Resilience will receive a lot of attention as the complexity of our world increases. Below is a brief description of the logical correspondence between complexity and resilience, followed by a succinct primer on mechanisms of resilience. But first, a bit of history is in order.   Before the Industrial Revolution reliability wasn’t a granted thing. The whole concept of craftsmanship was intrinsically tied to the idea that the quality of the output varied widely with each individual. This lack of uniform standards meant that the benefits of scale economies were out of reach. The big invention fostered by the Industrial Revolution was reliability (arguably at the expense of craftsmanship). Process and procedures become more important […]

Futurists, professors and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.   My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.   As knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, the very business model of traditional […]

Over two and a half millennia ago, Greek philosophers gave us the “dialectical” method of constructive argument. In the 21st century democracy is faced with significant challenges, and moving forward may require searching for solutions from the wisdom of democracy’s inventors.   The dialectic method is a form of reasoning based on dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (anti-theses). The dialectical method of dialogue is unique and different from rhetoric and debate in that it aims to converge the opposite points of view and form a new and superior point of view from the synthesis of the initial arguments. This transcendence is possible by searching for commonalities between the two opposing points of view when considered […]