Aspects of Perspective
There is an extensive academic pedigree on the importance of Perspective in Systems Thinking.
In STPrism a Perspective consists of two, interrelated elements:
- The Opinion former
- The Target of that opinion
In STPrism the Opinion former is the expert or Voice and the target here is the Aspect of Systems Thinking principles and practice - the QSet.
The fundamental building block of STPrism is the QSet - which is a digest and extraction produced separately for each thinker in the collection of authors. The process of forming a QSet is to sift & sort the source material and produces a semantically consistent (uses the same understanding) reworded in a common style and phrasing and of similar length. It is this digest - reflecting different aspects of the field of Systems Thinking/Complexity - which is the common basis for slicing and dicing investigations.
QSets - Aspects of Systems Thinking
Distinctions - Systems Thinking and Complexity Science
Pedigree and genesis of the different schools for dealing with situations. This prompt is to try and clarify the stances of the different thinkers, a basic definition
Distinctions What is the distinction between systems thinking and complexity science
Environment
This prompt is inspired by Ross Ashby’s writing on the choice of a ‘system’ which automatically presupposes an ‘environment’ it is the basic frontier across which the Law of Requisite Variety applies and is basic to the cognitive distinction between ‘this and that’
Environment How is the concept of environment used and what differentiates the environment from the system why is this important to the approach presented here?
Gists
This prompt is designed to provide a useful ‘mid-length’ summary of each ‘thinkers’ material for comparison, slice and dice etc. It is designed to the ‘neutral’ to the extent it asks for a response ‘in the authors own framing (but not necessarily in their own words)‘
Gist What is the gist and principles behind this collection from author name?
How To Guides with Questions
This prompt is designed to deliver the material in practical form, the essential checklist required to run a study. It significantly extends the value of the rambling philosophical approach to recast the material in a structured ready to use imperative form.
How-To Can you provide a how to guide for an investigation including the questions to ask.
Nutshell
This is another prompt to produce the mass of material, sometimes poorly structured, in practical form. Although you might carp about the layout of the graphics it is necessary a useful aspect of the material and an amazing achievement that these diagrams are produced automatically.
Nutshell Can you produce a process map from this material which provides a simple guide on how to deal with situations of complexity including a mermaid diagram?
Keywords and Jargon
This prompt is to deliver the different definitions together with a glossary for references of how often common terms and definitions are used differently. It was less successful in producing a set of clear principles.
Keywords Can you extract the key concepts, principles and theories in the form of keywords and an attached glossary
People Dynamics
This is a rather specialist question intended to probe how the different thinkers approach the tricky aspect of managing the dialectic jostle (ie argument) between different observers holding different perspectives.
Dialectic Can you explain how the dynamics of different people holding different perspectives and opinions are handled in Technique Name
Perspectives Points of view
This is a prompt which studies the consequence of the second-order thinking about the role of the observer.
Perspectives How are different points of view between different observers handled
Questions
This prompt was a bit of a serendipitous fluke, I issued the prompt by mistake and yet it seemed to produce a valuable perspective of the material collections as it was take as an imperative command ie Structure based on Questions! (to structure the underlying material on a set of questions).
Questions Structure based on Questions
Uncertainty
Uncertainty how does author interpret uncertainty
What is Complexity
This prompt is to probe the collected material for each authors view on complexity which varies from the ontological (and produced a list of material factors) to the epistemic (which ultimately turns to the state of a confused mind). It is a gulf which is never reconciled and often forms the basis of arguments. when thinkers meet.
What-is-complexity What is complexity and what is the advice in how to deal with complexity
Limitations
It is a Structure that is based on Questions*
The computer says YES - there is no capability for the computer to reply I'm not sure, what do you mean etc. In each case a full answer is produced without equivocation or doubt
which can be Sensitive to the Source Material
Beware the impact of fusing different papers or even sources together. This is best illustrated under Questions where a 'combined' response is filed under Ladyman-Ashby which also includes Alex Ryan and Warren Weaver but this quite different in the structure from each of these authors 'alone'
An illustration of the tyranny of the consensus.
Other Prompts
Voices
This is a basic bibliographic prompt which is combined with the automated summary produced by NotebookLM to profile each ‘thinker’ or ‘School of Thought’
Provide a complete list of all sources in this notebook in a Markdown list format with titles and links including isbn or doi references but editing out any blank lines and removing any front matter
And some fun - Styles
Pretty self-explanatory!
Prompts
• can you write a summary of this collection in the style of a snake-oil salesman • can you write a summary of this material in the style of a crank • can you write a summary of this material in the style of a barrister defending it against accusations of fraud and poor science • can you write a summary of this material in the style of a academic or research defending their PhD with reference to other source and authors and the integration and linking of other theories • can you write a summary of this material in the style of a sceptical systems thinker
Case Study
This is the first and faltering attempt to capture each authors ‘opinion’ on some report. There is a great deal of potential here but my first attempt at just adding the report material into the Voice collection of primary sources did not work so well and led to some ‘contamination’ of ideas - the essence of the external report was integrated into the views of the Voice.
How can snowden's ideas bring insight and resolution into the risk-case-study
Debug
When you get totally bamboozled around which query on which Notebook collection created this result (black mark to Google on their configuration and version management) the following may help. If they can use techniques of a digital watermark their images why do they not watermark their reports with its pedigree?. One of the depressing thing of each new ‘wave’ of IT is it seemingly has to re-learn all the hard won lessons of previous generations.
Can you provide a historical list of all the prompts in this chat