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Mathew Mytka's avatar

Keen to follow along with this as there is significant resonance with the work I've been doing over the years. The points about paradoxical thinking, affording for complexity and provoking the limitations of pursuing consensus, learning through play, participatory sense-making and bringing scientists, artist, philosophers together is needed more now than ever. Maybe when timezones work I can join in on some synchronous play.

Neural Foundry's avatar

Exceptional framing of opponent processing in action! What really lands here is the shift from debating until consesnus to actively building with contradictions still intact. I worked on a municipal planning project once where we got stuck trying to reconcile neighborhood visions, but once we stopped trying to merge them and just built separate pathways that didn't block eachother, momentum came back fast.

Love and Philosophy's avatar

Thank you. This is really interesting. Wondering: How did you come to this method in your work? By accident? Or did you think of it in these terms?

Rainbow Roxy's avatar

I resonate with what you wrote; seeing diverse perspectives as a feature, not then a bug, is so spot on. How do we operationalize that more broadly?

Love and Philosophy's avatar

Many of us working with this in mind? At least it is a place to begin. We’re also making an index of people and resources so do let us know if you have any ideas.

Jasen Robillard's avatar

This very much aligns with the art/craft/work I'm personally exploring in my communities (Wisdom Exchange, cohousing life, my puzzle-art patrons). I'm endeavouring to explore this space even more in 2026. I would love to find out more about The Perspective Studio and how we might learn from one another. Many folks working in this space who are siloed in their jurisdictional fields would benefit from the inherent network effects of these shared practices.

Johannes Jaeger's avatar

Sounds interesting! I just asked Andrea to put us in touch. Or, even easier: contact me at the email address that i linked at the very end of the essay?

Andrea Hiott's avatar

sending you both an email to introduce you, would be great to come up with some puzzles for holding paradox ❣️

Johannes Jaeger's avatar

Thank you! Contact made. Serious play will ensue.

Debbie Aliya's avatar

Interesting. I have developed a warm up exercise to help people learn to describe visible objects with simple facts. The goal is to help people 1) get to agreement 2) see how rapidly we accept our own experience and opinions as fact 3) learn to distinguish levels and types of facts. Feel free to reach out on LinkedIn if interested.

Johannes Jaeger's avatar

Hi Debbie. Thanks for the feedback. I *did* email you a few weeks back, in response to your comments on my Wimsatt piece. Curious to learn more about your approach!

Debbie Aliya's avatar

Hi Johannes,

I have a ROUGH draft of Unit 7 from the new book I am working on in my series Creative Critical Thinking for the Passionate. If you are interested, I can send you a pdf. Please contact me in LinkedIn as I have not mastered DM's in Substack yet.

Andrea has a physical copy of the first workbook. At some point I am supposed to be getting an ecopy of my massive text book on engineering failure analysis. Chapter 3 in that book is basically on visual examination centered on these ideas. If you go to my LinkedIn profile, you can see both books.

Debbie Aliya's avatar

If anyone else wants to help review, please contact me.

Andrea Hiott's avatar

Happy to help if I can in any way. Happy New Year Debbie