Karl Schroeder

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• Commented on Breaking in to pimp my next book
  Thanks, Jonathon, and all I can say about your Australia trip is, give'r! (I think that's not obscene.) My wife's sister lives in Western Australia, essentially on the edge of the Great Sandy Desert. We had our honeymoon in Kalbarri...
• Commented on Breaking in to pimp my next book
  Hey, Peter, The Sunless Countries is scheduled to be out in paperback on May 8. This will be Trade paper, I believe, like Pirate Sun before it; but hey, the cover design is gorgeous on these....
• Commented on Breaking in to pimp my next book
  I don't have a preferred vendor for ebooks. If you buy stuff off my site, you'll be taken to Amazon, but that's not because of any ideological or particular business-related passion on my part. I have a Sony reader and...
• Posted Breaking in to pimp my next book to Charlie's Diary
  Hi, everybody! After my brief blogging stint here last summer, Charlie graciously offered to let me appear here now and then when I have something major to announce. I do: the fifth and final Virga novel, Ashes of Candesce, will...
• Posted Science Fiction as Foresight to Charlie's Diary
  Well, I went and done it. I've completed my Master's in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (now watch me innovate!). It's taken two years but I enjoyed every class and project. Most of you know I was working on this; I've...
• Posted Thanks, and Farewell to Charlie's Diary
  Well, Charlie should be shambling away from the airport sometime around now, ready to take up the yoke of piloting his unruly ship of ideas once again, so it's time for me to say goodbye. Thanks to everybody who contributed...
• Commented on I am the Very Model of a Singularitarian
  All good thoughts, Charlie, and no, we're not engaged in a war between paradigms here. Contrast and compare is the order of the day, and sometimes you get ideas from one stream of thoughts appearing in the other. The Singularity...
• Posted I am the Very Model of a Singularitarian to Charlie's Diary
  I suggested in an earlier post that foresight is not so much about prediction as it's about designing against surprise. Key to this is the exploration of multiple futures, which is why scenario-based foresight is so commonly practiced. Scenarios are...
• Commented on Swirling/writing (2): <em>shugyo</em>
  This is interesting; I too use Openoffice, but with gray text on a black background, to differentiate it from Word, which I use for business, academic and technical writing, and where it's almost impossible to change the default colours. And,...
• Commented on Rewilding Etiquette
  Dirk, I'm not sure how you get from the idea of a redesign of manners to the idea of ruthless enforcement of same. The one does not follow from the other, any more than the idea of open source software...
• Posted Rewilding Etiquette to Charlie's Diary
  Imagine a future where the most revolutionary changes in our world have not come from nanotech, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence or even space development--but from cognitive science and a deepening understanding of how humans function (or not) in groups. What...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  jboss, you've hit the nail on the head. Lots of this research is ongoing, and a lot of it takes place under the noses of technologists in the form of "human factors" design. It's also called "best practices." And the...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  Well, I dunno what to say, guys. You asked if I saw evidence that our ability to resolve conflicts is getting better. I said yes. I provided what I consider to be objective evidence. You don't think it's evidence. Well,...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  unholyguy, I cannot even begin to make sense of what you just wrote. The fact that the world is on the whole getting better IS the evidence that we are evolving better systems to resolve conflicts. On the very simplest...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  jboss: something totally different. See comment #93 on objective measures....
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  unholyguy: I'll refer you back to my previous post on eucatastrophe, which in turn was based on the Millennium Project's annual State of the Future report. That group has been tracking objective measures of well-being such as infant mortality, crime...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  unholyguy, I disagree. If I'm a business, there's no value to me to bring in consultants who will tell me what I want to hear; I want them to tell me what I need to hear. And I've never been...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  Jay, in activities like SDD the vocabulary used to describe an issue is controlled by the person who raises the issue. For instance, during the process of establishing the influence map ("would addressing A serve to resolve B?" and so...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  David L, have you explored dotmocracy? (www.dotmocracy.org) It was experimented with in South America as a way to get people who generally don't get a voice at town meetings to successfully submit proposals for local projects. Within its bounds, it's...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  I'm curious to know how you can determine in advance the difference between "want different outcomes" and "have different names for the same thing"? Prejudging others' intentions is something that happens all the time in wicked problems. It may indeed...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  unholyguy: very good points--and yes, the Cyprus failure is conspicuous and interesting. I think of SDD as being one of a basket of techniques--or a class of methods, I guess--that have the potential to make certain aspects of decision-making easier....
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  BTW, I had considered mentioning in the post that one of the ways of dealing with wicked problems is war: you radically simplify the whole landscape by forcibly eliminating whole areas of complex independent interaction. In the sequel to "Crisis...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  allynh: it's clear you've had bad experiences. However, what you're describing is not Structured Dialogic Design, it's what you get when you don't use something like SDD. Also, the Delphi method (not the Delhi method) is a polling technique, developed...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  dirk bruere: No, I believe I'm describing the exact opposite of Zero State. The slaughterbench of genocidal warfare that was the 20th century was largely driven by competing theories of human perfectibility. I'm not interested in "improving" mankind and what...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  heteromeles: also an excellent point!...
• Commented on Wicked (2)
  jboss, you raise a very good point. I don't want people to confuse what I'm talking about here with what's come to be called Critique--the whole maundering discourse of postmodern self-referentialism whose authors Northrop Frye referred to as writing prose...
• Posted Wicked (2) to Charlie's Diary
  What do we do about wicked problems? --That is, problems that we can't all even agree exist, much less define well; problems that have no metric for determining their extent, or even whether our interventions mitigate them? I don't have...
• Commented on Our Eucatastrophe
  Not that it's really what I wanted to talk about here, but to respond to the nuclear fusion thread: you don't need aneutronic fusion or even break-even conditions for nuclear fusion to be successful. All you need is a polywell...
• Posted Our Eucatastrophe to Charlie's Diary
  In an earlier post I talked about prediction vs. preparation as different ways of approaching the future. Also foresight, which is the systematic study of trends and possibilities for the near future. When you do foresight, you quickly begin to...
• Commented on Wicked (1)
  I should clarify that previous statement: SDD works to AVOID the lowest-common-denominator approach to deciding what to work on....