> On Mar 5, 7:27 am, TruthSlave home.com> wrote:
>

>>Immortalist wrote:
>>

>>> tacit knowledge is knowledge that people carry in their minds and is,
>>> therefore, difficult to access. Often, people are not aware of the
>>> knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others. Tacit
>>> knowledge is considered more valuable because it provides context for
>>> people, places, ideas, and experiences. Effective transfer of tacit
>>> knowledge generally requires extensive personal contact and trust.
>>>
>>> Tacit knowledge is not easily shared. One of Polanyi's famous
>>> aphorisms is: "We know more than we can tell." Tacit knowledge
>>> consists often of habits and culture that we do not recognize in
>>> ourselves. In the field of knowledge management the concept of tacit
>>> knowledge refers to a knowledge which is only known by an individual
>>> and that is difficult to communicate to the rest of an organization.
>>> Knowledge that is easy to communicate is called explicit knowledge.
>>> The process of transforming tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge is
>>> known as codification or articulation.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_knowledge
>>>
>>> Hierarchical Incompetence: A key feature of large hierarchical
>>> organizations is the over-simplification of issues and the loss of
>>> tacit knowledge about issues as they ascend the hierarchy, and the
>>> tendency for lateral communication across the various departments,
>>> fiefdoms, etc to be stifled either actively by management, or by self-
>>> imposed isolation.
>>>
>>> Conversely the hierarchies only easily deliver simple messages which
>>> cascade down to the lower levels. These messages tend to be
>>> inappropriate or counter-productive to the goals of the hierarchy and
>>> open to inadvertent mis-interpretation as they arrive at the
>>> organizational "sharp end," as reality is inevitably much more complex
>>> than envisioned by those at the peak of the hierarchy. Often
>>> unofficial actions based on local tacit knowledge and lateral
>>> communications compensate for these inevitable communications and
>>> conceptual failures no matter how well-intentioned the original
>>> policies.
>>>
>>> Hitler's' Third Reich was famous for bitter inter-departmental
>>> rivalries, personal vendettas and lack of co-operation actively
>>> fostered by Hitler himself, but these communications failures may have
>>> cost him the war.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hierarchical_incompetence
>>>
>>> The relevance paradox occurs where individual professionals or a group
>>> of professionals are unaware of certain essential information which
>>> would guide them to make better decisions, and help them avoid
>>> inevitable, unintended and undesirable consequences. These
>>> "professionals" will seek only the information and advice they believe
>>> is the bare minimum amount require as opposed to what they actually
>>> needed to fully meet their own or the organization's goals.
>>>
>>> For example; civil engineers from the 1950s onwards unwittingly caused
>>> a massive increase in the debilitating water borne infection
>>> schistosomiasis (Bilharzia) for locals as a result of irrigation
>>> schemes that lacked simple low cost counter-measures built in, simply
>>> because they had no knowledge of these counter-measures. A decade
>>> later the UN publishes guidelines explaining these cheap counter
>>> measures and how they should be necessary to built-in to the
>>> structures of the irrigation schemes.
>>>
>>> The civil engineers were victims of the relevance paradox because they
>>> only thought they need to know about concrete, water flows, etc. and
>>> not how to restrict velocities to prevent the snail species which
>>> carried the disease from multiplying...
>>>
>>> ...The relevance paradox can and usually does apply to all
>>> professional groups and individuals in numerous ways.
>>>
>>> The notions of IRGs or Information Routing Groups and Interlock
>>> research are designed to counter this paradox by the promotion of
>>> lateral communication and the flow of Tacit knowledge.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relevance_Paradox
>>>
>>> Unintended consequences refer to situations where an action results in
>>> an outcome that is not (or not limited to) what the actor intended.
>>> The unintended results may be foreseen or unforeseen, but they should
>>> be the logical or likely results of the action. For example, students
>>> of history often conjecture that if the Treaty of Versailles had not
>>> imposed such harsh conditions on Germany, World War II would not have
>>> occurred. From this perspective, one might consider the war an
>>> unintended consequence of the Treaty.
>>>
>>> One may class unintended consequences into roughly three types:
>>>
>>> a positive unexpected benefit, usually referred to as serendipity or a
>>> windfall
>>>
>>> a potential source of problems, according to Murphy's Law used in
>>> Systems Engineering
>>>
>>> a negative or a perverse effect, which may be the opposite result of
>>> what is intended
>>>
>>> Discussions of unintended consequences usually refer to the third
>>> situation of perverse results. This situation often arises because a
>>> policy has a perverse incentive and causes actions contrary to what is
>>> desired.
>>>
>>>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_unintended_consequences
>>>
>>>
>>>http://youtube.com/watch?v=YDh8M8KPH48

