Quotes about interaction
page 2

“Unfortunately, the truth is usually the first casualty in an interaction between two people.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 52

“String theory was not invented to describe gravity; instead it originated in an attempt to describe the strong interactions, wherein mesons can be thought of as open strings with quarks at their ends. The fact that the theory automatically described closed strings as well, and that closed strings invariably produced gravitons and gravity, and that the resulting quantum theory of gravity was finite and consistent is one of the most appealing aspects of the theory.”

David Gross (1941) American particle physicist and string theorist

"Einstein and the Search for Unification", p. 10 https://books.google.com/books?id=rEaUIxukvy4C&pg=PA10, in The legacy of Albert Einstein: a collection of essays in celebration of the year of physics (2007)

Strong

“Several features or attributes of organizations can therefore be recognized
# Organizations are social institutions (entities) composed of sets of persons with established patterns of interaction.
# Organizations develop to achieve specific goals. Therefore, organizations are social creations that require order and cooperation.
# Organizations are social instruments possessing relatively identifiable boundaries and existing on a relatively permanent basis. While this final point is perhaps less clear than were those that precede it, the identification of fixed boundaries (for instance, the distinction between members and nonmembers) and continuity (that is, existence and identity over time) provide a conceptual framework for the study of organizational activity.”

Arthur G. Bedeian (1946) American business theorist

Source: Organizations: Theory and Analysis, 1984, p. 3-4 (1984: 2-3)

Study, Time, Personality

“For a person of understanding, interacting with children is endlessly interesting. Here one sees the book of nature thrown open, stripped of artificiality.”

Adolph Freiherr Knigge book Über den Umgang mit Menschen

Der Umgang mit Kindern hat für einen verständigen Menschen unendlich viel Interesse. Hier sieht er das Buch der Natur in unverfälschter Ausgabe aufgeschlagen.
Über den Umgang mit Menschen (1788)

Children, Books, Understanding, Nature

“[The particular concern of the information scientist] is with the process as a whole – the interaction between the three elements [information behaviour, records, channels] that leads to people becoming informed.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Meeting the challenge (2009), p. xxiii.

People

“Surely, after 62 years, we should have an exact formulation of some serious part of quantum mechanics? By 'exact' I do not of course mean 'exactly true'. I mean only that the theory should be fully formulated in mathematical terms, with nothing left to the discretion of the theoretical physicist… until workable approximations are needed in applications. By 'serious' I mean that some substantial fragment of physics should be covered. Nonrelativistic 'particle' quantum mechanics, perhaps with the inclusion of the electromagnetic field and a cut-off interaction, is serious enough.”

John S. Bell (1928–1990) Northern Irish physicist

Against 'measurement' (1990)

Mathematics, Parting

“Most of the network related programming in games has to do with providing a good interactive experience when playing over the internet. This matter is very different from serving web pages. The primary concern there is to handle connection latency, latency fluctuations, packet loss and bandwidth limitations, and pretty much hide all of that from the player's experience.”

Timothee Besset French software programmer

Quoted in Brian Boyko, "ID Software Developer Timothee Besset on Network Performance in Games" http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2007/01/id_software_developer_timothee.html Network Performance Daily (2007-01-29).

Game, Loss

“The enterprise engineer must be a leader, a designer, and a synthesizer. He is a doer. He understands theory as a guide to practice. He must concern himself with human organization because the pace and success of technology are becoming more dependent on interaction with the social system and less on scientific discovery. In private as well as public research and development, such men must find ways to reverse the deterioration of ethics and efficiency. They will strengthen the information links between physical design and the public so that technology can better serve society. In the public sector they must show the level of wisdom and leadership that can co-ordinate great engineering projects with politics. They will recognise that informing the public and becoming a nucleus for crystallising public opinion is even more important in many programmes than is the underlying science.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Engineering Education and Engineering Practice in the Year 2000 (1967), p. 137

Wisdom, Men, Way, Understanding

“Baritone Vytautas Juozapaitis was perfectly full of himself as Don Giovanni. His hilarious interactions with sidekick Leporello, played by the animated bass-baritone Stefano de Peppo were the highlights of the show.”

Vytautas Juozapaitis (1963) Lithuanian opera singer

"Mozart Company proves opera can be fun", The Star Presss (November, 2004) http://www.jennykellyproductions.com/prod_mozart_review.htm

Animals

“Scientists are trained to be rational and we are not trained to interact with people and develop social skills. Politics is about being able to convince people. Scientists could do with learning how to do that.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan interview: 'It takes courage to tackle very hard problems in science

People, Learning, Training

“Our central argument is that industrial relations practices and outcomes are shaped by the interactions of environmental forces along with the strategic choices and values of American managers, union leaders, workers and public policy decision makers.”

Thomas A. Kochan (1947) American academic

Source: The transformation of American industrial relations, 1986, p. 5

Decision

“Throughout life, all people are engaged in activities – practical or mental – trying to solve problems, activities that themselves give rise to problems. To solve these problems, people need knowledge. They can acquire this personal knowledge in two main ways. First, they can interrogate the world – natural and social – by means of closer observation, deeper analysis, controlled experiment, all forms of cognitive interaction. Second, they can enrich their personal knowledge by communicative interaction with the stock of public knowledge that mankind has built up over the millenia, thus acquiring what we may call information. The activities in which people engage also produce two other kinds of knowledge: that embodied in people (skills) and that embodied in their artefacts.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Brian Vickery (2005) " Information science, in 3 parts http://web.archive.org/web/20100201154159/http://www.lucis.me.uk/infosci1.htm" on lucis.me.uk, 2005.

Life, People, World, Way

“We say that the words were smooth, caressing, hard, sharp, and so on: all words that refer to body touching. Indeed we can kill or elate with words as body experiences. We kill or elate with words because, as co-ordinations of actions, they take place through body interactions that trigger in us body changes in the domain of physiology.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Reality; The Search for Objectivity or the Quest for a Compelling Argument (1988), p. 48 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989).

Change

““Prosthetic Morality Enforcement. The idea is that by analogy, if a part of your body is deficient or missing, you can use a prosthetic limb or artificial organ. Well, our ability to make moral judgements is hard-wired, but it’s been so far outrun by the demands of complex civilization that it can’t keep up. For example…have you ever wondered why discussions in chat rooms or instant messaging turn nasty so easily? Or wander off topic? It’s because the behavioural cues we use to trigger socially acceptable responses aren’t there in a non-face-to-face environment. If you can’t see the other primate, your ethical reasoning is impaired because you can’t build a complete mental image of them—a cognitive frame. It’s why identity theft and online fraud are such a problem: There’s no inhibition against robbery if the victim is faceless. So we need some kind of prosthetic framework to restore our ability to interact with people on the net as if they’re human beings we’re dealing with in person.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 26, “Liz: It’s Complicated” (pp. 287-288)

People, Idea, Fraud, Problem

“Edward Snowden said that if we want to protect ourselves against government agencies scraping our data, we should get off Dropbox, Facebook, and Google and that we should “search for encrypted communication services” because they “enforce your rights.” Few have taken his advice. Zombies can’t be deprogrammed. The social media apparatus beckons us and we become addicted, joining the billion-plus strong for whom a life without social media is an impossibility. Social contacts, dating prospects, job opportunities, communications with loved ones—just about every interaction we have—flows through social media. For most of us it isn’t a choice; it’s a necessity. Even Snowden couldn’t resist: on October 6, 2015, he joined Twitter.”

