Essays
If you want to dig into this stuff I’d suggest looking at my book – Truth, Will & Relevance – which essentially condenses my core ideas. I’d also recommend looking at the page with all of my key posts on Education and another with my key posts on London Ontario, if those topics interest you.
The ones with asterisks designate “core” posts that represent a significant aspect in my body of ideas (more asterisks = more representative).
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*** Things Happen Because Time Exists (Dec 8, 2009) – “The idea that “things happen because time exists” doesn’t really answer anything, it’s a way to admit uncertainty and ambiguity where it belongs, to prevent myself from resting too comfortably on supposedly stable facts and ideas.”
***Object Bias (Dec 6, 2009) – “We’re the species that happened to acquire imagination and memory capable of transposing the real world into a conceptual world of symbols — abstract objects that aren’t subject to the physical laws of change and motion affecting the rest of reality.”
**Social Media, Structure, and the Creative Cycle (Nov 24, 2009) – “To use the “third object” metaphor, ideas and works of art are intermediaries or objects representing transformation. In times of chaos, creators build bridges to close gaps, drawing lines to show how things relate. In times of stagnancy, creators build wedges to separate things, drawing lines to distinguish differences.”
Our Web and the Will to Believe (Nov 12, 2009) – “Flawed as it may be, the web is becoming the best resource we have to learn and deliberate and pragmatically work through the process of overcoming our past (and future) mistakes.”
**Learning Heuristically (Sept 30, 2009) – “Everything we do is a small vote that will determine, in the aggregate, the future of our society. In the near term, today’s decisions affect what options will be available tomorrow.”
**The New Digital World-View (Sept 28, 2009) – “Specifically, digital media needs to serve as a metaphor for appreciating the new ideas about human nature; at the same time, the updated understanding of human nature is required to fully appreciate a socially dynamic world connected by digital media… back-and-forth until both aspects become intuitive.”
*“Because you wouldn’t go to a ‘citizen prostitute’ for sex, would you?” (Aug 19, 2009) – “What so many protectionists miss is that telling stories and getting to the bottom of things are basic human motives that transcend any industry or profession. They’re on the same level as sex — literally. We owe our civilization as much to the reproduction and natural selection of knowledge as much as anything biological.”
London Needs an Information Hub (July 13, 2009) – “We could talk about improving the infrastructure. I’m not sure that’s necessary (though better wireless access in more places would be nice). All I’m talking about is encouraging more citizens, organizations, and companies in London to use the free and virtually-free stuff that’s already available.”
Death of an Immortal (June 25, 2009) – “To understand the significance of the event we need to distinguish between “history” as actual events and “history” as the account, or story we compose around them… Don’t underestimate the power of the latter.”
*‘Selfless’ and ‘Selfish’ are Both Myths (June 9, 2009) – “There’s nothing holy or mystical — nor certainly not weak, nor criminal — about sharing. On a really practical, tough-minded, scientific level, “selfless” sharing can and does tend to increase the number of pieces on the board that everyone has access to.”
*Regarding Leadership (June 5, 2009) – “Great leaders don’t just speak to policies and policy-makers. They speak to the people whose daily lives are directly affected — people who will be constantly presented, often in subtle and barely-perceptible ways, with decisions whether to uphold and perpetuate the spirit of the policies or whether to violate and take advantage of them.”
Devil is in the Details of Tori Stafford’s Story (May 21, 2009) – “Now it registers that seemingly minor details (as I called them) aren’t so minor at all. It’s always a detail that pulls a solution together — or a number of details added up — just as it’s details (or the prolonged absence of a few) that make a compelling story. More to the point, life is nothing but details.”
Journalistic Sources (May 16, 2009) – “Above all the claims about the need to save journalism, about it being essential to our society, etc, this fact seems to be missed: the more essential journalism is supposed to be, the more continuously prevalent it should appear throughout history.”
Preface to Plato / Postscript to Print? (May 13, 2009) – ”The changes happening now have the potential to go way beyond “to print, or not to print.” The Athenian example demonstrates how profound the changes can be in extraordinary times.”
*The Silicon Valley Model (April 16, 2009) – “Rather than expanding control and diminishing variations, the emerging attitude will be about expanding variety and accommodating the unknown. It inverts all of our intuitions and assumptions about doing business and managing the economy… Know your ecology and complexity science.”