>>
>>Great post!
>>
>>There seems to be two issues here. One, on the lack of competent
>>feedback mechanisms, and two, the basic flaw of human selfishness,
>>which in some cases tends to do only as much as it needs do. Just
>>enough justify its function by the narrowest of definitions.
>>
>>Even then feedback, where it lacks feedback, can become counter
>>productive. If its not well thought, or there is no element in
>>its use for 'tacit knowledge', the exercise of feedback can
>>dominates to the extent that it becomes the primary focus. A
>>confusion of secondary and primary objectives.
>>
>>A case in point are SATs. Here the success of learning is judged
>>by the ability to pass SATs, in practice Knowledge [of] then
>>dominates at a cost of understanding or analytical thought.
>>Education then suffers when the objective of SATS are lost,
>>or subject to that selfish flaw in the human character which
>>manipulates the exercise at a cost to its function.
>>
>>Instead of an improvement in education one gets an improvement
>>to the perception of an improving education. Year on year
>>improvement then becomes a small matter of redefining the SATs.
>>
>>Feedback works in nature because there is no thought, no room
>>for self. Nature is objective. Where there is no feedback one
>>finds a form of cancer, consumption without sight of its end.
>>
>>[My apologies for new thread, but my 'sandbox' of a server,
>>has blanked the thread -- so much for our managed views...]

>
>
> Quite alright, you made some excellent points along the lines I was
> thinking actually.
>
> Actually that is a very profound way of looking at it and it seems to
> cut across many potentially wide distinctions. If the distinctions are
> spread to wide choices may favor a center point, to thin, any point.
> Actually I think that it is an interplay, an intermixing of extremes
> and excesses, as Aristotle would say, between individualism/
> communitrianism, being/becoming, top-down/bottom-up, rigid
> hierarchical ordering/open systems (closed body plan vs open
> ecosystem)
>
> There is a degree organizationally closed and open systems but I don't
> know how inversely proportional information flows in an open/closed
> manner. Materials/information pass through the organizational
> structure which may or may not influence the organizational structure
> iteslf. Feedback may or may not influence or change or both. Sir Fred
> might say that the situation is complex.
>
> Here are just two examples of Flexibility in applying both or many at
> once;
>
> MULTISTABLE SYSTEM - within a multistable system, subsystem adapts to
> subsystem in exactly the same way as an animal adapts to its
> environment.
>
> (l) The environment is assumed to consist of large numbers of
> subsystems that have many states of equilibrium. The environment is
> thus assumed to be polystable.
>
> (2) Whether because the primary joins between the subsystems are few,
> or because equilibria in the subsystem are common, the interaction
> between subsystems is assumed to be weak.
>
> (3) The organism coupled to this environment will adapt by the basic
> method of ultrastability, i.e., by providing second-order feedbacks
> that veto all states of equilibrium except those that leave each
> essential variable within its proper limits.
>
> (4) The organism's reacting part is itself divided into subsystems
> between which there is no direct connection. Each subsystem is assumed
> to have its own essential variables and second order feedback.
>
> http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/MULTIS_SYSTE.html
>
> There are two major ways to approach any situation: "top-down" and
> "bottom-up". An understanding of how these two tactics complement each
> other can help reveal when each is most appropriate.
>
> A top-down style moves from general to specific. It begins with the
> big picture, overarching principles, wide-angle views, and then zooms
> in to reveal increasing levels of fine detail. When something is
> clearly feasible but demands a coordinated approach, with harmonizing
> contributions from multiple sources, top-down methods make a lot of
> sense.
>
> A bottom-up style, on the other hand, goes from atomic scales toward
> the macroscopic world. It begins with fundamentals, first principles,
> infinitesimal slivers, and then puts those building blocks together
> to create the whole. When something depends utterly on getting every
> detail right, as in proving a mathematical theorem, and when the
> pieces are relatively independent modules which can be clicked
> together in a straightforward fashion, then bottom-up methods make a
> lot of sense.
>
> Flexibility in applying both top-down and bottom-up approaches can
> offer extraordinary power.
>
> http://zhurnal.net/ww/zw?TopDownBottomUp