We have to make a choice: divert more & more energy to avoid & repair leak after leak or come to terms with an open world. # This is the big ethical and practical choice we need to confront. Every time we choose to keep even the smallest secrets we sow seeds that’ll grow into [...]
Tagged as:
cablegate,
epistemology,
foreign affairs,
government,
history,
internet,
julian assange,
knowledge,
love of learning,
news,
open government,
philosophy,
politics,
process,
secrecy,
transparency,
truth,
wikileaks
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
For 2010′s Edge Annual Question, John Brockman asked 165 of the smartest people he knows “How has the Internet changed the way you think? ” [It's a familiar topic around here... and I actually answered the question when I wrote about last year's.] A surprising number of answers are about sex. More than a few [...]
Tagged as:
brain,
epistemology,
internet,
mind,
philosophy,
psychology,
technology,
think21st,
thinking,
third culture
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
The premise of this series is to work out a new way of looking at our changing world» Part of the reason we’ve had so much difficulty making sense of the complex events of the past decade is that our ways of thinking — specifically, the metaphors, analogies, and images we resort to — have [...]
Tagged as:
bias,
epistemology,
heuristics,
learning,
meta factors,
metaphors,
metaphysics,
networks,
object bias,
philosophy,
psychology,
relevance,
social media,
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
Diving in even further over my head, here’s further elaboration of the philosophy I use. To understand why we do things, we have to appreciate why things happen at all. It’s ridiculously simple: things happen because time exists. I’ve found this principle to be a useful heuristic for grounding uncertainty and making random occurrences continuous [...]
Tagged as:
epistemology,
metaphysics,
object bias,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
process,
process philosophy,
reification,
space,
spatiality,
temporality,
think21st,
time
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
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 [...]
Tagged as:
change,
communication,
community,
criticism,
deliberation,
democracy,
epistemology,
openness,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
social media,
society,
technology,
transparency,
web,
will to believe,
william james
With so many people claiming to be social media experts we just as often hear “there are no social media experts.” There certainly are a lot of people who can generate a whole bunch of verbiage, but social media presents such an all-encompassing, massive and dynamic shift that the “social media expert” label makes about [...]
Tagged as:
careers,
discipline,
epistemology,
expertise,
knowledge,
professions,
social media,
society,
web
by OpenConceptual on 07-19-2009
in concepts
[Update: within minutes I decided to change the title to "Designing Ideas for Democracy" -- replacing "methodologies" with "ideas" -- which occurred to me after I thought about search results, then realized "ideas" is more appropriate anyways.] This will be the provisional mission for Open/Conceptual. As usual, “designing methodologies ideas for democracy” is something that [...]
Tagged as:
analogies,
civics,
creativity,
design,
design thinking,
enterprise modeling,
epistemology,
ideas,
ideation,
meta-methodology,
metaphors,
methodologies,
philosophy
