I am Charles

I was asked to introduce myself in an online conference I’m attending for Fellows of the Imaginal Institute. This was the post I made:

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I am Charles

 

My concern is the human mind in service
to an open heart, and my problem
is that the heart picks issues rich in ambiguity
and multiplicity of voices, tensions
and torsions tugging not one way but
in many directions, even dimensions, as does
a spider’s web weighed down with dew –
to clarify which a mind’s abacus is required

equal in subtlety to subtlety itself, while
in all our thinking and talking, one
effect follows one cause from question
to conclusion down one sentence or white
paper — whereas in counterpoint,
Bach’s fugal voices contain their dissonance.

Mapping missing links

Jogged by a mention in John Robb’s blog, I found an interesting quote in a piece Rick Bookstaber wrote for Institutional Investor on The Myth Of Non Correlation:

What catches many investors off guard and leads them to make the “100 year” sort of comment is not the behavior of individual markets, but the concurrent big and unexpected moves among markets. It’s the surprising linkages that suddenly appear between markets that should not have much to do with one other and the failed linkages between those that should march in tandem. That is, investors are not as dumbfounded when volatility skyrockets as when correlations go awry. This may be because investors depend on correlation for hedging and diversifying. And nothing hurts more than to think you are well hedged and then to discover you are not hedged at all.

Here’s the money quote from the hipbone perspective:

It’s the surprising linkages that suddenly appear between markets that should not have much to do with one other and the failed linkages between those that should march in tandem.

Simply put, the issue is mapping the world in a way that corresponds with the world’s linkages, that’s not surprised by them… and what do you do, then, about black swans, about surprise?

Spiders and dewdrops

Spiders and dewdrops do a pretty convincing job of portraying a certain level of complexity in this node-and-edge diagram of the global situation.

When, say, Castro hands over power to his brother, or Musharraf has to give up control of the Pakistani army, it’s like snipping a couple of threads in that spiders web — and the droplets fall this way and that, carom into one another, the fine threads they’re on swing down and around until a new equilibrium is reached…

But try thinking that through in terms of Cuba and Pakistan before breakfast one morning if you’re Secretary of State, with a linear Cold War mind, Russia going through its own changes, and al-Qaida and associates training and recruiting in the background…

About hipbone out loud

Understanding is modeling, mapping.

In this blog, I want to capture the glimpses I have of an extraordinary world, each glimpse being a tiny area of a vast map — certainly more sophisticated than any individual can generate with data visualization tools and modeling software, perhaps more complicated than a single culture can grasp as a collective — but important, as it is the matrix in which our individual and cultural life-maps fall.

You will find I favor quotes and anecdotes as nodes in my personal style of mapping — which lacks the benefits of quantitative modeling, the precision with which feedback loops can be tracked, but more than compensates in my view, since it includes emotion, human identification, tone of voice.

The grand map I envision skitters across the so-styled “Cartesian divide” between mind and brain. It is not and cannot be limited to the “external” world, it is not and cannot be limited to the quantifiable, it locates powerful tugs on behavior within imagination and powerful tugs on vision within hard, solid fact.

Doubts in the mind and runs on the market may correlate closely across the divide, and we ignore the impacts of hope, fear, anger and insight at our peril.