Kenneth Goldsmith (1961) American writer

Wasting Time on the Internet, 2016

Love, Life, Search, Communication

“Making drawings to indicate the many elements in any human situation is something which has characterized SSM from the start. Its rationale lies in the fact that the complexity of human affairs is always a complexity of multiple interacting relationships; and pictures are a better medium than linear prose for expressing relationships. Pictures can be taken in as a whole and help to encourage holistic rather than reductionist thinking about a situation.”

Peter Checkland (1930) British management scientist

Source: Systems thinking, systems practice: includes a 30-year retrospective, 1999, p. 16

Thinking, Help, Drawing

“Now if you see that it is inconceivable that anything should exist, it is evident that at least one inconceivable fact is there. That is to say, that which exists is not limited to the conceivable. Since the inconceivable is there, it is impossible to set any limit to the quantity of inconceivableness which may be present in the situation. Now were the existence of anything consistently to remind you of the fact of inconceivability, since it is impossible to live without interacting with a large number of existing things, it would be impossible for you to feel in the same way about the conceivable.”

Celia Green (1935) British philosopher

Advice to Clever Children (1981)

Way, Feeling

“In principle, every social situation involves strategic interaction among the participants. Thus, one might argue that proper understanding of any social situation would require game-theoretic analysis. But in actual fact, classical economic theory did manage to sidestep the game-theoretic aspects of economic behavior by postulating perfect competition, i. e., by assuming that every buyer and every seller is very small as compared with the size of the relevant markets, so that nobody can significantly affect the existing market prices by his actions.”

John Harsanyi (1920–2000) hungarian economist

Source: "Games with Incomplete Information," 1997, p. 136

Behavior, Game, Understanding, Perfection

“I maintain that learned orienting interactions, coupled with some mode of behavior that allowed for an independent recursive expansion of the domain of interactions of the organism, such as social life… and/or tool making and use, must have offered a selective basis for the evolution of the orienting behavior that in hominids led to our present-day languages.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 31.

Life, Behavior, Learning

“Basic ingredients of the decision-making focus include, then: (1) a process approach; (2) a conception of tensions as inherent in the process; and (3), a renewed concern with the role and workings of man's enlarged cortex seen as a complex adaptive subsystem operating within an interaction matrix characterized by uncertainty, conflict, and other dissociative (as well as associative) processes underlying the structuring and restructuring of the larger psychosocial system.”

Walter F. Buckley (1922–2006) American sociologist

Source: Sociology and modern systems theory (1967), p. 499.

Decision

“I approach each building as a sculptural object, a spatial container, a space with light and air, a response to context and appropriateness of feeling and spirit. To this container, this sculpture, the user brings his baggage, his program, and interacts with it to accommodate his needs. If he can't do that, I've failed.”

Frank Gehry (1929) Canadian-American (b.1929)

Source: Blueprint. Nr. 90-92, 1992.

Feeling, Light

“These two opposed forms of social organization, the modern state and the market, have evolved together through recent centuries, and their mutual interactions have become increasingly crucial to the character and dynamics of international relations in our world.”

Robert Gilpin (1930–2018) Political scientist

Introduction, p. 4
The Political Economy of International Relations (1987)

World

“Human cognition constitutes a natural information processing system that has evolved to mimic the architecture of biological evolution… Both evolution by natural selection and human cognition can be characterised by a series of basic principles. In the case of human cognition, these are:
The information store principle dealing with human long-term memory;
The borrowing and reorganising principle dealing with how we characteristically obtain information from other people;
The randomness as genesis principle dealing with how we create novel information;
The narrow limits of change principle dealing with the role of a limited working memory in processing novel information;
The environmental linking and organising principle that explains how we use organised information held in long-term memory to determine how we interact with our environment.”

John Sweller (1946) educational psychologist

John Sweller, "Evolutionary bases of human cognitive architecture: implications for computing education." Proceedings of the fourth international workshop on computing education research. ACM, 2008.

People, Nature, Memory, Change

“The term (system-of-systems) is being applied to the creation of new systems by bringing together existing operational systems under a single umbrella and, presumably, creating or adapting links and interactions between the operational systems, which become subsystems of the higher level umbrella system.”

Derek Hitchins (1935) British systems engineer

Source: Advanced Systems Thinking, Engineering and Management (2003), p. 80 as cited in: Jung-Ho Lewe (2005) An Integrated Decision-Making Framework for Transportation Architectures https://smartech.gatech.edu/jspui/bitstream/1853/6918/1/Jung-Ho_Lewe_200505_phd.pdf. p.

“Human interactions, stimulated as they are by disequilibrium, never achieve balance. In even the most favorable transaction, one party—whether he realizes it or not—must always come out the worse.”

Jack Vance Dying Earth

"Morreion" (first published in Flashing Swords #1, March 1973), chapter 4
Dying Earth (1950-1984), Rhialto the Marvellous (1984)

“People use the word "natural" … What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is four years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the sunday school teachings.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

LSD: Methods of Control (1966)

People, School, Nature

“In addition to interviewing and participating, we spent a good deal of time in observing the interaction of the various people who make up the restaurant organization. For example, we observed waitresses getting their food from service-pantry girls and picking up drinks from bartenders, and we stood with the checker while she checked the waiters’ orders as they left one kitchen we were studying.”

William Foote Whyte (1914–2000) American sociologist

Source: Human relations in the restaurant industry. 1948, p. 361

People, Food, Girl, Drink

“In a previous paper we showed that a static (nonrotating) black hole cannot be endowed with exterior scalar-meson or massive vector-meson fields. Here we show that the same is true for massive spin-2 meson fields. We also extend the above results to the case of a rotating stationary black hole. We conclude from our results that a black hole in its final (static or stationary) state cannot interact with the exterior world via the strong interactions which are mediated by meson fields such as the π (scalar), ρ (vector), and ƒ (spin-2). A direct consequence of this is the impossibility of determining the baryon number of the black hole by means of exterior measurements alone. This results in the transcendence of the law of baryon-number conservation as originally predicted by Wheeler.”

Jacob Bekenstein (1947–2015) Mexican-Israeli physicist

[Nonexistence of baryon number for black holes. II, Physical Review D, 5, 10, 15 May 1972, 2403–2412, 10.1103/PhysRevD.5.2403]

World, Law, Strong

“Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction.”

Donald A. Norman book The Design of Everyday Things

Source: The Design of Everyday Things (1988, 2002), Ch. 6, p. 180.

