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This open, on-line Newsletter is published weekly, every Friday Afternoon at 4:30 PM PST. It is updated with new announcements and articles each week. |
Lewis Works Newsletter The E-zine of Applied General Systems Science By Hugh M. Lewis, PhD, MA, general editor Vol. IV: No. 1 09/12/06 Copyright 2006 ©, Hugh M. Lewis. Facsimiles of this page or parts of this page may be printed and distributed for non-profit research, consulting and educational purposes only, as governed by fair use policy. |
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We have begun a renewed effort at publishing weekly a fourth volume of our Newsletter. Our web-system and entire framework has been consolidated and reconstructed. This is a critical time for the Lewis Works framework, as we are beginning a phase of "stepping out" with the framework into the larger world. We are attempting to accomplish this in a non-aggressive and what can be considered a professionally appropriate manner. We are therefore making serious and concerted efforts at this point in time to put a polish upon whatever we can and to reevaluate all our efforts before the system gets married to the world for richer or poorer. We have in fact given our entire framework a new make over and a new face and body lift.
Criticisms/Comments, then Provide Feedback
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Fool Proofing Human Systems Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me--Confucius Anyone interested in developing long lasting and effective human systems must be first and foremost concerned with the problem of fool-proofing such systems. Only a relatively fool-proof system is in long run an effective system, and the measure of how fool-proof a system may or may not be is itself always relative to the standards that we seek to apply to the system. Such standards themselves may be culturally implicit to our way of living and values and adaptation in the world--in other words, what may be fool-hearty to one person may be fool-proof for another. We might mark the rise of human civilization and the march of human progress by the measure of how relatively fool-proofed systems have been devised and developed over time compared to systems that were in one way or another, and often in many ways, fool-prone and vulnerable to the vagaries of human intelligence. A singular mark of human intelligence is their capacity for prevarication--for sending intentionally misleading signals. Combine this with a tremendous capacity for symbolic manipulation and displacement, and we have the workings of a basic socio-pathic liar. It is not that people cannot be fundamentally trusted some of the time, but that it might be unwise to fundamentally trust people, all the time. All systems we know of are ultimately, in their bottom line, human systems--even if just by the fact of their knowing. However efficient a mechanical system may ideally be, it is less so by the human factors involved in the final formulas for the articulation of that system. If a new system is to work or to failure, we must ultimately look to the human factors in the performance and implementation of that system for the outcomes. The challenge in human systems development seems to be the design and implementation of a system that can be said to be "error" free of all those unpredictable "human factors" that tend to destroy a system otherwise. The Constitution of the United States of America is probably one of the greatest and most "fool proof" charters for a governmental system ever developed. Though it is not perfect and could not have foreseen the future of their own nation, the men who drafted this at the Constitutional Convention adopted the right frame of mind in the effort to so thoroughly balance powers and responsibilities and to prevent any one agency or individual from gaining too much power and control. Human systems seem to stay generally one step ahead of fool-proofing efforts on the web, even in Totalitarian controlled networks like China-Net. Humans appear to have a natural proclivity to test the boundaries of whatever system they are constrained by, and to out-think and "out-wit" any system they are controlled by. This says much for the need for human freedom, to try to figure a way out of whatever box one is put into. I dare say many, especially bright people are motivated more by the challenge of solving a problem than any real desire for freedom--for once gaining their freedom they are generally bored and restless and don't know what to do with it.
