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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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 [...]
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epistemology,
ideas,
metaphysics,
mind,
philosophy,
process,
psychology,
relevance,
stories,
theory,
think21st,
will to relevance
Literally! Out of all the things buzzing in my head for a “new decade” post, the idea I want to highlight most is the increasing importance of making stuff. It’s been germinating in my mind via MakerCulture in the Making by UWO + Ryerson’s online journalism classes. Last week it was crystalized by Umair Haque’s “Builders’ Manifesto” [...]
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00's,
goals,
happiness,
history,
institutions,
makers,
motivation,
organizations,
progress,
think21st
Some thoughts culminating out of the last post about how open standards emerge… a recent post by fellow Londoner Bill Wittur on some open government basics… the latest post on the Google blog defining their notion of openness… and a book I perused a couple days ago by Beth Noveck on open collaborative government. There’s no way I [...]
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beth noveck,
collaboration,
collaborative democracy,
deliberative democracy,
democracy,
google,
open government,
open source,
open standards,
policy,
pragmatism,
think21st,
wiki government
The natural inclination right now for geeks of a certain type is to start dreaming up new standards bodies, or how they can participate in the Open Web Foundation to make a Super Awesome Twitter API Evolution Committee. Here’s my recommendation: Don’t. Don’t do any of that shit, and don’t run off to make membership [...]
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bureaucracies,
collaboration,
copenhagen,
design thinking,
designers' ego,
generativity,
innovation,
open innovation,
organizations,
planning,
rapid prototyping,
think21st,
twitter,
twitter api
Metaphors aren’t just literary devices, they affect our intuition and reasoning in ways we’re barely aware of. Which isn’t to say they’re bad; they’re essential — that’s the point. By calling Metaphors We Live By a “landmark” in the previous post, I wasn’t trying to be dramatic, I was simply trying to provide better information [...]
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exindustrialism,
industry,
innovation,
intuition,
metaphors,
think21st,
thinking,
vocabularies
Continuing the Thinking in the 21st Century series… Great comment by Phronk on the previous think21st post [excerpt]: Autonomy, flow, exploration, striving for material (digital) goods, relatedness, competence, they’re all represented, often in explicit numerical form. And they interact in a complex, emergent way that even the game developers can’t anticipate. See also: Twitter. I’ve been [...]
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collaboration,
learning,
metaphors,
networking,
research,
social science,
think21st,
understanding
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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autonomy,
competence,
complexity,
emergence,
flow,
intrinsic motivation,
motivation,
positive psychology,
psychology,
temporality,
think21st
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 [...]
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epistemology,
information,
intuition,
knowledge,
management,
methods,
organizations,
social uncertainty,
statistics,
think21st,
uncertainty,
uncertainty principle
Continuing the previous discussion of object bias and conceptions of time… As a very rough rule of thumb I like to apply a kind of generalized version of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle: “the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known, and conversely…” [via SEP] Applied to social and economic models, [...]
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data,
human factors,
information,
process,
statistics,
systems,
think21st,
thinking,
uncertainty,
uncertainty principle
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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about,
beta-think,
concept development,
creative philosophy,
design thinking,
philosophy,
pragmatism,
think21st,
thinking alive
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
