I am an old, white, cisgender man. I spent my first couple of decades in England and then accidentally moved to Canada, which is where I have lived for another half century. I originally came for a year to do graduate studies, but never got round to going back except for short visits. I have also worked for two to eight months total in each of the Netherlands, the Czech Republic and the USA, and for a week each in Poland and France, as well as travelling in Mexico and Ireland.
My family background is working class. My grandfathers were a coal miner who later moved to a cotton town and became a mill worker, and a lifelong mill worker. My parents were a textile mechanic and a retail cashier. We lived in row housing in the mill town of Bolton, Lancashire. I spoke both Lancashire dialect and BBC English as occasion required. In my early teens, we moved out of town to a country village a few miles away.
My early education was in a teaching hospital, the Royal Manchester Children’s Hospital. I didn’t go to primary school until the last year, when I was ten. My parents taught me to read and in the hospital I read a lot, the usual kids books but also books on physics. I also got science education from the hospital. They developed medical machinery which they prototyped in Meccano™, a construction toy in which you bolt together metal parts, so it makes more robust results than Lego™.
They let me help with that so I learned a lot, in random order, about how bodies and machines worked.
I also volunteered for the nurses’ school, for them to practice non-invasive procedures like bandaging, taking vital signs etc.
Although I hadn’t attended primary school until the last year, but in those days in England, kids were streamed based on “ability”, which was tested by an exam called “the eleven plus”, I had a small problem. Fortunately, my parents bribed me to learn the multiplication tables and I had read widely, I was graded for a grammar school and went to one of what were considered the two top schools in my town, the other requiring fees and being segregated into boys and girls. I focused on science, though also took an interest in history, in which the class was given the choice of either “political history”, which was largely about kings, queens and prime ministers, or social and economic history. Although this did have what I now know is a massive imperialist bias, I learned some valuable skills and it was impossible to hide some of the terrible things that were the unacknowledged dark side of empire and economic success.
After grammar school, I went to Cambridge University. They have a bizarre system in which you study a single subject exclusively each year. I did mathematics and theoretical physics the first two years but decided that was too narrow a focus for me so I then did a year of philosophy.
That got me into graduate school, for which I moved to Canada, intending to do an MA, starting a thesis in philosophy of science. However, I decided at that point that the life of an academic wasn’t how I’d imagined it so I decided to try something that would give me a wider knowledge of the outside world. I had, during vacations, supported myself with factory work but didn’t like that either.
So I tried social work, thinking that would broaden my understanding of the way things worked and would also help people. The first part worked, I learned a lot of things, especially that even some people who abuse their children are not necessarily as bad as the institutions that supposedly help children. I resigned when I was asked to do something that both my supervisor and I agreed that the rules meant that I had to do something that was very bad for a couple of kids and would be far more expensive to the public purse than the far better alternatives. I couldn’t do that.
After a brief hiatus as assistant manager in a prairie grain elevator, I went back to university to do a year of computer science, following which I had about a year as a programmer/analyst and then about 30 years as an IT architect. I found that more interesting than I had thought it would be, because my job mostly involved finding out as much as I could about other peoples’ jobs and figuring out how computers could help them do them. finishing as an Open Group certified Distinguished Lead Architect, in the role of Executive IT Architect, which meant I was technical lead on large scale ($100 million plus) projects, or acting as adviser to industry executives, mostly in government, covering environment, social services, health and more.
Because of my background in philosophy, social work and science, I soon got to be technical lead in designing larger scale systems — not just the computer systems but the human systems in which they fit, because introducing computers tended to change the nature of the work of the people using them and of their “customers”, broadly defined. As a result, I learned some of the tools for analysing systems. I spent some time as a member of a methods and tools team, and taught basic and advanced courses on that.
I also took the advice of Martha, one of Doris Lessing’s characters in her “Four-Gated City” novel, the one that I have read the most. That is to do the equivalent of at least one undergraduate course every semester. That has added up to quite a few subjects, including social sciences, biology, history, economics and systems in a variety of fields beyond information systems. I completed an online course in Indigenous Studies from University of Alberta. I recommend it to any non-Indigenous person living in the territory now known as Canada.
I am now retired and getting used to the idea of being a senior citizen with its consequences.
Others define themselves by nationality. I am now down to two because Brexit has deprived me of broader European citizenship, so I now hold British and Canadian citizenship. I don’t really consider myself to be any of “British”, “Canadian” or “English”. I’m not a nationalist or even a patriot, for reasons explained in the workbook. However, it does mean that I have an obligation to hold the Canadian government to account as much as possible as well as the Ontario provincial governments. I mostly do so by pestering my representatives by email and phone.
I also read widely on a variety of subjects, including politics, social sciences, biology, and many others. In recent years including works by non-eurocentric writers.
The tools I will emphasize the most are two collections that I have spent a good deal of time and effort on already. One is derived from linguistic philosophy, which I studied at both the undergraduate and graduate level and have found useful beyond their original purpose of solving specifically philosophical problems. The other is systems thinking. I am less optimistic than many authors that there is a general approach to thinking about all kinds of systems, but I have found that many of the tools appear to be useful, if applied with considerable care, to the systems I am most interested in; the systems made by we humans in order to collaborate in large numbers.