Thinking in the ragged gap between Yes and No

[danieldwilliam]

Benoît Mandelbrot has died at the age of 85.

Not a bad knock.

I honour him for the gift he gave me of fractal geometry.

Fractal geometry was one of the things that changed how I thought about the world.

I used to think the universe followed simple rules simply and therefore everything was a soluble if you understood the rules and had a good enough model.

Two things excited me about fractals. 

 I liked the idea of self-similarity. Once I the had the idea that some objects seen at one magnification look much the same when viewed at any other magnification I began to see examples all over the place. Road networks, trees, river systems, the examples are all round us.

Most important for me was the idea that simple rules could give rise to very complex situations and that it was often difficult to tell in advance if a point was inside a set or not. This was a crucial change for me in the way I thought about the world. If the simple parts can give rise to complex wholes and the margin between In and Out, between Yes and No is very, very, very fine.

This, combined with the fact that the margin of error for measurement is often big enough to change the outcome, gives rise to Chaos and this makes the world much more interesting and the tools we need to understand it much more subtle.

We are guessing when we try and manipulate complex systems and complex systems are all about us. We may avoid some traps for unwary if we approach systems thinking they be complex and very difficult to understand or manipulate. We are thinking in the ragged gap between Yes and No.

Also, complex systems are much more beautiful then Newtonian mechanism, no matter the familiar allegiance to the latter.

The world is much more complex than it first appear and sometimes you have get right into the detail and sometimes you have to stand right back.

Comments

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I struggle to write long, fluid prose on the touch screen of my iPhone. LJ is also particularly difficult to use on the phone (tho’ I have hopes that the LJ iPhone app will help.

If I think of something I want to write on LJ I occasionally use the title as a place holder until I’m near a device with a proper keyboard.

This is going to be a post about Mandelbrot Sets, or more about the effect that learning a little about Mandelbrot sets had on how I think about the world.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Don't have a lot to this except that I agree with it.

I think Mandelbrot and his work has hugely formed my approach to organisational consulting. It just seems to me so blindingly obvious that people cannot be modelled linearly. I do not understand why it isn't blindingly obvious to everyone, and it still upsets me that it is so difficult to explain and communicate to people who haven't been lucky enough to have this kind of education.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Add to. A lot to ADD TO this.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Bit of Sharon Stone moment there.

If you hadn't drawn attention to it I'd not have noticed the missing words.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

By a curious stroke of chance Bluebird's homework this half term was to a group presentation on a famour mathematician. She got Pascal and the group next to her got Mandlebrot so we spent a little time talking about Madlebrot sets and looking at them on the phone.

I actually used the words "This is the really good bit" about a fly through video of the classic Mandlebrot Set.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

Has she come to terms with her daddy's geek quotient?

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I think not yet, tho' she pretends to find me more embarrassing than I think she actually does.

The ful realisation of her father's actual geekiness will occur shortly before she realises that she is her father's daughter.

[widgetfox.livejournal.com]

I can see how that would work.