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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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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Complain or celebrate if you like but you’re wasting your time. What matters is what we do about this — or rather, what we do with this. Because if promoting creativity is important to you, as it is for me, then I hope you’ll be open to exploring ways to reconceive what it means and [...]
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This is my first post following ChangeCamp London (there will likely be one or two more) in which I’m suggesting points for probable improvement: mostly things I actively promoted through the planning process, and which I hope to see emphasized more in the future. This post argues for the need to be open throughout the process. [...]
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Eric Schmidt shared this video via Twitter, depicting the gist of Dan Pink’s Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us: I feel like it shouldn’t be such a big surprise. Maybe I’m an extreme case, but most rewards seem offensive to me — like bribes — or condescending: “Hey boy, go fetch!” They have [...]
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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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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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Continuing the series… Trying to understand human motivation and behaviour, a few years ago I finally came across this article: Motivation Reconsidered: The Concept of Competence, by Robert White (1959). According to the current APA abstract: Theories of motivation built upon primary drives cannot account for playful and exploratory behavior. The new motivational concept of “competence” [...]
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Mark Bauerlein complained at WSJ.com that “Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues.” It has something to do with all the time they spend, according to Nielson Mobile, sending and receiving an individual average of maybe 1,742 or 2,272 mobile text messages per month. And what’s supposed to be bad about that? Bauerlein’s concern is that “much of [...]
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