Problem, Effort

“When order is achieved among human beings by allowing them to interact with each other on their own initiative — subject only to the laws which uniformly apply to all of them — we have a system of spontaneous order in society.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

The Logic of Liberty (1951)

Law

“They say sociopaths are dangerous because they know the subtleties of social interaction better than most people and they use this knowledge to use and exploit people. Well, it seems to me people with Asperger's are the opposite of sociopaths.”

Alexei Maxim Russell (1976) Canadian writer

from Trueman Bradley - Aspie Detective.

People, Knowledge

“The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 137

“In industrial marketing settings, the relationship between buyer and seller is frequently long term, close and involving a complex pattern of interaction between and within each company. The marketers' and buyers' task in this case may have more to do with maintaining these relationships than with making a straightforward sale or purchase.”

Håkan Håkansson

H. Hakansson (1982), International Marketing and Purchasing of Industrial Goods: An Interaction Approach. London: John Wiley and Sons, p. 14; as cited in : Christian Homburg (2001, 16)

“Many of the founders of quantum mechanics, including Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, and Louis de Broglie… were realists. For them quantum theory… was not a complete theory, because it did not provide a picture of reality absent our interaction with it. On the other side were Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and many others. Rather than being appalled, they embraced this new way of doing science.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Way, Reality, Science

“Actor-oriented, dynamic systems theories. This family of theories -- inspired to a great extent by Buckley -- is largely non-functionalist. It includes Buckley’s (1967, 1998) “modern systems theory,” Archer’s (1995) “morphogenetic” theory, Burns’ “actor-system-dynamics” (also ASD; Burns et al. 1985; Burns and Flam 1987), and the “” of Geyer and van der Zouwen (1978). Complex, dynamic social systems are analysed in terms of stabilizing and destabilizing mechanisms, with human agents playing strategic roles in these processes. Institutions and cultural formations of society are carried by, transmitted, and reformed through individual and collective actions and interactions.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 3.

Family

“Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole.”

China Miéville book Perdido Street Station

Source: Perdido Street Station (2000), p. 553

Dreams

“In the industrial mode of development, the main source of productivity lies in the introduction of new energy sources, and in the ability to decentralize the use of energy throughout the production of circulation processes. In the new informational mode of development the source of productivity lies in the technology of knowledge generation, information processing and symbolic … what is specific to the informational mode of development is the action of knowledge upon knowledge itself as the main source of productivity… in a virtuous circle of interaction”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 16-17 as cited in: Andy Hargreaves (2003) Teaching in the Knowledge Society: Education in the Age of Insecurity. p. 16

Knowledge

“The key to improving Virginians’ interactions with their government is to design processes with an eye toward the citizen experience and not toward a government organizational chart. As governor, I will improve the way agencies interact with each other and with Virginians. Through digitization and increased communication, we can break down the siloed approach and encourage cross-agency collaboration. This is good for our sportsmen.”

Ed Gillespie (1961) American political strategist

An interview with gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie http://www.fredericksburg.com/sports/outdoors/ken-perrotte-an-interview-with-gubernatorial-candidate-ed-gillespie/article_ac9bcf45-054a-5a84-b7e2-e5214e3209e7.html (October 25, 2017)

Way, Communication

“Ethologists and comparative psychologists have discovered a host of refined adaptations in animal behavior during the past few decades. Food-finding, avoidance of predators, and behavioral adaptations to environmental stresses, including constructing shelters, nests, and burrows, all involve impressively versatile tactics on the animal's part, rather than rigid, stereotyped reflexes. Social behavior, especially courtship and care of developing young, call forth an efficiently tuned and controlled matrix of interactions among many different and potentially conflicting behavior patterns. Animal orientation and navigation have provided several striking examples of previously unsuspected modes of perception. Finally, the versatility of animal communication used to coordinate group activities has implications that can only be described as revolutionary. The flexibility and appropriateness of animal behavior suggest both that complex processes occur within their brains, and that these events may have much in common with our own conscious mental experiences.”

Donald Griffin (1915–2003) American zoologist

The Question of Animal Awareness: Evolutionary Continuity of Mental Experience https://books.google.it/books?id=2iTTlLpYaNsC&pg=PA0 (Revised and Enlarged Edition, New York: The Rockefeller University Press, 1981), chapter 1.

Food, Behavior, Communication, Past

“True learning comes from engaging in discourse with those who are profoundly different. Your mind may not be swayed, but the interaction should open up your eyes.”

Edgar Bronfman, Sr. (1929–2013) Canadian-American businessman

http://www.faithstreet.com/onfaith/2012/10/09/bronfman-why-civil-discourse-is-imperative-for-inter-jewish-dialogue/11782.

Learning

“E = mc2 really applies only to isolated bodies at rest. In general, when you have moving bodies, or interacting bodies, energy and mass aren't proportional. E = mc2 simply doesn't apply. …For moving bodies, the correct mass-energy equation is
E=\frac {mc^2} {\sqrt{1-\frac{v^2} {c^2}}}
where v is the velocity. For a body at rest (v=0), this becomes E = mc2. …we must consider the special case of particles with zero mass… examples include photons, color gluons, and gravitons. If we attempt to put m = 0 and v = c in our general mass-energy equation, both the numerator and denominator on the right-hand-side vanish, and we get the nonsensical relation E = 0/0. The correct result is that the energy of a photon can take any value. …The energy E of a photon is proportional to the frequency f of the light it represents. …they are related by the Planck-Einstein-Schrödinger equation E = hf, where h is Plank's constant.”

Frank Wilczek (1951) physicist

when the velocity <math>v</math> approaches the speed of light c, the denominator approaches 0 thus E approaches infinity, unless m = 0.
Source: The Lightness of Being – Mass, Ether and the Unification of Forces (2008), Ch. 3, p. 19 & Appendix A

Color, Light

“Sensemaking is about the enlargement of small cues. It is a search for contexts within which small details fit together and make sense. It is people interacting to flesh out hunches. It is a continuous alternation between particulars and explanations with each cycle giving added form and substance to the other.”

