Reflecting on last weekend’s talk on creativity I worried that probably emphasized the “open” aspect of the creative cycle at the expense of the “closed” aspect. My gist seemed to be, “Don’t worry about anything… try everything, and fantastic creations will magically appear.” Given the circumstances, I’m happy I erred that way rather than the other. We [...]
Tagged as:
benjamin franklin,
bruce mau,
complexity,
creativity,
dennis dutton,
digital media,
discovery,
electricity,
epistemology,
evolution,
generativity,
history,
paradigms,
poetry,
pragmatism,
progress,
revolutions,
social media,
theory,
think21st,
thomas kuhn
Late last night I had a serious lapse of faith in social media — as we all must from time to time. We should have serious doubts questions about this stuff… Which is why I chuckle whenever I read editorials merely pointing out “there are hazards” and digitization “isn’t all good” — as if any [...]
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change,
communication,
community,
criticism,
deliberation,
democracy,
epistemology,
openness,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
social media,
society,
technology,
transparency,
web,
will to believe,
william james
The news sure spread fast. It interrupted broadcasts and seemed to consume Twitter — as much as it can be consumed by any single event. Ethan Zuckerman of Global Voices reported, according to his metric, that 15% of all posts on the service mentioned Michael Jackson. By comparison, he never saw Iran or Swine Flu [...]
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change,
cultural evolution,
culture,
demographics,
generations,
history,
imagination,
immortality,
meaning,
michael jackson,
narrative,
paradigms,
pop culture,
significance,
twitter
I’m looking through my notebook and remembered that back in February I was starting to develop a Buddhist-like ‘practice’ based on writing. I’m going to make another effort. It looks like I was onto something. A few months ago, in search of discipline, I started copying out Upanishads during my breaks at work. My intention was [...]
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buddhism,
discipline,
goals,
notebooks,
organization,
practice,
writing
I had a longish essay half-conceived on this and partly written… but instead of that I’ll keep it short and let you fill the rest in for yourself (which I need to do way more often). The gist is this: online sites and links exist for the sake of promoting offline experiences (communities, friendships, profit, [...]
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generativity,
metaphysics,
philosophy,
social media,
space,
substance,
time,
two aspects,
vitality,
web
I tend to go through new mottos every few months. Background on some of the old ones are here, here, here and here. “Learning is personal, knowledge is social, truth is an adventure” came to me while staring at a blank description field in the settings of thinkingalive.com, a new WordPress-powered site I set up for [...]
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alfred north whitehead,
michael polanyi,
personal knowledge,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
truth
Principles are intellectual landmarks for orienting our actions and decisions as well as our opinions of others. Principles aren’t to be upheld at all costs; principles are provisional, to be upheld until they don’t work anymore — then broken and reformed… In fact, what we believe are our principles may not be (or probably aren’t) the [...]
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ideology,
intellect,
politics,
practice,
pragmatism,
principles,
theory
A few years ago I spent a while trying to grasp “what it’s all about.” What I came up with — more or less — is that the purpose of life is to tell a good story. Whether or not that’s true, it’s the most effective way to manage and resolve a lot of problems. Some [...]
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life,
narrative,
philosophy,
purpose,
purpose of life,
story,
storytelling
I feel obligated to write about this because it squats squarely in my basket of interests, touching on politics, belief, science, ethics, media… If I didn’t post something about this I’d be signaling gross indifference to the enterprise of blogging. Concern in the science community shouldn’t be surprising. By comparison, while we don’t expect the agriculture [...]
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attraction,
belief,
canada,
chance,
darwin,
evolution,
politics,
religion,
science
This is exactly what I was getting at in my basketball & wisdom post: Everyone should watch this, then go out and act on it — then watch it again, then keep doing the right thing… There’s nobody who hasn’t thought ill of bureaucratic limitations and the pernicious mediocrity they create, but how many people [...]
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barry schwartz,
ethics,
morality,
practical wisdom,
virtue,
wisdom
Part of an ongoing series on belief. David Brooks generated a lot of discussion with his column in May on “The Neural Buddhists“: Scientists have more respect for elevated spiritual states. Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania has shown that transcendent experiences can actually be identified and measured in the brain (people experience a [...]
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atheism,
belief,
buddhism,
epistemology,
neuroscience,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
psychology,
religion,
william james
