aron

I think maps and recipes are often good comparative structures.

A good map highlights where you’d want to go. You’ve seen the image of the peak of a trail and along the way it might highlight things worth seeing. Thus, it invites the hiker towards the destination. Simultaneously, it’s not as they say the “territory” itself. While some of us do enjoy just browsing Google Maps for fun, it’s not a replacement for the journey. Surprise is still necessary for a good and enjoyable hike.

A bad map doesn’t drag you in to explore it. It can also be too dense.

A great recipe shows you the food which is the end of your planned narrative. The ingredients are partly visible in it and the journey takes you through the process. A poor recipe is unable to foreshadow what you might eat and leaves out gaps in preparation such that the logic or plot of the preparation leaves you frustrated or lost (resulting in an undercooked mess).

Sometimes, a recipe might show you something that’s unattainable for an average cook, in the same way that a map might deceptively lure you into a direction with information and visuals that don’t match reality.

So, great (direct or indirect) foreshadowing and non-linear storytelling relies on:

1. Setting a novel, realistic, and clear future event

2. which from the setup of ingredients available at the start

3. leaves a viewer surprised in how the start gets to the unique end.

“We only count what we know to count, and that's strongly determined by where we stand and who we are.

I often hear people say that qualitative research isn't generalizable, by which they mean that they use "sample" that do not have the features necessary to make valid inferences about a known population.

Forget for a minute that most survey samples aren't truly random, that confidence intervals are often not included, and so on.

We're all operating with the kind of bias that makes it hard to find hay in the haystack. We're biased towards things that are already legible to us. Statistical methods make a virtue of that.

Qualitative research helps us to de-center our concepts, to expand our understanding of the frameworks and schema that operate in lesser examined corners of life.

Even numbers aren't simply a sequence of digits, but a continuum of rationality and irrationality, with the latter making up the grand majority.

Going Further is about changing your stance in ways that challenge our sense of what counts.”

Adam Talkington

Head of Ethnography at Further&Further

When a complex system is far from equilibrium, small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to shift the entire system to a higher order.

We need a new definition of scale that is not about the production volumes of a material but the proliferation and exchange of knowledge. From scaling up to scaling out – or perhaps from scaling up to skilling up.  

If you want to be read in the future, make sure you would have been read in the past. We have no idea of what’s in the future, but we have some knowledge of what was in the past. So I make sure I would have been read both in the past and in the present time, that is by both the comtemporaries and the dead. So I speculated that books that would have been relevant twenty years in the past (conditional of course of being relevant today) would be interesting twenty years in the future.