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 [...]
truth
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 [...]
I tend to go through new mottos every few months. Background on some of the old ones are here, here, here and here. “Learning is personal, knowledge is social, truth is an adventure” came to me while staring at a blank description field in the settings of thinkingalive.com, a new WordPress-powered site I set up for [...]
Continuing the discussion of moral codes… It’s difficult to encapsulate this creative attitude into a tidy formula, but I think this conveys my theory of the “practice of theory” as well as anything: There are exceptions to every rule, and rules for every exception. We need rules to live effectively (not just rules to live [...]
Maybe I should have done this on Thursday, as a kind of commemoration of 9/11 — that’s what made me begin to practice writing seriously. Previously I’ve written about how the dotcom crash that began in 2000 was a turning point in my education. It convinced me that “nobody really knows anything,” and “sometimes answers [...]
I’ll sound like a huge nerd for saying this, but one of the few things I look forward to all year is the Edge Annual Question, edited by literary agent and intellectual impressario John Brockman. At the end of each year, Brockman asks 100+ of the world’s smartest people one question and publishes their answers [...]