Karl E. Weick (1936) Organisational psychologist

Source: 1980s-1990s, Sensemaking in Organizations, 1995, p. 133

People, Search, Sense

“Many of the principal theoreticians of Fascism, as we have seen, had been schooled in Marxism and, like Giovanni Gentile, demonstrated a competence in the material that won the admiration of Lenin himself. The fact was that the philosophical neo-idealism that served Fascism as its normative foundation shared its origins with orthodox Marxism through their common connection to Hegelianism… Like Marx, Gentile rejected the ‘liberal’ conviction that human beings are best understood as independent, self-sufficient monads, possessed of inherent freedoms, interacting only at their conveniences.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, (2000), p. 166

School, Freedom

“Maps, due to their melding of scientific and artistic approaches, always involve complex interaction between the denotative and the connotative meanings of signs they contain.”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 337

“So, is “Caliph Ibrahim” of the Islamic State an extremist, a militant, a terrorist or an Islamic fighter? None of the above. All those labels imply behavior that makes some sort of sense in terms of human reality and normal ideologies. Yet the Islamic State and its kindred have broken out of the entire conceivable range of political activity, even its extreme forms. A “militant” spends much of his time promoting an idea or a political program within acceptable rules of behavior. The neo-Islamists, by contrast, recognize no rules apart from those they themselves set; they have no desire to win an argument through hard canvassing. They don’t even seek to impose a point of view; they seek naked and brutal domination. A “terrorist,” meanwhile, tries to instill fear in an adversary from whom he demands specific concessions. Yet the Islamic State et al. use mass murder to such ends. They don’t want to persuade or cajole anyone to do anything in particular; they want everything. “Islamic fighter” is equally inapt. An Islamic fighter is a Muslim who fights a hostile infidel who is trying to prevent Muslims from practicing their faith. That was not the situation in Mosul. No one was preventing the city’s Muslim majority from practicing their faith, let alone forcing them to covert to another religion. Yet the Islamic State came, conquered and began to slaughter. The Islamic State kills people because it can. And in both Syria and Iraq it has killed more Muslims than members of any other religious community. How, then, can we define a phenomenon that has made even al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Khomeinist gangs appear “moderate” in comparison? The international community faced a similar question in the 18th century when pirates acted as a law onto themselves, ignoring the most basic norms of human interaction. The issue was discussed in long negotiations that led to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) and the Treaty of Rastadt (1714) and developed a new judicial concept: the crime against humanity. Those who committed that crime would qualify as “enemies of mankind” — in Latin, hostis generis humanis. Individuals and groups convicted of such a crime were no longer covered by penal codes or even the laws of war. They’d set themselves outside humanity by behaving like wild beasts… Neo-Islamist groups represent a cocktail of nihilism and crimes against humanity. Like the pirates of yesteryear, they’ve attracted criminals from many different nationalities… Having embarked on genocide, the neo-Islamists do not represent an Iraqi or Syrian or Nigerian problem, but a problem for humanity as a whole. They are not enemies of any particular religion, sect or government but enemies of mankind. They deserve to be treated as such (as do the various governments and semi-governmental “charities” that help them). To deal with these enemies of mankind, we need much more than frozen bank accounts and visa restrictions.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

"Beyond terrorism: ISIS and other enemies of humanity" http://nypost.com/2014/08/20/beyond-terrorism-isis-and-other-enemies-of-humanity/, New York Post (August 20, 2014). <br class="br">New York Post

Hostility, War, People, Fear

“Gandhi arrived in South Africa in 1893 at the age of 23. Within a week he collided head on with racism. His immediate response was to flee the country that so degraded people of color, but then his inner resilience overpowered him with a sense of mission, and he stayed to redeem the dignity of the racially exploited, to pave the way for the liberation of the colonized the world over and to develop a blueprint for a new social order.
He left 21 years later, a near maha atma (great soul). There is no doubt in my mind that by the time he was violently removed from our world, he had transited into that state.
He was no ordinary leader. There are those who believe he was divinely inspired, and it is difficult not to believe with them. He dared to exhort nonviolence in a time when the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had exploded on us; he exhorted morality when science, technology and the capitalist order had made it redundant; he replaced self-interest with group interest without minimizing the importance of self. In fact, the interdependence of the social and the personal is at the heart of his philosophy. He seeks the simultaneous and interactive development of the moral person and the moral society.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

People, Age, World, Color

“The linguistic domain as a domain of orienting behavior requires at least two interacting organisms with comparable domains of interactions, so that a cooperative system of consensual interactions may be developed in which the emerging conduct of the two organisms is relevant for both. The specifiability through learning of the orienting interactions allows for a purely consensual (cultural) evolution in this domain, without it necessarily involving any further evolution of the nervous system; for this reason the linguistic domain in general, and the domain of self-consciousness in particular, are, in principle, independent of the biological substratum that generates them.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Biology of Cognition (1970), p. 43.

Behavior, Learning

“In psychotherapy, the impact of love feelings, technically called the transference, is held under some degree of control by the artificial device of interpreting the patient's feelings while establishing barriers to the psychological exposure of the therapist. The therapist is supposed to come to the relationship fully endowed with a stable set of established insights which will be adequate in a practical sense to any application which the patient's needs will require. The patient, on the other hand, is supposed to limit his interaction with the therapist to the areas where he is aware of psychic pain or where the therapist accepts communication in the name of therapeutic technique. If everything else is carefully excluded, neither participant will be called on to deal with areas of the unknown in themselves which would require creative personal investment.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

8. Psychotherapy and Social Welfare
Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

Love, Pain, Feeling, Communication

“Two features of QT are commonly taken to be fundamentally non-classical: the absolute randomness of single events in the atomic regime, and the need for a permanent record of the experiment obtained using a macroscopic experimental arrangement…QT can also be applied to the larger system consisting of the original atomic system plus the macroscopic experimental arrangement. In this case, however, the larger system needs to interact with another stage of macroscopic recording. Since this procedure can continue ad infinitum, and is decisively terminated only when the result of an experiment is interpreted by a conscious observer, some noted quantum theorists have promoted the view that the quantum theory has some nexus with the consciousness of the observer…”

Ravi Gomatam (1950) Indian academic

Ravi Gomatam's paper "How do Classical and Quantum Probabilities Differ?" http://www.bvinst.edu/gomatam1/pub-2011-01.pdf, delivered at the conference on Foundations of Probabilities and Physics - 6 (FPP-6), Vaxjo, Sweden, June 13-17, 2011.

Decision

“The social dynamics of human history, even more than that of biological evolution, illustrate the fundamental principle of ecological evolution - that everything depends on everything else. The nine elements that we have described in societal evolution of the three families of phenotypes - the phyla of things, organizations and people, the genetic bases in knowledge operating through energy and materials to produce phenotypes, and the three bonding relations of threat, integration and exchange - all interact on each other.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 224

People, Family, History, Knowledge

“The rule systems governing transactions among agents in a defined sphere specify, to a greater or lesser extent, who participates (and who is excluded), who does what, when, where and how, and in relation to whom. ln particular, they define possible rights and obligations, including rules of command and obedience, governing specified categories of actors or roles vis a vis one another. The theory deals with the properties of social rule systems, their role in patterning social life, and the social and political processes whereby such systems are produced, maintained, and transformed as well as implemented in social action and interaction.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: The shaping of social organization (1987), p. 8; Cited in: Carola Aili, Pamela Denicolo, Lars-Erik Nilsson (2008) In Tension Between Organization and Profession. p. 228.

Life

“This theme of mismeasurement interacts with the designation of the one hundred years between 1870 and 1970 as the “special century.” Measurement errors are greatest in the early years, both in the scope of the standard of living and in the extent of price index bias. Clearly the welfare benefits to consumers in the categories of life entirely omitted from GDP were greatest long ago: the transition from the scrub board to the automatic washing machine was a more important contributor to consumer welfare than the shift from manual to electronic washing machine controls or from a twelve-pound tub to an eighteen pound tub. The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.”

