Modelling Complexity — EQ, IQ and OQ
“Let us honour, if we can, the multidimensional woman and man. Though we value none but the unidimensional one,”
We use models so much more than we think we do.
For instance, people use terms like IQ and EQ regularly to describe the way in which managers and other people operate, often to describe poor or insensitive behaviour. It seems like a sort of shorthand for ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ skills.
And we humans do like ‘either-or’ two factor configurations. Look at binary. Yes? No? ;-)
But of course, people have many more dimensions
A long while ago, I read the work of Thomas Szaz and being at that time involved with someone with a significant interest in mental health, came to the rapid conclusion that mental health problems were just extreme forms of ‘normal’ behaviour. I tried this theory on a forensic psychiatrist at one of the secure psychiatric hospitals that bracket the M62 motorway in the UK (I was visiting, okay? No, really. It was a conference. Honest).
He looked at me with pity and, shaking his head, said “You have clearly never known anyone who is truly mad”. Clearly, his experience was different from mine. And he almost certainly considered more dimensions than I did.
More recently I had an interesting discussion about complexity with RolandRust and many other people. And this led me to think about redescription mining and model building
We know — particularly in digital transformation, software engineering, machine learning, deep learning and data science that abstraction — model building- is often the most difficult thing to get right. Which dimensions do we include? Which, exclude? And what’s the rationale behind the choice?
The word rationale indicates ‘rationality’ This seems to have strong links with balance, order and predictability, with appropriate penalties for any transgression of these concepts. Indeed, such a transgression could be seen as ‘hubris”. Originally hubris was the intentional use of violence to humiliate or degrade. It could be employed against men or women. The word’s meaning changed over time, and hubris came to be defined as an overweening presumption that leads a person to disregard the divinely fixed limits on human action in an ordered Universe. This, in turn, leads to punitive action from the Gods, themselves.
So, do we need to move beyond ‘soft’ and ‘hard’, ‘EQ’ and ‘IQ’?
Do we need a more integrative ‘OQ’ where we build inclusive or transcendant models?
And how many dimensions do your models contain?
And how do you improve them, in coding and in life?
