aron
@aronshelton
@aronshelton
I'm so thankful that I'm an addict and that I'm an alcoholic, because I have these people. And without that addiction and alcoholism and without coming to the point where I could admit that, I don't know that I would have ever had a bond with such an amazing group of people as this. And it's awesome because it's not just here. It's not just in the
... See more“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
What are the words you do not have yet? [Or, “for what do you not have words, yet?”]
What do you need to say? [List as many things as necessary]
“What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?” [List as many as necessary today. Then write a new list tomorrow.
“Communication is not what has been said. It is what it is possible to say— and that is guarded by the implicit messages inherent in the relationships.” - Nora Bateson, Combining
“The change before the change suggests that perhaps indescribability is, in itself, an evolutionary condition, a built-in extra budget of possibility for unfamiliar formations. I suspect it is, and this indescribability offers the challenge of how to communicate this unseen, submerged process. One is to accentuate the lateness of responding to "eme
... See moreprovocations and Wordplay
Do ideas really occur in chains, or is the lineal structure imposed on them by scholars and philosophers? How is the world of logic, which eschews “circular argument” related to a world in which circular trains of causation are the rule rather than the expectation? (G. Bateson, 2002, p.18)
I post this quote from Peter Block's book "Community" every year. It doesn't get much attention because it's not built for social media: it's thick.
But there really isn't a better explanation of the "why" behind the work I do, and its encouragement for communities to move away from blame, apathy, and entitlement and towards possibility, intentional
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