Connections - Intertwingled: Information Changes Everything - page 66

Figure 3-11. The two loops of double-loop learning.
In short, we must go deep, breaking the icy surface in search of the truth. This reminds me of
Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, a poem I've loved since high school, and a source of inspira-
tion in my decision two decades past to take the road less traveled by becoming an information
architect. Of course, the joke's on me. A few years ago, while helping our daughter with home-
work, I searched for “road not taken meaning” and found “in leaves no step had trodden black,”
I'd been wrong all that time. No road is less trodden, and that truth is revealed with a sigh. Frost
dropped hints and warned us explicitly.
You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem - very tricky.
But, inspired by his words, we missed his meaning. We chose our roads less traveled, knowing
that made all the difference. One can only imagine the unintended consequences of this mass
misinterpretation. As for me, I love it all the more as the poem about forks that took me for two
loops.
Forks
In 1941, Jorge Luis Borges, a blind Argentine librarian, wrote an amazing story, The Garden of
Forking Paths, about a topic and a labyrinth containing “an infinite series of times, a growing,
dizzying web of divergent, convergent, and parallel times…all possibilities.” This use of analogy
to connect the forks of space and time is poetic, irresistible, and recursive.
In 1991, Herbert Simon, the polymath pioneer of artificial intelligence and decision theory, wrote
“I have encountered many branches in the maze of my life's path, where I have followed now
the left fork, now the right. The metaphor of the maze is irresistible to someone who has devoted
his scientific career to understanding human choice.” lxxviii