Replying to LO26026 --
Dear LO'ers, dear At,
That was a heavy meal At has served us. A meal that will take several
moons to digest.
If that is so, why then replying, why this reaction?
Well, honestly I cannot give a good and simple answer to that question.
But maybe my motivation could serve.
To give a motivation, I must open myself. I am less scared to do this,
because I am convinced that the readers of At's long contribution will be
aware of the mindmine *judgement* and thus will save me from laughter
and/or excommunication.
I will start with a confessment: When opening my mailbox I am keen to see
if At has written something. Usually that is the case ;-) . I generally
read his contributions with care and interest. That is the result of my
judgement on contributors.
The next thing that I like to share with you are my following thoughts. It
is a little bit 'thinking aloud'. Is my judgement on the contributors
based on form or content, or both? Is it based on the messenger or the
message, or both? How often judgement is based on the messenger? I am not
sure if it is because of my own increasing insights, or if it is realy so.
But in these days I got the impression from politics and newspaper
articles that more and more the messenger is blamed, critisised, or
weighted; not the message.
The nice (or bad/sad) thing of this discussion list is that in most cases
we have not seen eachother, we have never met eachother. Only names,
labels of messages. So this is maybe an important issue: we know eachother
from content, not from our
appearance/form/outlook/voice/skincolour/cloths.
[Rick, maybe this is something to include in your evaluation of LO's - the
fact that judgement based on the messenger plays a less important role
here; the focus on content is higher than in real life]
So I have the vague idea that my judgement is more based on content than
on form, more on the message than the messenger.
It is funny in this respect to quote the last sentence of At's
contribution:
"Please forgive my spelling and other language errors because I am so
tired to focus on them in the text".
In my words: Please, look through the form and see the content.
But I think I know how much effort At has put in the form, because he
knows how important that is and how often the form is the filter-quality
of judgement.
Avoiding judgements is one of the main messages in At's contribution. But
according to me, there is also another message: it is wise to realise the
fact that there is a form and a content side and that we should enrich
ourMental Models with this insight of both sides. But also to realise that
there is an interplay between form and content. Or the *what* and the
*how*, or nominal and seminal names. At has invited me to give some
illustrations of mindmines in geological evolution. There are numerous -
evolution of the earth, the atmosphere, life, rocks, landscapes, etc. And
of course, the evolution of geology as a science. All are full of
mindmines, some of them have been neutralised in the past, some are still
alive, hidden or not. But for the moment I will try to keep it simple.
Maybe later I will write something more on this theme.
I shall give now some examples of mindmines inspired from geology, but
which are common in descriptions of landscapes, so we all could see the
pitfalls.
Some months ago I have written something on sanddunes. Is the word
*sanddune* not a pleonasm?
Is a dune not always a small mountain of sand? Is the word *dune* not
sufficient? Does the word *dune* refers to the form, the content, or both?
This mix is one of the common mindmines in geology, and probably in lots
of other disciplines. It is this MENTAL MODEL that immediately 'shapes'
our mental picture: a medium sized mountain with rounded forms consisting
of loose sandgrains and formed by the wind. Possibly we even have a
certain colour in mind, a complete landscape of beaches and sea or ocean,
certain type of vegetation, etc. So the word *dune* is very rich, a
richness that refers to form AND content. I can destroy this mental
picture with one smashing stroke: there are also snowdunes. Away is the
beach, sand, sea, desert, palmtrees, etc. All are disappeared, apart from
the loose grains and the wind. Is that what remains from the content of a
dune? But still the word simultaneously contains form and content.
That combination of form and content has created a lot of troubles in the
past. Some people refer to a valley if it describes a longitudal
depression, bordered by mountains or hills. Others include also the past
evolution of such longitudal depression in their mental model: the
depression is caused by the erosion of water or ice and preferably, there
should be still a river running through that valley. So again, there is a
purely morphological (form-) description, or a description that combines
form and content (the what AND how). These latter combinations gave
always problems. The East Africa Rift Valley is a longitudal depression,
not always bordered by mountains (it is the high African plateau), and
certainly not caused by erosion. It is a main fault zone, the depression
is caused by a slow split off of the eastern part of the continent from
the rest of Africa.
Another example is a delta. Originally, a word that purely refers to the
triangular form of the mouth of a river. The river Nile is the classical
example. Think also of the /_\ - sign that At has used in many of his
contributions. It is the Greek letter 'delta', a triangel if written as
capital. But this triangular shape is completely lost in the modern mental
model of a river delta. The mouth of a river could have any shape (the
Mississipi has a bird foot mouth ;-))
There are lots of other examples were form and content are mixed in some
way, often because of our mental models. These mental models could differ
from one to the other, but also the insights of the content could change
during time. What was thought in the past as the cause of a certain form,
could be very different from the cause/process/dynamics/the 'how' of more
modern insights.
Circular features on the earth's surface called craters, were in the past
always related to volcanoes. A crater is the 'mouth' of a volcano. When
for the first time circular features wre discovered on the surface of the
moon, the conclusion (judgement?) was made that their is/was volcanic
activity on the moon. Much later the insight grew that these features
could very well be the result of impacts.
As a last example I like to mention the word *sea*. When does a lake
becomes a sea? It is the size (form) that defines the difference. But
where does this transition from one to the other lies exactly? No one
knows. Certainly, this was in the past a problem too. The Latin word for
sea is *mare*. The Roman languages still use words that ar directly
evoluated from this Latin word (mar, mer). In Germany a sea is still
called a *Mer*. But in all other Germanic languages like English and
Dutch, words as *moor* and *meer* refer to lakes, pools, swamps; certainly
not a sea (English) or *zee* (Dutch) which have the meaning of the Latin
*mare*. In Germany, the word *See* refers to a lake! So even the form
description could hide some mindmines.
Judging, making choices is indeed an action fuul of risks. Filtering only
on form is the riskiest; discrimination is the sad result that has caused
so many trouvles in past and present. Judging or filtering only on content
is also risky but occurs seldom. Why? Because the moment one could see
content through the form, one is more keen to have also an eye for
commonness instead of differences. That is at least what I have noticed
these last years. And that is why sstems thinking is so important. I am
glad that Peter Senge has articulated this fact so strongly. I am
convinced that with systems thinking a lot of judgement will be tempered
and thus a lot of mindmines become neutralised.
Thank you At for that heavy meal. I have digested only a very small part
of that meal, which resulted in this reply. It will take much longer to
digest all the meal, to digest the whole of form, content and judgements.
Maybe the result of further digestion will result in a large silence,
avoiding judgements/choices/filtering of myself. Because I still judge,
despite the fact that I do my best to avoid this incredable mindmine.
Best wishes,
dr. Leo D. Minnigh
l.d.minnigh@library.tudelft.nl
Library Technical University Delft
PO BOX 98, 2600 MG Delft, The Netherlands
Tel.: 31 15 2782226
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Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.
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--Leo Minnigh <l.d.minnigh@library.tudelft.nl>
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