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The Intersubjective Mind - Embracing the Unknown

Jeff Parks
February 24, 2018

The Intersubjective Mind - Embracing the Unknown

We live in a world that overwhelms. We struggle with balance, to find a purpose, to feel understood and valued. How do we focus our thoughts and by extension our interactions with other people in a forward direction? The discipline of Information Architecture strives at its core to derive understanding. As the world inverses the acronym of IA towards the machine, how do we ensure that we always work first and foremost from the desire to understand one another?

Drawing inspiration from over 15 years in the discipline of Information Architecture as well as thought leaders outside the discipline including: Mustafa Suleyman, Alan Watts, Martin Ruef, David Hume, Oliver Sacks, Shunryu Suzuki, and Jon Ronsom, Kina’ole’s Jeff Parks, one of the founders of World IA Day, will tie together the past with the present to suggest a way to balance the objective reasoning of the machine age with the subjective drives of the individual.

Jeff Parks

February 24, 2018
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  1. #IA for Good “If what I say now seems to

    you very reasonable, then I’ll have failed completely.” ~ Arthur C. Clarke, speaking in the year 1964, attempting to explain what the world might like in the year 2000
  2. Intersubjective Entities “Intersubjective entities depend on communication among many humans

    rather than on the beliefs and feelings of other human beings.” - Yuval Noah Harari
  3. Knowing Is Not Understanding Understanding is ‘swimming the English Channel’

    of intellectualism. Knowing is splashing around noisily in the shallow end. #Metaphor
  4. Klosterman’s Razor Representation Asymmetry between people who develop technologies and

    the communities who use their products (gender, race, class)
  5. But What if We’re Wrong? “My goal is not to

    contradict conventional answer ‘X’ by replacing it with unconventional answer ‘Y’. My goal is to think about the present in the same way we think about the past wholly aware that such mass consideration can’t happen until we reach a future that no longer includes us… Because this is - or should be - why we invest time into thinking about anything that isn’t essential or practical or imperative.” ~ Chuck Klosterman
  6. #AI and Society “If the business model of a company

    is not benevolent, then AI has the potential to make that company truly dangerous. Likewise, if an organization aims at improving the human condition, then AI might make that organization more efficient in realizing its benevolent potential. The motivation of our AI’s will stem from the existing building blocks of our society; every society will get the AI it deserves.” ~ Joscha Bach (Cognitive Scientist, MIT Media Lab, Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics)
  7. The Organized Mind “In order to understand one person speaking

    to us, we need to process 60 bits of information per second. With a processing limit of 120 bits per second, this means you can barely understand two people talking to you at the same time. Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message [received] is competing for resources in your brain…” ~ Daniel J. Levitin
  8. Questions Matter “Don’t ask kids what they want to be

    when they grow up but what problems do they want to solve. This changes the conversation from who do I want to work for, to what do I need to learn to be able to do that.” ~ Jaime Casap
  9. IA for Good or Bad? “The whole process of nature

    is a process of immense complexity. It is really impossible to tell that what happens in it is good or bad. Because you never know what will be the consequence of a misfortune - or - you never know what will be the consequences of good fortune.” ~ Alan Watts