#complexity
10 discoveries · Hand-picked discoveries from the open web, newest first.
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The new stuff we are doing in the Art of Hosting
Lots of new stuff is bubbling up into the Art of Hosting we teach, including different ways of teaching. Read on to find out more.
Chris Corrigan · EN
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Dialogic containers and the danger of metaphors
I'm writing about dialogic containers these days. They are tricky to describe, and in the same way that Mike asserts a sophisticated understanding of systems, it's important to find helpful metaphor for a dialogic container. As facilitators we are used to using the world "container" to describe something that we can sense, feel or even physically see. The term does not convey the nature of an actual thing, but if you ask people what they mean by container you find yourself in a metaphorical world. And also, it feels like a finger pointing at the moon. Dialogic containers are important to dialo
Chris Corrigan · EN
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Cynthia Kurtz on why we should do a participatory project
When you worry that something you care about is going out of fashion, but you have no evidence for such a thing happening, the best course is to make the best argument you can for it as if the decline were happening. And then, if the decline is not happening, your best argument will still be useful. So I thought: What is my best argument for participation? What would entice a listening-weary, stay-at-home population to leave home and travel to the other earths of the people around them? How about an appeal to enlightened self-interest? Let’s see what I can ...
Chris Corrigan · EN
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Cynthia Kurtz on PNI
Two Cynthia Kurtz posts in a row! Participatory Narrative Inquiry has been a very powerful way to connect my own facilitation, evaluation/research and change work in my practice. We’ve done PNI projects that have lasted from a few days to five years. Narrative capture and sense making creates a grounded and co-owned process for planning, creating change, adjusting strategy or simply understanding a current state. It works with the capacities and capabilities of the people in the organization or community themselves to do the work and so it is a good way to suspect the lure of the intervenor. .
Chris Corrigan · EN
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Solving for uncertainty
A really good post from Chris Mowles that talks about how we seek to outsource our discomfort with uncertainty to an algorithm or a method or a process. Why is it so scary that unexpected things might happen when we get together to try and achieve something, unless we have things all planned out? Where is the room for the spontaneous, the novel and the eccentric? Two contrasting recent events have made me think about the technologies that we apply to meeting together, that aspire to create what my late colleague Doug Griffin used to refer to as the ...
Chris Corrigan · EN
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The Mathocalypse
More Updates (Oct. 12): Jeffrey Ketchersid has used Claude Code agents to show that BusyBeaver(10) exceeds Graham’s number, beating the previous best result that BB(13) does so. In response to my request, a couple days later Jeffrey also used Claude agents to show that the value of BB(335) is independent of ZFC, improving the best […]
Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimized · EN
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Podcasts about the Topic
“The Topic” being, of course, the Mathocalypse, except sometimes with AI alignment and even quantum computing and complexity theory and other stuff thrown in. With Ryan Peterman: Notably, near the end of the above podcast, you can watch my live reaction to the news that an Anthropic model found algorithms for the 3SUM and the […]
Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimized · EN
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Podcasts about the Topic: Part II
As always, I strongly recommend 2x speed, which compensates somewhat for my verbal infelicities! New! More podcasts keep dropping! This one is with the AI alignment researcher Roman Yampolskiy, about … well, AI alignment, plus the Mathocalypse, plus quantum computing, plus whether the universe is a simulation, and I forget what else! Man do the […]
Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimized · EN
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Talk by Dana Moshkovitz: The Unique Games Conjecture – Proved (!!?)
In my “Mathocalypse” post, I mentioned that my wife Dana—who’s been working on Subhash Khot’s Unique Games Conjecture since ~2009, for the entire time I’ve known her—has for the past few weeks (while on sabbatical at the Simons Institute in Berkeley) been spending essentially all of her time laboring to understand OpenAI’s recent proof of […]
Scott Aaronson Shtetl-Optimized · EN