Just noticed there’s a new documentary about Ray Kurzweil and his big ideas (transhumanism, artificial intelligence, technological singularity, etc.). The movie’s called Transcendent Man: … offering [Kurzweil's] vision of a future in which we will merge with our machines, can live forever, and are billions of times more intelligent…all within the next thirty years. I saw him talk [...]
Tagged as:
culture,
future,
futurism,
predictions,
progress,
ray kurzweil,
singularity,
society,
speculation,
technology
The 2011 Edge Annual Question is a doozy. It came out this weekend: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? This is my fourth year doing a kind of mashup. A few hours ago I didn’t think I’d be able to. Reading through the answers, I felt like I was taking a pummeling: one after [...]
Tagged as:
brain,
certainty,
edge annual question,
knowledge,
meaning,
mind,
philosophy,
psychology,
spatiality,
temporality,
truth,
uncertainty
Here’s a fascinating article about the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue at Firdos Square in 2003 – a great case to examine how our desire for compelling stories and images makes us deceive ourselves. Some argue it may have made things worse — enabling the infamous “Mission Accomplished” announcement and causing people to overlook real problems. (More [...]
Tagged as:
attention,
conspiracies,
deception,
iraq war,
journalism,
self-deception,
war
I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
Tagged as:
change,
evolution,
facebook,
future,
generativity,
meaning,
philosophy,
progress,
social media,
society,
technology,
twitter
It took me most of my young life to figure this out. After growing up as a precocious political junkie I got jaded pretty early. I grew up in a rural conservative family but somehow, deep-down I’m an urban technophile who often hopes there’s no problem that walkable neighbourhoods and Twitter hashtags can’t solve. In [...]
Tagged as:
cities,
conservatism,
democracy,
design ego,
elections,
government,
ideology,
moral psychology,
motivation,
politics,
pragmatism,
progressivism,
purpose,
relevance,
values,
voting,
will to relevance
It’s great to do “meaningful work” and have “meaningful dialog” and make “meaningful contributions.” But do you really know what it means? It’s often just a synonym for “good” — which can be , um, good — but at its worst it merely means that something “feels good” or “resembles good.” When it’s done right, [...]
Tagged as:
charity,
generativity,
good,
hedonism,
ideas,
ideology,
marketing,
meaning,
meaningful,
morality,
motivation,
narcissism,
objectivity,
purpose,
rhetoric,
work
I just had a crazy thought about The Social Network. It turns on this controversial and often-repeated remark (found here) by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin: I don’t want my fidelity to be to the truth; I want it to be to storytelling. I’m #TeamInternet all the way but I appreciate where Sorkin is coming from. I’m sort [...]
Tagged as:
cultural evolution,
facebook,
fiction,
film,
generativity,
internet,
movies,
narrative,
stories,
storytelling,
truth,
web,
writing
Lately I’ve been missing the old sense of wonder and enthusiasm I once had for the future. It seems to be a natural development in the life cycle: it was easier to get excited “when I didn’t know any better,” or hadn’t “seen it all before.” I’ve been able to get some leverage on that [...]
Tagged as:
awe,
change,
emotions,
experience,
henry adams,
jacques barzun,
machines,
religion,
society,
technology,
utopias
Of everything I’ve written, I think The New Pragmatist has retained the most value. I told someone two years ago I was going to clean it up and publish a PDF, but I got pulled away from it by too many new ideas to have any patience for futzing around with something old… until now: [...]
Tagged as:
books,
epistemology,
knowledge,
lulu,
objectivity,
practice of theory,
pragmatism,
publishing,
self-publishing,
subjectivity
Picking up the Thinking in the 21st Century thread again… I’m nearing the end of the most philosophical stuff. It all turns on this one… Just a reminder to read this as a proposal — a basis for refinement and elaboration (not to mention citations and evidence), not presuming finality. A few weeks ago I [...]
Tagged as:
epistemology,
ideas,
metaphysics,
mind,
philosophy,
process,
psychology,
relevance,
stories,
theory,
think21st,
will to relevance
Continued from the social uncertainty principle post, using the analogy of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. Like virtually all of the ideas I’m describing in this series, the social uncertainty principle is a heuristic for observing ideas-in-action and overcoming fallacies that affect them. Specifically it’s a rule of thumb for working out a balance between ideas that [...]
Tagged as:
epistemology,
information,
intuition,
knowledge,
management,
methods,
organizations,
social uncertainty,
statistics,
think21st,
uncertainty,
uncertainty principle
The core of my practice of theory is an appreciation of what I call “object bias” — our tendency to conceive experience composed of distinct and permanent objects.
Tagged as:
abstract objects,
abstraction,
cognitive science,
epistemology,
evolution,
heuristics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
specialization,
think21st