Robert J. Gordon (1940) American economist

Source: The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016, p. 13

Life, Error

“[Each person] is a member of one or more functioning workgroups that have a high degree of group loyalty, effective skills of interaction and high performance goals.”

Rensis Likert (1903–1981) American statistician

Source: New patterns of management, (1961), p. 104

Personality, Loyalty

“As control engineers and scientists, we have greatly altered the way people and nations live and interact with one another. We have helped to create a world in which people live longer, enjoy better health, are better educated, and can travel and communicate over greater distances. But the systems that provide these better lives are fragile systems subject to unpredictable failures and possible destruction. We have also helped to create a world in which international relations are such that the very civilizations we have helped to build over centuries can be destroyed in a matter of hours.”

Harold Chestnut (1917–2001) American engineer

Harold Chestnut (1986) " Applications of Control Principles to International Relations http://www.ieeecss.org/CSM/library/1986/dec1986/w13-14.pdf" In: IEEE Control Systems Magazine, Vol.6, No. 6, Dec. 1986. pp. 13-14

People, Health, World, Education

“Greene takes it for granted, and here the great majority of physicists agree with him, that the division of physics into separate theories for large and small objects is unacceptable. … Greene believes that there is an urgent need to find a theory of quantum gravity that applies to large and small objects alike. … As a conservative, I do not agree that a division of physics into separate theories for large and small is unacceptable. … The essence of any theory of quantum gravity is that there exists a particle called the graviton … I looked at various possible ways of detecting gravitons and did not find a single one that worked. Because of the extreme weakness of the gravitational interaction, any putative detector of gravitons has to be extremely massive. If the detector has normal density, most of it is too far from the source of gravitons to be effective, and if it is compressed to a high density around the source it collapses into a black hole. There seems to be a conspiracy of nature to prevent the detector from working.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Way, Nature

“A true community consists of individuals - not mere species members, not couples - respecting each others individuality and privacy while at the same time interacting with each other mentally and emotionally - free spirits in free relation to each other - and co-operating with each other to achieve common ends. Traditionalists say the basic unit of "society" is the family; "hippies" say the tribe; noone says the individual.”

Valerie Solanas (1936–1988) American radical feminist and writer. Attempted to assassinate Andy Warhol.

Source: SCUM MANIFESTO (1967), p. 7 (hyphens (not en- or em-dashes) so in original; "others" so in original, probably intended as "other's"; line break across "inter-"/"acting"; "noone" so in original, probably intended as "no one").

Family, Communication, Time

“It is irrelevant in that ethnies arc constituted, not by lines of physical descent, but by the sense of continuity, shared memory and collective destiny, i. e. by lines of cultural affinity embodied in distinctive myths, memories, symbols and values retained by a given cultural unit of population. In that sense much has been retained, and revived, from the extant heritage of ancient Greece. For, even at the time of Slavic migrations, in Ionia and especially in Constantinople, there was a growing emphasis on the Greek language, on Greek philosophy and literature, and on classical models of thought and scholarship. Such a ‘Greek revival’ was to surface again in the tenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as subsequently, providing a powerful impetus to the sense of cultural affinity with ancient Greece and its classical heritage. This is not to deny for one moment either the enormous cultural changes undergone by the Greeks despite a surviving sense of common ethnicity or the cultural influence of surrounding peoples and civilizations over two thousand years. At the same time in terms of script and language, certain values, a particular environment and its nostalgia, continuous social interactions and a sense of religious and cultural difference, even exclusion, a sense of Greek identity and common sentiments of ethnicity can be said to have persisted”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

Source: National Identity (1991), p. 30: About Ethnic Change, Dissolution and Survival

People, Literature, Sense, Nostalgia

“In complex systems cause and effect are often not closely related in either time or space. The structure of a complex system is not a simple feedback loop where one system state dominates the behavior. The complex system has a multiplicity of interacting feedback loops. Its internal rates of flow are controlled by nonlinear relationships. The complex system is of high order, meaning that there are many system states (or levels). It usually contains positive-feedback loops describing growth processes as well as negative, goal-seeking loops. In the complex system the cause of a difficulty may lie far back in time from the symptoms, or in a completely different and remote part of the system. In fact, causes are usually found, not in prior events, but in the structure and policies of the system.”

Jay Wright Forrester (1918–2016) American operations researcher

Source: Urban dynamics (1969), p. 9

Lie, Behavior, Time, Parting

“Every great thinker who has concerned himself with the historical process has speculated about the meaning of time and its flow in history. Marx, Hegel, Spengler, Toynbee, and Sorokin, each with his own variation on the theme of time-flow as mechanically patterned fluctuation, predict the future but ignore its dynamic interaction with the past and the present.”

Fred Polak (1907–1985) Dutch futurologist

Source: The Image of the Future, 1973, p. 1 (partly cited in: European Centre for Leisure and Education (1975) Society and leisure. Vol. 7. p. 22)

History, Time, Past, Future

“Catholicity, the focus of this study, has long been recognized as an essential attribute of the Church of Christ and has been of particular concern to those churches which designate themselves as 'Catholic'. It is not possible to analyse catholicity without speaking of other traditional attributes of the Church: unity, holiness, and apostolicity. In the context of planetization, in which the cultures of diverse peoples are interacting and interpenetrating, catholicity takes on new and challenging aspects, decisive for the future of Christianity. Catholicity has ramifications in many different areas of ecclesiology. The present work, although brief, necessarily touches on many problems of historical and contemporary theology. But it does not pretend to be, even in outline, a complete ecclesiology.”

Avery Dulles (1918–2008) Catholic cardinal

Preface
The Catholicity of the Church

People, Problem, Decision, Study

“Since society is only a group of individuals interacting according to their various purposes and plans, society has no ‘good’ apart from that of the units of which it is composed.”

Roy A. Childs, Jr. (1949–1992) American libertarian essayist and critic

"The Epistemological Status of the Issue,” 1971-72

“Many kinds of processes are at work in the world around us, and they are all superimposed on, and interact with, each other in complicated ways.”

Alan Chalmers book What Is This Thing Called Science?

Source: What Is This Thing Called Science? (Third Edition; 1999), Chapter 3, Experiment, p. 28.

World, Way

“At the ULB, Brout and I initiated a research group in fundamental interactions, that is, in the search for the general laws of nature. Joined by brilliant students, many of them becoming world renowned physicists, our group contributed to the many fields at the frontier of the challenges facing contemporary physics. While the mechanism discovered in 1964 was developed all over the world to encode the nature of weak interactions in a "Standard Model," our group contributed to the understanding of strong interactions and quark confinement, general relativity and cosmology. There we introduced the idea of a primordial exponential expansion of the universe, later called inflation, which we related to the origin of the universe itself, a scenario, which I still think may possibly be conceptually the correct one. During these developments, our group extended our contacts with other Belgian universities and got involved in many international collaborations.
With our group and many other collaborators I analysed fractal structures, supergravity, string theory, infinite Kac-Moody algebras and more generally all tentative approaches to what I consider as the most important problem in fundamental interactions: the solution to the conflict between the classical Einsteinian theory of gravitation, namely general relativity, and the framework of our present understanding of the world, quantum theory.”