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Making Implicit Solutions Explicit The advance of science is marked along its entire trail by the systematic explication of the otherwise implicit patterning of the nature Unknown solutions to problems that may be said to be real already exist in the problem in an implicit manner. If we understand the problem enough, the solution should eventually become self-evident. Sometimes problems have no solution, and are in fact pseudo or false problems. Often these false problems are part of a larger or real problem, but are a problem of focus, definition, or framing of the problem in an appropriate or relevant way. If we tend to define the wind as the breath of God, then we are unlikely to look for mechanical explanations for what causes wind to occur. Complex problems especially may admit of a range of possible alternate solutions, and we may not easily exhaust this range of solutions or ever come to know if the solution we have is the best possible one. There are also what might be called "ambiguous" problem sets (some inherently so, it seems) which may admit of no clear or final solutions, but only of part-whole solutions or more-or-less type solutions that resolve the ambiguity but do not remove it complete. We may never know, with this kind of problem, whether or not the source of our ambiguity of solution is in our own approach to the problem or inherent to the problem in itself. It may be said in general that for any possible system that is possibly real, there must exist at least one optimal solution set that represents a streamlined alternative system of that kind of possibly real general system. In other words, we may find the answers to our problems embedded in the relational patterning of the problem itself, if we know how to frame and structurally abstract the problem--i.e., if we know the right questions to ask. Flight was a problem that, if one had understood properly Bernoullian principles of lift and drag, and the concept of an air-foil cross-section of an air-plane wing, might have been easily solved, even if aeronautical engineers and physicists still debate the exact principles involved, without the kind of trial and error that was historically witnessed during the pre-flight error. These principles came to be applied to powered flight only after airplanes were invented and their basic designs worked out. Humankind had long watched birds in the freedom of flight, and long wished to have the same sense of freedom and power. Though many probably always thought that it was not "God's design" to give a human being wings (except perhaps for angels and messengers) one could not watch a bird in flight without wonderment and imagining oneself in flight as well. The vision of birds in flight against clouds made possible the imagination of the possibility of flight that was perhaps necessary and precursory to our own attempts to actually achieve powered flight. The challenge and trouble with knowledge and science in the world is that we do not know what is possible or not before hand, and we cannot second guess what we are capable of or not based upon what we do not yet know. In other words, we cannot know what is possible or not possible without the knowledge beforehand of what is real and not real. Our world of possibility is bound by the limits of our knowledge, but opens into a wider unknown realm. One important consequence of this fundamental relativity of our knowledge is that we cannot with certainty preclude what we are possible or capable of achieving or not, and not really knowing if things are possible or not always opens the door to investigation, experimentation and attempts at innovation that lead to new solutions hitherto impossible because unknown. |
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Announcements & Updates
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What was true a year and a half ago, is even more true today. We have
returned to the project of Lewis Works meta-systems development, one
might say, with a vengeance and a renewed, revitalized sense of purpose.
We have rethought our entire framework, streamlining much of it, and
further refining the rest. We are in the process of closing old projects
and programs, and inaugurating new ones in their place. We have managed
to consolidate our framework to a new level of efficiency operational
management and project development. We hope in the forthcoming months to
announce many new developments and project undertakings in this space as
more news becomes available.
Some new announcements are in order! * We are working through our web-system and consolidating a great deal of our framework. |
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Lewis Works Mission Preamble
Lewis Works is dedicated to realizing new human adaptive possibilities in order to create alternative long-term frameworks for human & biological systems development on earth and beyond. The primary mission of Lewis Works is to fundamentally empower all human beings, without regard or reference to their individual or cultural differences, so that they may function in a more constructive and non-violent manner by means of their integration within an applied systems framework that enables them to contextualize and focus their independent developmental efforts toward comprehensive solutions to common problems in resource distribution, environmental adaptation, and social-structural interaction. |
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Lewis Works strives to offer a genuinely comprehensive range of services and products for the global e-consumer in an informed, non-aggressive manner. It has taken us time to develop our resources into an integrated framework that will provide largely automated self-service to our members and other customers, bolstered by one-on-one account management and attention to personal details. But persistence & a great deal of patience is finally beginning to pay-off in terms of the emergence of a real web-system with an active presence on the Internet. We act both as a reseller for other providers, and we also are increasing the product range that we actually own or buy ourselves wholesale and then resell. We also provide a range of peripheral options through associate/affiliate accounts. We seek to be as honest and transparent in our dealings and relations with the world as possible, putting as a premium in our transactions building the values of trust and reliability. |
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