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 [...]
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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 [...]
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secrecy,
transparency,
truth,
wikileaks
I’ve heard great things about Zadie Smith’s work as a writer, but I had a hard time bringing myself to click on this link. The essay is about Facebook, and the generation that made it, and the movie that everyone’s talking about. It also references Jaron Lanier’s critique of the internet and adds to a growing [...]
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I’m not joking: when I was a kid I went through a phase of wanting to grow up to be someone who wrote “famous quotes.” From time to time I’d think of something that sounded profound and I’d think, “that isn’t so hard!” But then I wondered, “So now… how does this clever quote become [...]
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Tyler Cowen started this meme, which I noticed via Michael Martin. Arnold Kling took it up as well. I’ve already written a very long post about all of the books that influenced me. The books on this list are by no means the ones I love or respect the most. Some of them influenced me in [...]
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writing
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 [...]
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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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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 [...]
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social media,
will to relevance
Some readers may have noticed I’ve been getting little deeper and more technical lately. I’m trying to unburden myself of all of the theoretical equipment I’ve been using for the past few years — trying to make it explicit, get it out into the open, into the light of day. I should stress it’s just [...]
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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 [...]
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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.
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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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william james