** Why I Have Principles (April 11, 2009) – “The value of principles is not that they justify actions but that by stating our principles we start to produce an account of our theories-in-use — we start to construct a framework for understanding where our ideas and beliefs actually come from, which gives us the basis for correction and conciliation.”
Old Folks Need to Grow Up (April 5, 2009) - “If you want to save something from getting washed away by new technologies and social norms, that’s your problem — your responsibility — not exclusively, but if the old-guard doesn’t actively try to lead the process of conciliation then the young aren’t going to give you the benefit of the doubt.”
*** Purpose of Life (April 1, 2009) - “The outcome that matters most is the ability to make stories even better. In other words, when trying to decide how to approach things, we should ask, “Does this experience… not just make for a good story in itself — but does it help me develop into a better narrator?””
Capitalism vs. Socialism Through the Lens of Eco-Conscience (March 28, 2009) – “Creative/conscious capitalism is still young, still developing into a clear set of ideas and practices. It’s an experiment — as business itself is (or should be), like science — that leaves room to compensate for and learn from our mistakes rather than institutionalizing and perpetuating our errors.”
Long Tails of London (March 26, 2009) - “There’s a false assumption that blogs are these fleeting, in-the-moment things. That’s certainly how they are made, but in the process they also leave behind concise threads of enduring information, with permanent links.”
The Global Depression (March 6, 2009) – “Once we admit these circumstances aren’t just “the worst since” the last depression but will actually become a historic depression in its own right, we don’t have to be so frightened by “staring into an abyss”; we can start to appreciate that we’re already in that abyss and it isn’t really that bad. The future has always been uncertain. The overarching lesson of all this is that we’ve been projecting rosy assumptions into an unknowable future; now we’re finally being honest but we’re not equipped to handle what we can’t see.”
London Media: Time for Homegrown Focus (March 4, 2009) – “We’re stupid to have much faith in office-holders working out of Toronto, Ottawa, Winnipeg — or wherever — to do what’s best for London. It’s going to be hard enough for us to decide what’s best for ourselves. But we need to get better at it. We need to learn as we go.”
The Atlantic Monthly, the World of Ideas, and the Future of Publishing (February 16, 2009) - “… the new geography — and the new politics, the new economy, the new culture, the new industry – will generate new thinking… The structure of our real world informs the world of our ideas. Geography, politics, the kinds of work we do, and technologies we use, provide the metaphors and images we use for understanding the present and forecasting the future.”
*** Creative Philosophy (December 30, 2008) – “Creative philosophy is a mode of philosophy with the focus on the future — moving towards new discoveries and creations, generating accidents and opportunities to adapt on the fly rather than primarily adhering to prior methods and principles. It’s all about heuristically moving forward, generating and managing limitless novelty.”
*** Personal Moral Codes (December 30, 2008) - “… it isn’t an act of moral relativism, it’s an act of moral relation or moral reference. I know there are other people (maybe not many) who share my family resemblence to the intp type, who also enjoy categorizing and defining and conceiving moral codes for the sake of doing it – simply because it’s in our nature: it’s the rhythm of our lives.”
* Investing with Asymmetric Intentions (December 27, 2008) – “Entire industries have developed in which customers are buying a good or service for the sake of something that sellers are either using as bait, or don’t even realize they’re selling. This creates further asymmetries and complex tensions that are impossible to account for, which makes long term customer relationships difficult to manage as they degenerate into mutually incomprehensible intentions.”
* Social Capital and Innovation in London, Festival Edition (December 24, 2008) – “When I started writing this I was simply going to say, “I realized that conversations like this are important modes of social capital, and blogs are a great way to develop and refine that,” but now I’m thinking more about London’s brand and how we can continue to distinguish ourselves as a community and thrive creatively — and by extension, economically.”
* Social and Creative Capital in London, Orchestra Edition (December 22, 2008) – “The arts help us understand and explain the world we live in. Consider my last post, a short commentary on a book I just read. The insights I gained from that helped me make a little more sense of life, it helped me write this, and as these intellectual investments accumulate over time, eventually I’m able to produce even greater value at even less cost…”
From News to Nascence (December 18, 2008) - “And who should we turn to for help making sense of these various manifestations of decline? And who is going to reinterpret decline into opportunity, to show us how these changes can help us make things better? Journalists should be at the top of that list.”
