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Rohan Light

Rohan Light

I help the good build the worthwhile. Doing #progressive, thinking #resilience, learning #DataOps, reading #history, governing #data, loving #physics

I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter, But I Didn't Have the Time

My reflections on the Future for Life 'call for pause' letter controversy, which is not a false controversy The title is from Blaise Pascal (1623-1662, a short life, Quote Investigator), whose work we continuously encounter in the body of work on mathematics, economics, probability and many other useful things. In

Meta's Cicero is not a threshold moment, but it could be, if we wanted, just for a different reason

Meta's Cicero is not a threshold moment, but it could be, if we wanted, just for a different reason

I wake early to do low light photography: time for coffee and a quick scan of current activity in LinkedIn, which is happening during one of the northern Hemisphere posting bursts, when top of planet people are sending updates of their work, each with different relativity 'past-ness' for me, here

The second risk of risk management

The second risk of risk management

The first risk of risk management is faulty risk management models. The second risk is making a fundamental category error about what sort of causal risk we're facing. We can do well on the first, but can still crash and burn with the second. The health system paradigm in Aotearoa

Roger Martin, Integrative Thinking and the Opposable Mind

Roger Martin, Integrative Thinking and the Opposable Mind

I read Roger Martin's epic little 2008 book 'The Opposable Mind' at the same time as I was working through Sam Savage's 2012 book "The Flaw of Averages". Both authors used a similar analogy: the human hand. Martin talked about the importance of the opposable thumb-and-forefinger as a master metaphor.

The flying fish: an updated theory of change model

This was meant to be a live piece while I worked the model up but I didn't move it along. Mainly because I ran out of time and got drawn into other things. But having a theory of change turns out to be somewhat important and so I'll come back

Explained but not understood

Explained but not understood

(An exploratory essay; last updated 4 December 2020) When we lose track of whose version of a story to trust, paranoia ensues. It seems no coincidence that we find ourselves in an epistemological crisis several years into what is frequently described as a “crisis in the humanities”, the very subjects

Lab notes Rovelli 11/11

I'm in my lab to get my head around #quantumcomputing and using Carlo Rovelli's The Order of Time to melt my brain to an appropriate state