Science and Sense-making and Hype and Promises

I was reading the slides from Dave Snowden's (@snowded) talk at KMWorld this week.  Most unfortunately I could not make the show and his Keynote.

In his talk two slides stand out for me. The first is titled “The nature of the system constrains how we can act in it.”  In this slide, Dave describes an ontological based set of principles for working with Ordered, Chaotic and Complex systems.  In regards to the Complex domain, one of the principles is “Real time feed back for control via modulators”

I think we need to carefully consider the wisdom Dave shares.  Modulators are not algorithms. Modulators are people who have the experience, gained by praxis, to disintermediate the contextual data.  From an anthro-centric standpoint, algorithms cannot sensibly switch the variable links.  For sensible means sense-making, in the manners that Dave describes in the slide titled “How do we avoid the hype and the false promises.”  

I’ve annotated the quadrants with my understanding of philosophy, which is nowhere near the caliber of Dave’s.  The annotation in the lower right (Prediction & high risk Scaling) is drawn from contemporary events. Readers might recognize it more readily by the old adage “History is written by the victors” (Walter Benjamin).  

I also think there is a spiritual dimension in sense-making that needs to be included; for it is the spiritual connections between us that most strongly influence the promises we give and receive.  However I am not at all qualified to describe where the spiritual lies in this framework.