Newspapers, Getting Old (December 17, 2008) - “Not only do [many] blogs help demonstrate some of the answers, but the people who write and comment on them are actively making the answers articulate. They don’t just contain primary research, they are primary research — exaclty the kind of research that newspapers need to understand in order to stay relevant.”
* Science Boom! The New New Deal (December 13, 2008) - “The key is not to expect the demand for science to be the same as consumer demand. Trying to turn energy and healthcare into consumer-driven industries does not seem like a sensible idea. For lack of a better word, what I’m talking about is ‘intellectual demand.’”
A Whole Lotta Keynes (December 11, 2008) – “The turnaround is almost incredible. In the past month alone, talk of stimulus, the “rebirth of Keynes,” and the ”Keynesian moment” have drowned out the Friedman, Reagan, Greenspan crowd that dominated the discussion right up until the sub-prime collapse in 2007.”
* Cisco and the Internal Economics of Organizations (November 30, 2008) - “In command and control organizations, people might have a vague sense they’d rather be doing more gratifying and suitable work — they might even think about accepting less money to do it — but there’s nothing concrete to assure themselves and signal to others that there is progress and growth. There must be something distinguishable, concrete, and clear. Money and job titles just happen to be the simplest and easiest ways to provide that.”
** Our Society of Overachievers (October 31, 2008) – “Our society has spent more time and energy on trophies that are totally dependent on demand than on stuff that generates and sustains value independently. The financial devastation we’ve witnessed is nothing compared to the intellectual, aesthetic, and moral devastation that might yet occur.”
* Lessons From History (October 29, 2008) – “We see all the specifics that make 2008 so different from 1908 but we don’t see the general shapes and tones that make it similar – and in some ways, part of the same historic period. A hundred years from now all of the talking and writing about these events will covered in a single lecture.”
Finance as an Information Problem (September 24, 2008) – “Enterprise and trade can exist without finance. People would still want and need things, people would still make things, people would still trade and sell things without financial intermediaries. On the other hand, if we hypothetically eliminated human creativity, drive, and material desire, financing wouldn’t exist. Finance evolved last — last in, first out.”
Innovation, Pragmatism, and Economic Recovery (September 16, 2008) - “That doesn’t mean we’re helpless, not at all. The defining quality of human nature is our ability to learn and create. Our ability to discover and adapt is what brought us this far in our cultural evolution. Any solution to our big challenges must begin and end with the understanding that people will continue to discover and adapt.”
* The Meaning of Integrity in Politics (August 30, 2008) -“The important point that’s missed by McCain and most Republicans is that Obama approaches every event and decision not merely as a matter of winning the media cycle, but as an opportunity to learn and develop, to build the skills, knowledge, and support that will make future challenges more manageable.”
* Barack Obama (August 29, 2008) – “Obama is the Miles Davis of politics. Miles demanded the best of the young musicians in his band; he was not afraid of letting them contribute their own qualities to the music — in fact, Miles wanted them precisely because they would challenge him (and each other) to adapt and grow in response. He was the visionary genius directing it and the mystical figurehead unifying it.”
** Towards a New Media Model (August 18 & 21, 2008) – “A social fabric develops as our many personal threads distribute evenly accross the full range of experience – not tangling too close together nor leaving too many gaps, but each tending to find an individual niche with just enough wiggle room. And it’s just as important that our threads should all continually stretch towards the future, learning and growing via new challenges, rather than going in circles, or falling slack and getting tied into knots.”
*** The Will to Relevance (July 13, 2008) – “Google’s search engine acts as a metaphor for this theory the same way that mechanical engines provided metaphors for nineteenth century psychology, and, for that matter, the same way that older computing vocabularies in the mid-twentieth century provided metaphors for cognitive psychology.”
*** The New Pragmatist (March 3, 2008) – “Pragmatism is the attitude by which individuals humanize the organizations and institutions where they work, learn, and live. As these institutions become more humane, it becomes easier to be humane ourselves. As we “unstiffen our theories” we are better able to communicate and collaborate – resolving differences, overcoming challenges, and addressing new opportunities, both in our private lives and as part of larger public enterprise.”
*** A Sense of the Future (November 29, 2007) – “That “light by which man is truly man” is the sense of life’s incompleteness; it selects and brings into the foreground those “solitary intimations of a problem… fragments of a yet unknown coherent whole,” a compelling mystery which we call the future.”
