Category Philosophy

The very wide field of philosophy

Scrap the SLA (Service Level Agreement)

Geir Isene 14 Comments

According to Wikipedia, an SLA is:

“A service-level agreement is a negotiated agreement between two parties, where one is the customer and the other is the service provider. This can be a legally binding formal or an informal “contract” (for example, internal department relationships).“.

SLAs is a hot item in IT, and is given much weight in the organizational framework called ITIL.

Almost all IT directors I talk to rely heavily on SLAs or blame the lack of proper SLAs for lack of success.

But seriously, do you have an SLA with Google? With Facebook, Twitter or the scores of Internet services that you use personally? No – and if you are unhappy, you simply find another solution or service provider.

An IT service provider would be wise to simply scrap the SLA or any contract that seeks to bind the customer. Instead, let the customer be free to choose and move to another vendor if they feel like it. In that way, the service provider will have to be constantly performing better than the competition. And that is the best solution to keep the customers.

Instead of locking the customer with contracts, service the customer like no one else.

No contracts, no lock-in and you have no choice but to become and be the best.

Without even intellectual property protection, you would have to rely on pure and excellent service to retain your customers.

Customer lock-in mechanisms makes for laziness, dwindling creativity and thus ironically opens the door to better service providers.

SLAs are only warranted where the customer are not free to choose another provider, such as when the business strategy dictates the business units to only use the internal IT department.

Invalidation

Geir Isene 89 Comments

People get touchy for all kind of reasons. In Internet discussions it is rampant.

I’ve seen critics of Scientology go ape-shit as someone challenge their views. I have seen Scientologists go irrational as someone challenge their beliefs. It’s not very helpful or productive if the purpose is to gain new knowledge.

If your purpose is to evolve, to gain wisdom or enlightenment, it may be wise to simply disregard defensiveness and keep your focus on that purpose.

“Invalidation” is an often used term in Scientology. It means:

“refuting or degrading or discrediting or denying something someone else considers to be fact.”

But certainty enters the equation. You get more touchy and more easily invalidated the more uncertain you are in your views. You wouldn’t get especially touchy if some guy came along and challenged your belief in a spherical Earth. Even if he screamed from the top of his lungs “THE EARTH IS FLAT!”, it still wouldn’t upset you. But if someone challenges something you want to believe, a view you are really not that certain about, then you may get quite touchy.

So when someone gets defensive in a discussion or blows up, realize that you may have struck a point of uncertainty, where the other is struggling to maintain his resolve.

This may be a reason why the Church of Scientology is so litigious, why their press releases are so defensive and irrational. It may be a reason why you sometimes see heated discussions on this blog.

I find it amusing when I myself get defensive. I try to use it to dig out my own uncertainties, and then dig deeper to see what exactly I am struggling with – and then go ahead and fix it. I enjoy that adventure 🙂

Status March 2013

Geir Isene 24 Comments

When I write about HP-41 calculators, the guys over at HP Forum reads it but few comment on the post (they do plenty of commenting in the forum). When I write about my realizations in philosophy or physics, many different people read it and interesting discussions ensue. When I write about my positive experiences in Scientology, some people read it and there are some comments (less than 200 comments on a blog post is not much here). When I write something critical about Scientology, the place goes ballistic.

I don’t much care how many reads what or how many comments. This blog is an act of selfishness. I enjoy writing. It helps me sort my thoughts and views. I invite others to comment and reading other’s viewpoints helps me improve my views. But it is interesting to see what gets traction, and since I have a few years of statistics, I’d like to share a few points.

December was the most active month ever, both in number of views and number of readers (some 15000 views and a couple of thousand readers). January beat December. February was another high, and March will beat February by a good margin.

Reflecting on the recent months, I see that when I post often, there is more action (duh!). And when I sort out my own earlier “brainwashing” (accepted data without thorough inspection), lively discussions ensue. These posts generate more comments on Scientology than on any other blog on the Net (with more than 1700 comments on one post). It seems that criticizing Scientology generates lots of emotions that results in action (posting of comments). Maybe because it triggers bad experiences or because it challenges beliefs? Or are there other reasons?

I will try out a different topic soon and see how that fares. Stay tuned.


(Hugh at Gapingvoid.com)

Forget Scientology, here comes U-ology!

Geir Isene 71 Comments

“What do you wish to achieve?”

After what seemed like an hour of silence, Tim was done trying to figure out the answer to that existential question. He spat out what first entered his mind anyway: “I want to understand better what I read.” “And I want to stop having those terrible nightmares since my father passed away six years ago.”

“OK”, the woman answered. “How is your reading now?”

Tim explained how he often got distracted when he was reading. Not from external noise, but from noise inside his head. It was sort of constant, and he had the idea it may somehow be related to his horrible nightmares – because he couldn’t remember the noise being that distracting when his father was alive.

“And how are your nightmares exactly?”

Tim related his usual nightly horrors.

Having gotten Tim’s goals and also where he was at in the present, Diane proceeded: “We should be able to help you out on both these goals.” She continued by explaining how they would go about helping Tim from his present situation to what he wanted to achieve. She explained the tools they would offer him, the estimated time and cost involved and the possible risks along the way. Nothing left out. Just simple transparency.

