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
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
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 [...]
Tagged as:
attention,
blogging,
context,
culture,
distraction,
future,
generativity,
ideas,
james wood,
knowledge,
Links,
lionel trilling,
matthew arnold,
mind,
nicholas carr,
perfection,
process,
psychology,
reading,
web,
writing
I love that it’s constantly changing. For now. It’s still pretty unpredictable, like the midst of a great big game — like the kind of games that Calvin & Hobbes played. It isn’t just the outcomes that change; our boundaries and rules keep changing too, without much notice. And we can change them (or at least [...]
Tagged as:
authority,
expertise,
information,
internet,
knowledge,
learning,
lifestreaming,
medium theory,
social media,
technology,
twitter
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
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
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 Brian on 10-08-2009
in media
Thanks to the miracle of aggregation and analytics we now have a lot more rankings and crap than we know how to use — so many handy ways to see who has the most authority, influence, power, popularity… Reminds me a little of Pandora’s Box — eh? One thing hasn’t quite made it out of [...]
Tagged as:
bloggers,
intellectuals,
knowledge,
news,
opinion,
politics,
rankings,
reporting,
trust,
web
Props to TechAlliance and BIOTECanada for booking Adam Bly to speak at the launch of National Biotechnology Week. I’m very grateful to have attended; I came away rejuvenated with energy and ideas… Bly made the case we need to reorient “our collective ideology, our collective imagination,” towards science — towards “Big Science.” Some of his remarks [...]
Tagged as:
adam bly,
biotecanada,
culture,
data visualization,
infographics,
innovation,
knowledge,
love of learning,
mindsets,
national biotechnology week,
seed magazine,
society,
techalliance,
technology
During the weekend I spent some time writing yet another criticism of old media protectionism. I called it, “Because You Wouldn’t Go to a ‘Citizen Prostitute’ for Sex, Would You?”… this is the tame version. What so many protectionists miss is that telling stories and getting to the bottom of things are basic human motives [...]
Tagged as:
careers,
cultural evolution,
dan rather,
jeff jarvis,
journalism,
knowledge,
motivation,
news,
newspapers,
paul berton,
psychology,
social_media,
will to relevance
by OpenConceptual on 07-22-2009
in concepts
We’ve been hearing for years about “T-shaped people” (with deep knowledge and competence in one or two areas, crossed with wide knowledge across many domains); Microsoft’s Bill Buxton recently wrote about “I-shaped people”: These have their feet firmly planted in the mud of the practical world, and yet stretch far enough to stick their head [...]
Tagged as:
analogies,
creativity,
education,
gurus,
innovation,
knowledge,
metaphors,
skills,
teams