François Englert (1932) Belgian theoretical physicist

excerpt[François Englert - Biographical, Nobel Prize in Physics (nobelprize.org), 2013, https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2013/englert-bio.html]

World, Law, Search, Idea

“Religion is the secret of life. It teaches us to love, to serve, to forgive, to endure, and to interact with our brothers and sisters with empathy and compassion. Advaita (non-duality) is a purely subjective experience. But in daily life it may be expressed as love and compassion. This is the great lesson taught by the great saints and sages of India, the exponents of Sanatana Dharma.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

May Your Hearts Blossom (1993)

Love, Life, Secret, Religion

“There has been an increased but still rather limited response to general systems theory, as variously reflected in the work of Bateson, Vayda, Rappaport, Adams, and an interest in the use of computers, programming, matrices, etc. But the interaction between general systems theory (as represented, for example, by the theoretical work of Von Bertalanffy) has been compromised, partly by the state of field data, extraordinarily incomparable as it inevitably is, as well as historical anthropological methods of dealing with wholes. General systems theory has taken its impetus from the excitement of discovering larger and larger contexts, on the one hand, and a kind of microprobing into fine detail within a system, on the other. Both of these activities are intrinsic to anthropology to the extent that field work in living societies has been the basic disciplinary method. It is no revelation to any field-experienced anthropologist that everything is related to everything else, or that whether the entire sociocultural setting can be studied in detail or not, it has to be known in general outline.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1970s, Changing Styles of Anthropological Work, 1973, p. 8

Study

“Engineers speak of a “control loop,” in which the “man in the loop” is the problematical element. This is the human component in a series of sequentially interacting pieces of equipment that control or adjust a function. But when the pilot is suddenly and unexpectedly brought into the control loop (in other words, participates in decision making) as a result of (inevitable) equipment failure, he is disoriented. Long periods of passive monitoring make one unprepared to act in emergencies. The sudden appearance of several alarms, all there for safety reasons, leads to disorientation.”

Charles Perrow book Normal Accidents

Source: 1980s and later, Normal Accidents, 1984, p. 132

Failure, Decision, Appearance

“We are best friends! I think our personalities balance one another extremely well — plus we know how to interact positively and productively with each other. We work hard at maintaining our partnership, but to be honest, it's just what we've come to know and depend on. I hardly remember my life without Scott!”

Scott Moir (1987) Canadian figure skater

Tessa Virtue, Interview for Golden Skate (17 September 2007)
Partnership with Tessa Virtue, Tessa Virtue about Moir

Life, Thinking, Dependency, Personality

“Organisations are technical instruments; designed as means to definite goals… they are expendable. Institutions… may be partly engineered, but they have also a “natural” dimension. They are the products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.”

Philip Selznick (1919–2010) American sociologist

Philip Selznick, quoted in Charles Perrow (1960, p.4), as cited in: Owen A. Jones. The Sources of Goal Incongruence in a Public Service Network. 2013. p. 35-36

Nature

“What we call structure is a shorthand way of describing repetitive patterns, encounters that people keep coming back to, a recycling of rituals. This larger structure has the feel of externality; it seems thing-like, compulsory, resistant to change. This sense of constraint arises in part because the major institutions as repetitive networks are based on their distinctive interaction rituals, which have generated emotional commitments to their identifying symbols. It is characteristic of these intensely produced membership symbols that people reify them, treat them as things, as “sacred objects” in Durkheim’s sense. Organizations, states, as well as positions and roles within them, are sacred objects in just this sense: reified patterns of real-life interaction, cognitively raised above the level of the merely enacted, and treated as if they were self-subsistent entities to which individuals must conform. This symbolic social structuring of the world extends even to physical objects by making them into property appropriated under the sanction of social groups.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), pp. 28-29

Life, People, World, Way

“I am constantly observing my actions, words, and behaviors while processing what my being white has done to affect certain responses and outcomes. The same is true of observing how others interact with me. How does my being white affect what they say and do to me, and how they behave around me?It is an important part of my commitment to actively dismantle the white skin privilege that persists in America today. While I remain much invested in the ongoing work of deconstructing institutional injustice and systemic racism, I am also committed to being hyper-aware of and hyper-sensitive to how I am manifesting and/or receiving privilege. I believe justice requires both. I also believe I can't condition myself to see or to rebel against institutional privilege if I can't first see them in myself.”

John C. Dorhauer

"Checking my Privilege," UCC News, August 4, 2016 http://www.ucc.org/commentary_checking_my_privilege_08042016#.V6gGJL2sepA.facebook

Justice, Behavior, Parting

“The Rigveda stated that the earth was a …globe suspended freely in space. The Vedic texts disclosed that the Sun held the earth and heavenly bodies in its orbit. The Shatapatha Brahmana, a treatise of untold antiquity, recognized and explained the fact that the earth was spherical.. Aryabhata explained the daily rising and setting of planets and stars in terms of the earth’s constant revolutionary motion. The Surya Siddhantha said that the earth, owing to its gravitational force draw all things to itself. In physics, the thinker Kanada, explained light and heat as different aspects of the same element, thus anticipating Clarke Maxwell's Electro-magnetic Theory, which unified different forms of radiant energy. Sankaracharya, in his Advaita thought expanded the concept of unity of matter and energy. Vacaspati recognized light as composed of minute particles emitted by substances, anticipating Newton’s Corpuscular Theory of Light and the later discovery of the Photon. In Botany, Sankara Mishra and Kanada have discussed the circulation of sap in the Plant and the Santiparva of Mahabharata has clearly stated that the plants develop on the strength of nutrients made through interaction of sunlight and materials obtained from the air and ground. Bhaskarcharya's concept of Differential Calculus preceded Newton by many centuries. His study of time identified Truti: The 3400th part of a second as the unit of time.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

He has rightly brought out the rationality and application of Sanskrit literature in diverse fields <br class="br">Source: Aruna Goel Good Governance and Ancient Sanskrit Literature http://books.google.co.in/books?id=El_VADF13pUC&pg=PA16, Deep and Deep Publications, 1 January 2003, p. 16-17

Star, Study, Light, Time

“A social system consists in a plurality of individual actors interacting with each other in a situation which has at least a physical or environmental aspect, actors who are motivated in terms of a tendency to the "optimization of gratification" and whose relation to their situations, including each other, is defined and mediated in terms of a system of culturally structured and shared symbols.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The social system (1951), p. 5-6

Motivation, Optimism

“In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.
First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii <br class="br">Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

Way, Mathematics, Support, Problem

“… Why is the muon, some dumb particle, 200 times heavier than the electron? Why is the proton about 2,000 times heavier than the electron? Why is the electric charge of the electron what it is? Why are there six quarks in nature? Why not seven or eleven or five? There are many, many "why" questions. Also a number of 'how' questions. What is the mechanism that causes the weak interactions to be weak and the electromagnetic interactions not weak?”

