Expanded Workings on Cross Cultural Complexity

From an email:

I have been thinking for the last year or so about the opportunities each of us has to accentuate our strengths in various situations. I don't have a name for it yet, nor do I truly know what about this idea fascinates me. I will try to describe it using an example:

Since we last met in DC I have had this image of a chess game in my head. I use the game itself as a stand in for a set of rules, either concrete or governed by convention, that two or more parties choose to engage in. This is a proxy for the litany of situational orthodoxies that each of us engages in every day. What interests me is not the dynamism each of us exhibits in transitioning to and from each one of these governed social interactions, but rather the secondary and tertiary vocabularies that we use during them that add layers to the interaction. If we go back to the chess game, we start to see one player exhibiting higher levels of comfort, or poise, or charisma — seeming advertent or inadvertent injections that go above and beyond what have been deemed the rules of engagement. These secondary modes often have some kind of bearing on the outcome of engagements. Are they in someway ad hominems in as much as they distinguish one person from the next? I am not sure.

Over the course of this email I have tried to avoid using a particular phrase: that these secondary vocabularies are somehow 'articulated arguments.' What I mean by that uses a more specific definition of language, that of any system of information containing complexity and interpretable statistical redundancies. Same as grammatical conventions are redundancies in spoken and written languages that allow for recognizable packages of information, I feel a lot of this secondary level of information we provide each other is interruptible. Though, it is an imperfect language because—and that is not a technical term—because a lot of what is being shared may or may not be picked up on due to experiential limits between two people. Common are interpretable in body language, but share relatively little information because you have both experienced the same thing. It builds a bond, but nothing new is learned. Similar experiences by contrast share a lot more, as the common ground gives a base line of information while simultaneously imparting information that isn't shared leading to extrapolation or interpolation and learning. The third alternative is that the information shared is incompatible and not common in any way, so the information shared is of a level of complexity to you that no insights can be gleamed. 

This last part interests me since it allows for an interpretation of information theory and cross culturalism where complexity, normally an absolute term, can be socially relative. That leads me to a second definition I have been working on for two years in which 'engagement' is the act of advertantly overcoming those social relativities. That definition needs even more work. 

In need of a masters/Ph.D. program with strong centers for logic, statistics, semiotic anthropology, african studies, development, information studies, political economy, economics, political science, and security studies.

My project would basically be a chronicle of the impacts of the globe's perception of Sub-Saharan Africa on the political economy of particular locations in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Any thoughts?

I'm probably not going to be able to secure funding fro two reasons: not being able to convince any one of those departments that my interdisciplinary project is worthwhile based on its categorizable merits within that unit; and that while I want to write my project down, I don't really have much interest in being a professor.

Can you imagine a university giving a fellowship to someone who doesn't want to go into Academia? They would be investing in...? It's not really how it works.

As it is I am planning/hoping on opening a whiskey distillery in London just in order to (in the long term) fund my stint in a University/library. It's a round about dream. I know.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Definitions: Personal Capital and Engagement, the evolution of 'Just Figure It Out!'

The following definitions are the result of over two years worth of thinking. They are far from done. They are being posted here 1) just in case someone can tell me how to make them better, and 2) so I have something to lean on in case someone else has a similar normative direction implicit in some other information-theoretic approach to understanding Sub Saharan African political economy that I don't know about.

This will probably take me the rest of my life to hammer out, but here's something (this all started when lamenting commentators insistance on the indecipherability of Somali clan structures):

Engagement: An information-theoretic perspective for international political economy.

Dendritically evolving dynamic systems are self aware, and all self aware systems are dendritically evolving. (cogent?): certain ideas are excised while others are followed based on selections engendered by self awareness.

Meaning a dynamic social system that is self aware and contracts and expands due to implications of this self-awareness.

Implications on ‘engagement.’

Engagement is: when do you have ‘enough’ info to ‘shut off’ and ‘engage’ with your ‘personal capital’

Personal Capital is :

Reconciliation of dynamic systems from unpredictable to personally legible via personal narrative and ‘choice.’

For legibility in state systems see Scott, but generally speaking any dynamic system has a level of complexity. Absolute complexity, complete randomness, has the most information within it. No human system is completely random as the human mind is incapable of perceiving or creating anything but patterns. Far from saying that all human activity can therefore fit within statistical parameters (which is conceivable if the number of human and natural dynamisms and the statistical realities of their interactions can be rendered, but this is currently impossible). My point is that if information exists in states (levels of abstraction, very general - encompassing all forms of linguistic modeling with redundancies all the way to Boolean logical systems); there is a minimum level of information (R0) is retained/transmitted by people (measured in basic units for that state, social qubits [currently undefined]) and is deemed immediately important to their lives—hence relevant; R0’s units have maximum potential energy (between 0 and 1) only when retained by people; potential energy = 1 means that information is acted upon and recreates new information in the same state; legibility is the Maxwellian capacity of people in this state to recognize and create decipherable patterns within any given state they inhabit.