** Origins of Creative Genius (October 22, 2007) – “The one discipline that seems the most marginalized now is philosophy. Perhaps this is because philosophy is par excellence the domain which progresses on the backs and in the minds of creative geniuses – autonomous iconoclasts, multi-disciplinary adventurers, and unconventional risk-takers – while our age is structured to promote safe, conventional, normal, and methodical productivity, even when it’s framed and sold as “creativity.”
A Modest Proposal (October 15, 2007) – “There will always be a few aspiring radicals – creative, inquiring, and adventurous types – who will try to question assumptions and challenge conventions, but I think the overwhelmingness of a highly motivated and organized majority might eventually push such people too far out into the periphery to be of much concern.”
In the Valley of Elah (October 7, 2007) - “Our old conventions and assumptions (our armour and weapons) interfere with our ability to deal with present and future problems. Sometimes the most effective approach is naive, and the best weapons and tools can be found right at our feet – if we’re only willing to look, and to calmly walk down and face our difficulties with clear-eyed confidence.”
Educating and Creating for ‘Web 3.0′ (October 1, 2007) – “The mistake back in 2000 was to conceive the web in limited terms of commerce by consumers. By now we’ve learned to think in terms of experience by users. But now that isn’t enough either. To continue growing we need to conceive the web in terms of education by creators.”
* War as Retreat (September 30, 2007) – “I’m suggesting that war is a result of human nature, but I’m not suggesting that human nature is inherently violent, power-driven, resentful, or war-like. Leaders go to war as a way to make circumstances understandable; war is an escape from complexity. War is a retreat to positions of artificial or forced simplicity.”
** A.N. Whitehead and the Philosophy of Enterprise (September 24, 2007) -“Philosophy and business need to save each other from their excesses. I doubt that many businesspeople will want to become philosophers, but philosophers would do well to take a closer look at business, at least as a way to generate more effective analogies and models. And if philosophers can manage (so to speak) to make management theory more substantial, more falsifiable, and more generally relevant and integral to the history of ideas, then so much the better for all of us.”
** Jacques Barzun and the Use of History (September 17, 2007) – “So where do we look for guidance? How do we learn to make effective decisions in a complex ideological landscape? How do we overcome doubt in order to act? Fortunately, intelligent people have been asking (and answering) these questions for thousands of years – including characters like Socrates and Hamlet, and historians like Jacques Barzun, who remind us that “experience is neither fixed nor finished; it grows as we make it by our restless search for truth…”
*** The Practice of Theory (September 12, 2007) - “I’m trying to approach theorizing as a business-like enterprise. The most important thing I can say about it is that the theory isn’t an end in itself, it isn’t a totally genuine attempt to compose a “true” theory of creativity. It is a way to study the creative, strategic, organizational, and administrative processes involved in a theorizing enterprise. It’s about mastering the practice of theory.”
*** What is the meaning of life? (September 9, 2007) - “Life cannot be meaningless; we may observe at any time and any place that life is a means to its own continuation. This discussion is itself a continuation of life. Even if you believe that life is meaningless, you must accept that it is at least meaningful enough that it gave you such feelings, thoughts, and beliefs.”
*** Why do ideas need to be managed? (September 5, 2007) - “People who say that ideas are a waste of time usually seem to be ignorant that that itself is an idea. Meanwhile, they admit to not being careful about the ideas they have. Why should we waste our time listening? Of course you’d think that ideas are a waste of time, if those are the only kinds of ideas you’re accustomed to. Everything is a waste of time if it isn’t done with care, or if it’s done excessively.”
** Benefits of Bubbles and Crunches (August 28, 2007) – “It’s the same with ideas as it is with money: it isn’t wise to go from fad to fad, investing with borrowed wealth; we need long-term vehicles for learning and understanding that retain some of their value when markets lose their footings — or rather, such long-term enterprises are the stabilizing force that markets need.”
**** Résumé/Manifesto (March 2007) – “Learning is a continuous project, it is necessarily imperfect and incomplete; the act of learning can remain meaningful, even while meaning fades from the thing learned. The greatest accomplishment of any education is an appreciation of the rhythmic, harmonious and melodic character of life. In the process, it is possible to achieve perfection or satisfaction momentarily, in activity, as part of an ongoing adventure.”