Sheldon L. Glashow (1932) American theoretical physicist

The Elegant Universe, NOVA Interview (2003)

Question, Nature, Time

“Pragmatics studies the factors that govern our choice of language in social interaction and the effects of our choice on others.”

David Crystal (1941) British linguist and writer

Source: The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, 1987, p. 120

Study

“Our brains have evolved mainly to deal with our body and its interactions with the world it senses to be around us. Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and our brain.”

Francis Crick (1916–2004) British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA

The Astonishing Hypothesis (1994)

World, Sense

“As life evolves it unbinds from the inorganic and interacts more with the organic.”

Kevin Kelly (1952) American author and editor

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)

Life

“Principles
You can't say A is made of B
or vice versa.
All mass is interaction.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

note (c. 1948), quoted in Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman (1992) by James Gleick, p. 5 (repeated p. 283)

“The enlightenment idea of privacy is breaking apart under the strain of new technologies, social tools and the emergence of the database state. We cannot hold back the tide, but we can use it as an opportunity to rethink what we understand by 'personality', how we engage and interact with others and where the boundaries can be put between the public and private. Those of us who are ahead of the curve when it comes to the adoption and use of technologies that undermine the old model of privacy have much to teach those who will come after us, and can offer advice and support to those who might be unhappy to have their movements, eating habits, friendships and patterns of media consumption made available to all. But every Twitterer, Tumblr, Dopplr or Brightkite user at Lift is sharing more data with more people than even the FBI under Hoover or the Stasi at the height of its powers could have dreamed of. And we do so willingly, hoping to benefit in unquantifiable ways from this unwarranted - in all senses - disclosure. I'll argue that we are in the vanguard of creating not just new forms of social organisation but new ways of being human.”

Bill Thompson (1960) English technology writer, born 1960

" The Death of Privacy and Why We Should Welcome It http://liftconference.com/death-privacy-and-why-we-should-welcome-it," January 18, 2009. (Remarks made during the Lift Conference)

Friendship, People, Dreams, Hope

“# General system theory in the narrower sense (G. S. T.), trying to derive from a general definition of “system” as complex of interacting components, concepts characteristic of organized wholes such as interaction, sum, mechanization, centralization, competition, finality, etc., and to apply them to concrete phenomena.
While systems theory in the broad sense has the character of a basic science, it has its correlate in applied science, sometimes subsumed under the general name of Systems Science.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 90-91

Sense, Science

“An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which:
(i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and
(ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 87.

“The point of a brain is that it's not one huge neural network with feedback, it has up to 50 to 60 identified areas, all of which have feedback and all of which are capable of knowledge storage. We've got a complex system and, within this complex system, we can start discovering what the mechanisms that support deliberation are. Consciousness must come out of these interactions.”

Igor Aleksander (1937) scientist

The simple things are hardest (2005)

Support, Knowledge

“A more structured connection with the mass is needed, and we must improve it in the course of the coming years. But as far as initiatives originating in the upper strata of the government are concerned, we are currently utilizing the almost intuitive method of sounding out general reactions to the great problems we confront.
In this Fidel is a master. His own special way of fusing himself with the people can be appreciated only by seeing him in action. At the great public mass meetings one can observe something like the dialogue of two tuning forks whose vibrations interact, producing new sounds. Fidel and the mass begin to vibrate together in a dialogue of growing intensity until they reach the climax in an abrupt conclusion crowned by our cry of struggle and victory.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

People, Way, Problem, Victory

“Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that "ideology has no place in science." On the other hand, some writers are even now maintaining a Lysenkoist position because they believe that the principles of dialectical materialism contradict the claims of genetics. Both of these claims stem from a vulgarisation of Marxist philosophy through deliberate hostility, in the first case, or ignorance, in the second. Nothing in Marx, Lenin or Mao contradicts the particular physical facts and processes of a particular set of natural phenomena in the objective world, because what they wrote about nature was at a high level of abstraction. The error of the Lysenkoist claim arises from attempting to apply a dialectical analysis of physical problems from the wrong end. Dialectical materialism is not, and has never been, a programmatic method for solving particular physical problems. Rather, dialectical analysis provides an overview and a set of warning signs against particular forms of dogmatism and narrowness of thought. It tells us, "Remember that history may leave an important trace. Remember that being and becoming are dual aspects of nature. Remember that conditions change and that the conditions necessary to the initiation of some process may be destroyed by the process itself. Remember to pay attention to real objects in space and time and not lose them utterly in idealized abstractions. Remember that qualitative effects of context and interaction may be lost when phenomena are isolated."”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

And above all else, "Remember that all the other caveats are only reminders and warning signs whose application to different circumstances of the real world is contingent."
"The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins, in Hilary and Steven Rose (eds.), The Radicalisation of Science, Macmillan, 1976, p. 58.

Hostility, World, Error, History

“What I would like to see is a greater degree of interaction that will lead to a much better cross-cultural understanding than what we have in Fiji today.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

Guest speech to the conference of the Fiji Labour Party, Lautoka, 30 July 2005

Understanding

“Rather than positing design and use as disconnected moments or stages in a technology's lifecycle, the structurational model of technology posits artifacts as potentially modifiable throughout their existence. In attempting to understand technology as continually socially and physically constructed, it is useful to discriminate analytically between human action which affects technology and that which is affected by technology. I suggest that we recognize human interaction with technology as having two iterative modes: the design mode and the use mode. I emphasize that this distinction is an analytical convenience only, and that in reality these modes of interaction are tightly coupled.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 408

Understanding, Reality

“How can we win the other half of our nation to Christ, when we do not show them the practical love of Jesus Christ in our daily interaction with Him? How can we help, as leaders, to convert them to Christianity when we practise division and separateness?”

James Ah Koy (1936) Fijian politician

Maiden speech in the Senate http://www.parliament.gov.fj/hansard/viewhansard.aspx?hansardID=165&viewtype=full, 8 December 2003 (excerpts), Speech in the Senate http://www.parliament.gov.fj/hansard/viewhansard.aspx?hansardID=245&viewtype=full, 26 August 2004 (excerpts)

Love, Help, Christ

“For all human beings, love is a constant preoccupation—a never-ending central theme. Indeed, the ultimate motivation behind interactions among people is often the desire to experience some form of love. The fact that love is so important has major implications for leadership. In particular, the degree to which leaders acknowledge the value of love in their own lives and in the lives of others can determine the success or failure of their undertakings. Far from being irrelevant or impractical, the intention to express love is fundamental for effective leadership. This is so because in the final analysis, a leader’s motivation is communicated to others in countless subtle ways. Leaders whose actions are perceived as self-serving often create disharmony, resentment, and disloyalty. On the other hand, those who base their behavior upon a genuine empathy and concern for others can gain loyalty and support that make the attainment of even difficult goals possible.”

