You sweat blood for years to get a new idea/concept such as complex adaptive systems established. Then it becomes popular at which point intellectually inadequate opportunists seize on the language and images without understanding or comprehension, to re-brand any old method or tool as some radical new complexity approach. As my grandmother would have said, mutton dressed as lamb. What is depressing is that they get away with it. In part because they teeter over the edge of the precipice that separates being simple from becoming simplistic. They take something exciting with potential for radical change and make it ordinary, dumbing it down to their level of inadequacy.. There can be only one punishment, and it's illustrated.
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Comments (2)
Dave,
I saw this same dynamic in the Network Centric domain a few years back. One paper in particular was especially perplexing. It asserted that various NCW concepts were wrong, provided a thesis statement for each concept (as they misunderstood it), discussed the antithesis of each concept, and then proposed a synthesis.
I suppose this fancy footwork was supposed to impress folks, but the resulting synthesis was (surprise, surprise) a reworked version of a framework the authors had proposed several years before.
It was so wrong at so many levels that providing a comprehensive critique of its (deliberate?) misunderstandings of basic NCW concepts would have made an excellent final exam for a short course in NCW.
Posted by WalterRSmith | October 13, 2008 10:38 PM
Posted on October 13, 2008 22:38
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” -- Eric Hoffer
Posted by Steve Freeman | October 23, 2008 11:16 AM
Posted on October 23, 2008 11:16