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, [...]
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We had an interesting exchange on Twitter the other day, about the lack of attention given by the media to lesser-known election candidates. Partially aside, it was the kind of thing I’ve been hoping to see for a while — a lively backchannel discussion about how local politics news is covered — and I hope [...]
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Let’s look at the genuine potential of new technology instead of dwelling on what’s being replaced — whether in remorse or celebration… This began as a response to Nicholas Carr’s Experiments in Delinkification a few months ago. I sat on it until Scott Rosenberg brought the topic up again this week with a series of [...]
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A recent tweet reminded me of Clay Shirky’s excellent observation: Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. Kevin Kelly called it The Shirky Principle, using the example of unions to illustrate: Unions were a brilliant solution to the problem of capital management which tended to exploit uncapitalized workers. But [...]
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I’ve learned not to care as much when other people are being stupid. It’s their problem. Last year I did more blogging in the spirit of “someone’s wrong on the internet,” but lately I’ve learned to lay off and let people screw up. (I’m so kind.) When I started writing about media it was because [...]
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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 [...]
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I just reached 5130 words on a blog post… a little to long to still qualify as a “blog post,” methinks. It’s an essay really, but still long enough I should explain. When I’m writing an essay, I often start adding a sentence or a paragraph in the middle or close to the start, and [...]
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I’ve been meaning to do one of these Open Yale Courses online for a while. I’d love to watch Robert Shiller’s course in financial markets (I think Shiller is great but I’m undecided how much I can really tolerate hearing about financial markets…) You can also view Paul Bloom’s introduction to psychology. I haven’t looked at many [...]
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I’ve sort of been on vacation so I’m a little late with this. Here’s Paul Romer making his case for charter cities: The TED Blog (via Design Thinking) conveys the gist better than I possibly could. It’s about making ways to change the rules: China, he says, demonstrates both the strengths and weaknesses of working with rules. [...]
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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 [...]
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There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
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Continued from Our Society of Overachievers. I saw this in Robert Shiller’s latest Economic View piece for the New York Times: In short, Mr. Janis’s insights seem right on the mark. People compete for stature, and the ideas often just tag along. Presidential campaigns are no different. Candidates cannot try interesting and controversial new ideas [...]
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Survival of the Fittest Ideas
by OpenConceptual on 07-07-2009
in commentary
There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter): “Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).” It’s a good following to the last post, about [...]
Tagged as: cultural evolution, evolution, ideas, intellectual evolution
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