Selecting Knowledge: Killing One's Worst Ideas through Fair Critical Comparison

Distance Learning Workshop 13: Selecting Knowledge: Killing One's Worst Ideas through Fair Critical Comparison

The Gateway Workshop focused a good deal on the importance of Knowledge Claim Evaluation (KCE), sometimes called Error Elimination, or Killing our Worst Ideas. KCE was characterized as the sub-process leading to the differentiation of knowledge and information, knowledge processing and information processing, and ultimately Knowledge Management and Information Management.

This Workshop goes much more deeply into this critical step within creative learning (or knowledge production, or knowledge making, or knowledge discovery, etc.) of killing your worst ideas. Creative learning begins with problems, and then proceeds deliberately with attempts to acquire or create solutions to them. The alternative decision models produced during creative learning are not immediately used in practical action and exposed to experience. Instead, they're evaluated in the step called KCE, error elimination, or killing your worst ideas. While the step of creating alternative decision models is positive in character, killing your worst ideas is 'negative' in its orientation. Its purpose is to test alternative decision models as severely as possible and to try our best to refute each of them. Our objective in doing this is to ensure that the alternative that survives comparison is the best decision model we've been able to create, and the one it makes sense to rely on when we have to decide.

So, how do you go about killing your worst ideas? You do it through fair critical comparison. Fair critical comparison is a distinctly neo-Darwinian process that focuses on comparing and selecting among competing ideas, and self-organization of distributed critical activities, around the problems being addressed by creative learning. It is the way you should apply criticism and testing in both killing your worst ideas and severely testing the strength of your best ones. This workshop teaches the method of fair critical comparison for killing your worst ideas and leaving your best ones standing. It covers:

The Idea of Fair Critical Comparison;
Fair Critical Comparison (FCC) Requirements
Direct Comparative KCE Criteria for FCC
Combining Comparative Evaluation Criteria in KCE
Two Formal Approaches to Measuring “Truthlikeness”
An AHP-based ratio scaling approach
A Fuzzy Measurement Model Approach to "Truthlikeness"
Other Approaches to Combining Criterion Attributes of "truthlikeness" and KM Knowledge Production
KCE Software: Use Cases and Structural Features

The Workshop Syllabus is available here.

The Workshop is taught by Joseph M. Firestone, Ph.D. Dr. Firestone's credentials are available here.

Text and other materials for the workshop include:

Karl Popper (1999), All Life Is Problem Solving, New York, NY: Routledge

Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy (2003), Key Issues in the New Knowledge Management, Burlington, MA: KMCI Press/Butterworth-Heinemann.

Joseph M. Firestone and Mark W. McElroy (2003) Excerpt #1 from The Open Enterprise: Building Business Architectures for Openness and Sustainable Innovation, Hartland Four Corners, VT: KMCI Online Press, available at: http://www.dkms.com/papers/
openenterpriseexcerptnumb1final.pdf

Joseph M. Firestone's forthcoming book, Riskonomics: Reducing Risk by Killing Your Worst Ideas (.pdf file)

Joseph M. Firestone (2003), “How Knowledge Management Can Help Identify and Bridge Knowledge Gaps,” An EIS Professional Paper, Wilmington, DE: Executive Information Systems, Inc., 2003, available at: http://www.dkms.com/professionalpapers.htm

In addition, a set of extensive course notes will be provided, and a
Certificate of Workshop Completion will be issued upon completion of this Workshop.

The Workshop is available weekly on Tuesdays and Thursdays. You can reserve it one week or earlier from the date you want to take it. After that time, you may still be able to enroll in the Workshop, if others have already scheduled it. But if it hasn't been scheduled, you still may not be able to enroll if another workshop has been scheduled for the same day. Register here for the Selecting Knowledge: Killing One's Worst Ideas through Fair Critical Comparison Workshop.