Tim’s brother, Craig sat in the other room with a counselor named Adam.

Adam used the same, simple approach and asked for Craig’s aspirations and where he was at today.

Craig was half a head higher than his older brother and weighed in at some 50 pounds more. In pure muscles. It came as no surprise that he wanted to be a better boxer. He told Adam that he had excellent reaction speed, but that some basic boxing skills seemed to fail him when he got knocked about a bit.

But Craig was an interesting mix between a muscle-man and a spiritual seeker, and Adam was taken off guard when he told him his most important goal in life; “To be able to go out of my body, freely as I want – just like I used to do when I was a kid.”

Impressed by this mixture of goals, Adam told Craig: “We do have the tools to increase a person’s reaction speed, but we have no experience when it comes to boxing skills and how you can retain them as you get beaten up in the ring. And I don’t know who to refer you to. Sorry about that.”

He continued: “And although we have certain methods that can let the person leave his body, they are actually side-effects of our mental training regime and not a sure-fire way to be what we call exterior,” “If you’d like, I can refer you to two other possible methodologies that may be able to offer what you want – one is a branch of Buddhism, the other is an ancient native American society. We cannot guarantee that they can help you, but it’s worth a shot to contact them. I’ll find their contact information for you.”

The brothers were briefed on this “U-ology center” and that they were actively collecting all kinds of tools to help people reach their goals and aspirations, that they would train to deliver those tools without exaggerations, that they would never question a person’s wishes, and that they would always be honest about what they can do and how they would go about helping a person. It would be all about You.

No one-size-fits-all regimen. No strict policies or hierarchy or ensuing power struggles. Only skillful training in a vast number of tools and applying them honestly where they fit the best.

Tim decided to try it out, while Craig was happy to check out that native American tribe.

possible

The basic assumption

Geir Isene 18 Comments

Following my previous blog post and the ensuing discussion, I have come to a rather unsurprising conclusion that is squarely in line with Kurt Gödel’s:

In any world view there will always be a basic assumption that cannot be proven.

Religions have basic assumptions of a beginning, of infinite cause, of eternal chaos or a causative agent. Science has a basic assumption of the laws of physics.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems prove that in a world view, there will always be something that you cannot prove. It hinges on this quote:

“His work PROVED that any system of logic or numbers that mathematicians ever come up with will always rest on at least a few unprovable assumptions.”

And the universe is a system of logic. It can be put even more succinctly:

“Anything you can draw a circle around cannot explain itself without referring to something outside the circle – something you have to assume but cannot prove.”

It follows Gödel’s that there must be something outside of the realm of the physical universe as we know it. Not outside as in “spatially outside”, but in “conceptually outside”. The physical universe cannot be all the truth. There must be something else that governs it. Some scientists believe that outside influence is the laws of physics themselves, but that begs the question of “how did those laws come about?”

Children are onto something when they keep asking “Why?”. As a parent you try to answer, and answer and answer until you have to give up. Because there is always one more “Why?” than you have an answer to. And that only validates Gödel. Somewhere we are bound to accept some basic assumption as our core belief to settle the never-ending Q & A.

It boils down to what you decide to accept as your core belief, the basic assumption. And in my experience that tells you a great deal about the core of the person himself. And since we have different basic assumptions in our world views, it makes for interesting discussions on this blog. Thank you.

Kurt Gödel

Kurt Gödel

Can there be a beginning?

Geir Isene 283 Comments

Man has pondered this questions for thousands of years. Science and religion have posed theories and beliefs depicting the absolute beginning of the universe, of existence. From the science’s Big Bang to the ancient Egyptian creation myths. It seems common to most mythologies, science included, to attempt to find and explain the very beginning.

But they all begs the question “What came before that?”. Science offer various theories for what came before the Big Bang, but you may always ask “But what started all that?” and “But why?”. And “How did the laws of physics come about?”.

If existence came from a spirit or spirits, then “What prompted it or them to create?” “Why?”

And so we may wonder, can there be a beginning at all?

Key success factors in business

Geir Isene 2 Comments

From an article I stumbled across over at Harvard Business Review:

The secret to being a great manager at Bell Labs is hiring the right people, giving them the tools they need, pointing them in the right direction, and staying out of their way.

It aligns perfectly with my article, “Processes, Automation and Human Potential“. It sums up succinctly how you do not rely on policy and micro-management to get things done. Whenever I see an organization relying on dictations, I know they fail on a) recruitment, b) training or supplying the right tools for the employees to freely use, or c) setting clear goals for delivery.


(Hugh at Gapingvoid.com)

Scientology or not

Geir Isene 230 Comments

Here’s a summary – again after lots of discussions lately:

  1. The current scene in the world of Scientology is a mess. Lives are getting ruined. I want the root causes found and handled.
  2. Scientology has not provided a consistent way of handling people’s issues and evidently does not provide a reliable way to deliver my main goals in life.
  3. I want #2 debugged – i.e. to “build a better Bridge”. If this means using whole chunks, only part or nothing of Scientology, then be it.

To those who find me hard to discuss with, stubborn or tough – it is only due to my insistence on the above. I tend to insist on getting the intended results, and let any method go down the drain if needed. I tend to run over holy cows.


(Hugh at Gapingvoid.com)