Bhakti Tirtha Swami (1950–2005) American Hindu writer

Source: Books, Leadership For An Age of Higher Consciousness, Volume 1: Administration from a Metaphysical Perspective (Hari-Nama Press, 1996), Chapter 1: The Phenomenon of Love

Love, People, Way, Behavior

“Present-day computers are designed primarily to solve preformulated problems or to process data according to predetermined procedures. The course of the computation may be conditional upon results obtained during the computation, but all the alternatives must be foreseen in advance. … The requirement for preformulation or predetermination is sometimes no great disadvantage. It is often said that programming for a computing machine forces one to think clearly, that it disciplines the thought process. If the user can think his problem through in advance, symbiotic association with a computing machine is not necessary.
However, many problems that can be thought through in advance are very difficult to think through in advance. They would be easier to solve, and they could be solved faster, through an intuitively guided trial-and-error procedure in which the computer cooperated, turning up flaws in the reasoning or revealing unexpected turns in the solution. Other problems simply cannot be formulated without computing-machine aid. … One of the main aims of man-computer symbiosis is to bring the computing machine effectively into the formulative parts of technical problems.
The other main aim is closely related. It is to bring computing machines effectively into processes of thinking that must go on in "real time," time that moves too fast to permit using computers in conventional ways. Imagine trying, for example, to direct a battle with the aid of a computer on such a schedule as this. You formulate your problem today. Tomorrow you spend with a programmer. Next week the computer devotes 5 minutes to assembling your program and 47 seconds to calculating the answer to your problem. You get a sheet of paper 20 feet long, full of numbers that, instead of providing a final solution, only suggest a tactic that should be explored by simulation. Obviously, the battle would be over before the second step in its planning was begun. To think in interaction with a computer in the same way that you think with a colleague whose competence supplements your own will require much tighter coupling between man and machine than is suggested by the example and than is possible today.”

J. C. R. Licklider Man-Computer Symbiosis

Man-Computer Symbiosis, 1960

Way, Error, Imagination, Problem

“Wiki has a feel of brainstorming, though it's not as interactive. You can do 10 minutes of brainstorming, and 30 minutes of analysis of the product of that brainstorming, and have something in 45 minutes. The pace on wiki is slower. You could write a page about an idea, or maybe a page about a bunch of ideas. Then you could come back in a week and see what's developed on that page.”

Ward Cunningham (1949) American computer programmer who developed the first wiki

A Conversation with Ward Cunningham (2003), Exploring with Wiki

Feeling, Idea

“General systems theory (in the narrow sense of the term) is a discipline concerned with the general properties and laws of “systems”. A system is defined as a complex of components in interaction, or by some similar proposition. Systems theory tries to develop those principles that apply to systems in general, irrespective of the nature of the system, of their components, and of the relations or “forces” between them. The system components need not even be material, as, for example, in the system analysis of a commercial enterprise where components such as buildings, machines, personnel, money and “good will” of customers enter.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: 1960s, Robots, Men and Minds (1967), p. 69

Money, Law, Nature, Sense

“Intellectual life hinges on face-to-face situations because interaction rituals can take place only on this level. Intellectual sacred objects can be created and sustained only if there are ceremonial gatherings to worship them. This is what lectures, conferences, discussions, and debates do: they gather the intellectual community, focus members’ attention on a common object uniquely their own, and build up distinctive emotions around those objects.”

Randall Collins (1941) American sociologist

Source: The Sociology of Philosophies (1998), p. 26

Life, Communication

“Relativity and… quantum… remain incomplete…. the main reason each is incomplete is the existence of the other. The mind calls for a third theory to unify all of physics, and for a simple reason. Nature is… "unified." …interconnected, in that everything interacts with everything else.”

Lee Smolin (1955) American cosmologist

The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, The Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (2007)

Nature

“The ultimate meaning of the systems approach... lies in the creation of a theory of deception and in a fuller understanding of the ways in which the human being can be deceived about (her) his world, and in the interaction between these different viewpoints.”

C. West Churchman (1913–2004) American philosopher and systems scientist

Variant: The ultimate meaning of the systems approach... lies in the creation of a theory of deception and in a fuller understanding of the ways in which the human being can be deceived about (her) his world, and in the interaction between these different viewpoints.
Source: 1960s - 1970s, The Systems Approach (1968), p. 229; cited in Charles Smith (2007) "Deception Meets Enlightenment: From a Viable Theory of Deception to a Quirk About Humanity's Potential". In: World Futures Vol 63, p. 42

World, Way, Understanding

“The Uniﬁed Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose visual modeling language that is used to specify, visualize, construct, and document the artifacts of a software system. It captures decisions and understanding about systems that must be constructed. It is used to understand, design, browse, conﬁgure, maintain, and control information about such systems. It is intended for use with all development methods, lifecycle stages, application domains, and media. The modeling language is intended to unify past experience about modeling techniques and to incorporate current software best practices into a standard approach. UML includes semantic concepts, notation, and guidelines. It has static, dynamic, environmental, and organizational parts. It is intended to be supported by interactive visual modeling tools that have code generators and report writers. The UML speciﬁcation does not deﬁne a standard process but is intended to be useful with an iterative development process. It is intended to support most existing object-oriented development processes.”

Ivar Jacobson (1939) Swedish computer scientist

James Rumbaugh, Ivar Jacobson, & Grady Booch (1999) The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual. p. 1.

Understanding, Support, Decision, Past

“[The integrative system] deals with such matters as respect, legitimacy, community, friendship, affection, love, and of course their opposites, across a broad scale of human relationships and interactions.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Spicer (1997) explains: "Boulding (1989) referred to three independent systems from which power is exercised in our society: threat, production and exchange, and integrative. The threat system is one in which power is accomplished through coercion in its many guises, often including asymmetrical one-way persuasive communication exchanges. The production and exchange system speaks to the economic system, of which public relations is certainly a part. And, finally, the integrative system.
Source: 1980s, Three Faces of Power, 1989, p. 670-671 as cited in: Christopher Spicer (1997) Organizational Public Relations: A Political Perspective. p. 248

Love, Friendship, Communication

“Capitalism puts higher and higher demands on people to be able to improvise, to adapt to the constant changes of the market, to interact with each other and communicate in an effective way, to be ready at any time for the worse. There is a strong correlation between the importance of constant innovation in capitalism and in improvisation, and we cannot avoid that there is a strong relationship between the two. … The more open you are to experimentation, the more you would be likely to open up new avenues for capitalism to produce value.”

Mattin (1977) Spanish musician

Interview (May 2007)

People, Way, Communication, Strong

“During the 1960s and 1970s, when cartographers were embracing the communication model and a behavioral approach to empirical research, psychology was undergoing a revolution in its perspective on what to study and how to study it. Psychologists began to realize that stimulus-response laws do not explain human perception or behavior (any more than the gravity models used by geographers can explain spatial interaction).”

Alan MacEachren (1952) American geographer

Source: How Maps Work: Representation, Visualization, and Design (1995), p. 7-8

Law, Behavior, Communication, Study