Saturday, April 25, 2009

Anti-empiricists doomed to defeat?

So our faculty in Antioch C3, a lot of New Agers, and a lot the New Age Left, believe we can change ANYTHING through feedforward, to hell with empiricism since thats just derivative of Western civilization.

So I came across this:

"Grand strategy, according to John Boyd (arguably America's best military strategist), is a quest to isolate your enemy's (a nation-state or a global terrorist network) thinking processes from connections to the external/reference environment. This process of isolation is essentially the imposition of insanity on a group. To wit: any organism that operates without reference to external stimuli (the real world), falls into a destructive cycle of false internal dialogues. These corrupt internal dialogues eventually cause dissolution and defeat. " (context link)

Does this mean the Mystical Morons are doomed due to a deterioration of meaningful dialogue?

1 comment:

B. F. Galbraith said...

You and I got the same notice at the C3 in the second year of our program that stated "we do not see evidence that you have completed a change project as required for your master's thesis project." Your reaction was to wash your hands of the whole school. My reaction was to bend over backwards to explain to them that though I didn't invent any new age religious ceremonies, the act of "starting a new worker cooperative" did in fact include a great deal of "organizational psychology stuff."

If they are so far gone that something as straight forward and obvious and lefty-left as starting a worker cooperative that focuses exclusively on open source solutions is an appropriate "change project" for the "Center for Creative Change," then I have to say that they are extraordinarily and cripplingly isolated EVEN FROM THE REST OF THE FAR FLUNG LEFT.

At the same time Bastyr students were showing up to ask me to speak at a conference they were holding, my instructors couldn't tell you A) what was significant about what I was doing, OR B) what Bastyr university even was.

Another example is the cancellation of "change project organizations night", where they couldn't get students and organizations to hook up at C3 events effectively.

This is absolutely reflected in the way Antioch University is ran: consider for example that they have no idea A) how they can hold on to technology professionals, but worse B) can't see why they should hold on to technology professionals.

In the inevitable upcoming war between HR and IT, Antioch will be one of the bloodier battlefields with the most casualties.