sharing is caring

recently we were cutting the jasmin bushes in our garden. as we had a ginormous amount of flowering branches, we put them in some vases on the street, to share them with the neighbours.
we felt very pleased as quite some people walked by carrying some branches. however, when my mum checked how much was left, not only the flowers but also one vase was gone!

we were rather annoyed, so i went to put up a sign: please take the flowers but bring back our vase. not long after, a woman stopped by to tell us she had 'found' the vase in some front garden round the corner. these guys were quite surprised when my mum came to see them; and they promised to bring the vase back once the flowers where wilting. mine are doing so by now, so i am curious when i will see that vase again!

"virtue is also if no-one is tempting you"

it is nice to have principles - as long as nothing challenges you to stick to them. i guess in many cases one then realises having missed out on half of the context of the situation (and every so-often also having judged people without having any idea about what they were going through).

so my question is: should one revise one's principles when realising that they were too narrowminded (ever heard of complicated principles??) or should one still stick to them (because it's a principle to stick to one's principles)?

complicated

"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated."
- Poul Anderson

-- reminds me of an old hypothesis of mine: only few people can allow themselves declaring problems as 'easy': the ones that have no clue about it at all and therefore can not estimate the difficulties involved, or the experts who know everything related to it.
i feel that for everyone else somewhere on the path from one of these states to the other anderson's quote applies very well. --

seminar

tomorrow will be my first ever seminar talk. weird feeling. i prepared about 12 pages as paper and condensed it to about 20 slides to be held in 30 min. about the rest i have no clue, i even couldn't decide on how to start my presentation. at least i'm not the first so i can see how things are done. but then, the location will be very nice and after my talk i can enjoy this place for 2 more days ;)


Größere Kartenansicht

it's in the system

there is an interesting point in systems theory: don't blame a person for behaving in a certain way - check the system first to see if they could act differently.
i quite like this approach; it kinda discourages blatantly judging someone without ever (mentally) walking in their shoes.

also putting this approach into practice could be interesting: if, for example, some people on your team behave not as expected it's not necessarily just them being terrible. maybe the team's structure doesn't leave them a choice to be different. only drawback: you might have to accept some responsibility and change yourself.

chrome

i really like this browser; however in the last few days it keeps getting stuck on random pages.. anyone knows anything?

decisions, decisions..

... and still more decisions! It's impossible how many things one has to decide during the course of a day or so.. And so many of them are really hard to optimize, so only attempting to make the best choice on some keeps blocking my thoughts for considerable time. So maybe 'any decision is a good decision'?

i guess many of them are not that dramatic - maybe can even be undone with some more hassle. but then, some aren't. strangely enough though, no one ever teaches how to deal with those. most people's strategy seems to be to treat them just as if it wouldn't matter, but are they right to act like this? or are they just shunning their responsibility and the possible consequences of their actions? or are they getting lost in trying to figure out the best choice? or even trying to define 'best'?

abstraction

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."
[Alford Korzybski, 1958]

I came across this quote when writing a seminar thesis on systems theory. Can't help to be intrigued by it, just pondering in how many ways this could be a valid statement. Maybe for models of things, personal world views, experience, all kinds of logical abstractions..