(Reader: resist any attempt at Weberian moralism here in the definition of legibility currently provided. Information is neutral in this case. The current case can be used within moral frameworks, but if self-aware information systems can choose their own moral direction, then it is beyond the parameters of this paper to presuppose any inclinations; thunder against!)

The implication is that information in one state can only be produced, transmitted, acted upon, and reproduced by people in that state.

My definition for ‘personal capital’ and more general ideas inform:

1. where information is held,
2. an ability for transmission to only happen from medium 1 to medium 1 except under specific circumstances that come at a high transmission cost (transcription, explanation, categorization)
1. Transcending one level of abstraction, going from one state or meta-state to another is costly.
2. It is understandable that not all transmitters (people) will be able to provide that cost of transmission, so certain information will be held in that meta-state only.

1. Hence ‘engagement’... is the process by which one introduces one’s self into where intransmutable information is held.

Kony 2012 Not Received Well by inhabitants in Northern Uganda

A news article explaining the displeasure of people in a Northern Ugandan town over the Kony 2012 campaign video. An impromptu commentator likened it to selling Osama Bin Laden bracelets after the 2001 attack. It would be seen as distasteful however beneficial the fundraiser intended it to be.

Viewers also made disgruntled remarks about how most of the in person footage was taken over a decade ago, and that the video didn’t reflect how Kony had moved to the Central African Republic or how things in Northern Uganda were now.

Now people are trying to reconstruct after a cataclysm. It’s not the same as still being dominated by a war or reble group, but it’s almost impossibly hard in a way that is incomparable to the simplicity of warfare — a binary with justice only incumbent on winning or losing.

I admire your zealousness Invisible Children, I really do, but read Dr. S Powers book, or Machete Season, or On Totalitarianism, and then go try to navigate a social, geographic, economic, political, agrarian, technical, and logistical reality that makes sense to you, and then see if it makes sense to anyone else. Take a poll.

Get rid of Kony! Do it. That’s what I want too. But are you and Rihanna going to move to Northern Uganda and open up a shop that can induce value adding processes, so you can provide wages and market Northern Uganda’s agricultural system into a vehicle for local saving for goods and services like education, health care, and even recreational facilities of local design and color? Are you going to live there long enough that the people around you willingly look you in the eye and say, “Your job in Uganda is done, we don’t need you anymore.” Are you going to stay there long enough to say, “No I am not done working, I am not done being here, You are my friends, I mean it, and I help my friends. I am staying here because I am Ugandan.” Are you going to do that?

What Sub Saharan Africa needs is engagement not salvation. Same as your friends do — including those of different creeds. It’s not so simple as you’re wrong and I’m right. Engage, don’t save. Saving is for heros, and currently I am not that thrilled with the heroism emanating from the House of Representatives, the United States Senate, the Executive Branch, or the United States Armed Forces. These organizations are rife with good people, but good people are our brothers. Brothers do not take up arms, and brothers do not condescend. Good brothers engage in basic camaraderie with us for a lifetime. I am tired of 5/6 of the world not being able to engage with the last sixth. It’s not solely the other way around.

I love this song, but I have no idea what it says. If anyone can help me, that would be wonderful. I don't speak much Swahili.

Umoja wa Tanzania by Juma Nature ft. Professor Jay. Current play count = 71.

Well Here We Go Again

It's been nearly two years since I've written an essay on African trade. I should be excited that I'm writing one now, no? I guess it does feel good to like what one does.

Still working on my spheres of security paper with inclusions from:

Abrahamsen, Rita & Williams, Michael C., Security Beyond the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 2010

and

Herbst, Jeffrey, States and Power in Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press) 2000


After that I'll have as robust a framework as I can for presenting it to three lecturers at my new University. I'll need recommendations on new materials in order to advance it towards publication and my eventual dissertation.

I will be so incredibly happy when I get into a Ph.D. program. Having the freedom, and pressure, that that affords could do wonders for me and my research.

For now I'll content myself with plaguing my one of my more left-leaning lecturers with jib jabs about knowledge reproduction being alienating too.

China in Africa from Edward Bishop on Vimeo.