtle message they send is “I don’t care enough to solve this on my own. Tell me what to do.” The world happens to them.

High agency people are different. They care. And because they care, they solve problems without being told. They happen to the world.

High agency people act like owners. Owners see a problem and fix it. They don’t wait. They don’t need permission. They don’t think this is someone else’s job. They don’t think this is hard. They don’t think “I can’t do this, I’ve never done it before.” They don’t think this is someone else’s job.

Act like an owner before you are one. That’s how you become one.

-Shane Parrish, from the November 2 edition

On time and majorities..........

 

Everyone hopes for an immediate solution, but the only solution to social problems comes through time.  We in America always believe we have only to pass a law and everything will be changed. . . . People only obey a law the majority have already decided to obey, and it must be a very large majority.

-Louis L'Amour, Bendigo Shafter

Umm.................no

 

Often, I’m waiting for the biggest Jackpot of all: the spontaneous remission of all my problems without any required effort. Someone suggests a way out of my predicament and I go, “Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I’m doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?”

-Adam Mastroianni, as quoted here

vexing.............................

 

Most of the issues that vex humanity daily—ethnic conflict, arms escalation, overpopulation, abortion, environment, endemic poverty, to cite several most persistently before us—cannot be solved without integrating knowledge from the natural sciences with that of the social sciences and humanities.  Only fluency across the boundaries will provide a clear view of the world as it really is, not as seen through the lens of ideologies and religious dogmas or commanded by myopic response to immediate need.

-Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

perspectives........................

 

The chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on a problem.

-Alain de Botton

problem solving.........................

 Accessing the problem-solving power of your mind is not about pushing; it’s about stopping. Mental processes are at their most effective during times of stillness, but we’ve stopped giving ourselves that opportunity. Because we keep forcing our minds to process, we never give them space to think, and by doing so, we take away their ability to solve.

-as cut-and-pasted from here

those pesky "other people"............

      As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites "have the inclination to think that the world is full of 'problems' to which they should seek 'solutions.' But the world isn't full of problems; the world is full of other people."  Of course, he adds, "there is no 'solution' to the existence of other people.  All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them."

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Let it be...........................

 If it is someone else's problem, you probably don't have the solution.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

perfectly imperfect.....................

      America is great because the people who came before us and built this country were imperfect.  And they knew it.  Their obvious imperfections gave them humility. That is why they envisioned a country where no single imperfect person—or small group of imperfect people—would have all the power.  Instead, all of us—imperfect as we are—would come together and work on problems together and figure things out together.  While each and every one of us is imperfect, the final result of that democratic, constitutional process would achieve the most perfect solutions possible.

-Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland

Stuck...................

 When your are stuck, explain your problem to others.  Often simply laying out a problem will present a solution.  Make "explaining the problem" part of your troubleshooting process.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice For Living:  Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

Wisdom...................

 Do not rely on the cooperation of those who will rarely give it. Search for a solution that is apart from such cooperation. You may be surprised by how easily such solutions can be found.

-Michael Wade

Beware the "correct solution".................

 One idea Friedman articulates better than almost anyone else is how advocacy of the market mechanism is (or at least can and should be) rooted in epistemic humility. It’s not just society that is unfathomably complex – the individuals who make up society are also complex and multifaceted ways technocratic policy can never hope to reflect. His advocacy of markets can be paraphrased as “Look, this social problem is extraordinarily complicated. I don’t know what the best solution is. In fact, even talking about a ‘best’ solution may be senseless, because different solutions will work better for different people and different circumstances. The best approach is to let a thousand flowers bloom and give people the space to work out for themselves how to solve their issues in a way best suited to their own needs and desires.” To be a technocrat is to deny that a problem is too complex for you to understand, to believe that there is a “correct” solution, that you in particular know what that solution is, and that you can effectively use policy to implement that solution by altering the behavior of people you’ve never met in ways you can reliably predict. If you reject the simple-society ontology of a naive realist, you see these kinds of claims as incredibly hubristic. But these are the claims one has to make to advocate a technocratic policy.

-Kevin Corcoran, talking about this book:

Science...................

 Science is an especially sweet and nutritious fruit of the Enlightenment. But an even sweeter and more nutritious fruit is the recognition that truth – including, but not limited to, scientific truth – is only reliably approached without ever being absolutely and forever secured, and approached only through open inquiry, discussion, debate, and tolerance for dissenting opinions and perspectives.

Too many elite intellectuals and public officials today – and, I fear, also too many ordinary men and women – have lost sight of the fact that science and reason are tools for improving our understanding and for supplying us with some information that’s useful for making the complicated and inescapably value-laden trade-offs that, in this vale, we must make. The belief that science is a source of complete and godlike knowledge is not merely mistaken, it’s a toxic fuel of authoritarianism when it’s combined with the false understanding of social problems as being a science project to be ‘solved’ by persons in power.

-Steven Koonin, as culled from here

a work-in-progress............

      Happiness comes from solving problems.  The keyword here is "solving."  If you're avoiding your problems or feel like you don't have any problems, then you're going to make yourself miserable.  If you feel like you have problems that you can't solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable.  The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

     To be happy we need something to solve.  Happiness is therefore a form of action; it's an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher.  It doesn't magically appear when you finally make enough money to add on that extra room to the house.  You don't find it waiting for you in a place, an idea, a job—or even a book, for that matter.

     Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today's problems will lay the foundations for tomorrow's problems, and so on.  True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

-Mark Manson, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*uck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

fast enough...............................

 Many of the world’s problems, I have concluded, were not given to me to solve. . . .

There is however a partial solution to the botheration of modernity. It is to give up on progress, now that it has revealed itself as unmistakably demonic.

To do anything worthwhile, or well, requires time, and space. The progressives demand that we make everything smaller and faster, and quite unfixable: warp-speed interplanetary rocket rides, and little wee implants to control us.

But the world is large, and moving fast enough. By ignoring the experts, we can be happy.

-David Warren, as extracted from here

 

the essence............................

      To me, that is the essence of being an entrepreneur—to not just recognize problems but to provide solutions.

-Sam Zell

Adaptable...................................

 The meaning of rational behaviour depends critically on the context of the situation and there are generally many ways of being rational.  We distinguish axiomatic rationality, as used by economists, from evolutionary rationality, was practiced by people.  Many so-called 'biases' are responses to the complex world of radical uncertainty.  Evolution in this uncertain world has led characteristics which are primarily adaptive to become embodied in human reasoning.  Humans are successful at adapting to the environment in which they find themselves, and have not evolved to perform rapid calculations of well-defined problems at which computers excel.  This is because the problems which humans face, whether sparkling at dinner party conversations or conducting international trade negotiations, are not well-defined problems amenable to rapid calculation.

-John Kay and Mervyn King,  Radical Uncertainty:  Decision-Making Beyond The Numbers