There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.
How to Procrastinate Like Leonardo da Vinci
Topic: Arts
8:55 am EST, Feb 25, 2009
W.A. Pannapacker:
Academe is full of potential geniuses who have never done a single thing they wanted to do because there were too many things that needed to be done first: the research projects, conference papers, books and articles — not one of them freely chosen: merely means to some practical end, a career rather than a calling. And so we complete research projects that no longer interest us and write books that no one will read; or we teach with indifference, dutifully boring our students, marking our time until retirement, and slowly forgetting why we entered the profession: because something excited us so much that we subordinated every other obligation to follow it.
If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.
From last year:
Is possibly noteworthy possibly a bot?
I always assumed he was a grad student.
Either the most prolific grad student ever, or possibly the single greatest purveyor of procrastination known to man.
Carolyn Johnson:
We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.
I am working on this essay as a way of not doing all of those things. This is the essence of what I call structured procrastination, an amazing strategy I have discovered that converts procrastinators into effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of time.
Recently, from TED:
Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses -- and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person "being" a genius, all of us "have" a genius. It's a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.
Finally, Richard Hamming:
If you do not work on an important problem, it's unlikely you'll do important work.
The Dow and S&P 500 tumbled to levels not seen in nearly 12 years Monday, as investors slowly came to the realization that they have been living well beyond their means while harboring wildly inflated expectations about the viability of their future prospects.
From last November, Michael Lewis:
The era that defined Wall Street is finally, officially over.
From within the midst of the bubble:
People say to me, "Whatever it takes." I tell them, It's going to take everything.
From 2007:
Bird: Well, you have to remember two things about the markets. One is that they are made up of very sharp and sophisticated people, who ... these are the greatest brains in the world!
Fortune: Hmf!
Bird: And the second thing you have to remember is that the financial markets, to use the common phrase, are driven by sentiment.
The Computer as a Road Map to Unknowable Territory
Topic: Science
7:30 am EST, Feb 18, 2009
Shankar Vedantam:
Last year, as the financial meltdown was getting underway, a scientist named Yaneer Bar-Yam developed a computer model of the economy. Instead of the individuals, companies and brokers that populate the real economy, the model used virtual actors. The computer world allowed Bar-Yam to do what regulators cannot do in real life. It allowed him to change the way actors behaved and then study how those changes rippled through a complex ecosystem.
The virtue of computational models is that when you are confronted by a dizzying array of potential problems, they can tell you where to focus your attention.
Our culture celebrates intuitive leaders who make brilliant calls -- even when we suspect their success was largely luck. Computational models, which speak the language of scientific doubt, are less sexy, but they can tell a president who takes empirical evidence seriously where public health dollars, battlefield troops and financial interventions can have the greatest impact.
Have you seen "Doubt"?
Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything! Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!
It won't be long now, with Science on his trail ...
One of the most important political questions of our time is: Where is Osama bin Laden?
We use biogeographic theories associated with the distribution of life and extinction (distance-decay theory, island biogeography theory, and life history characteristics) and remote sensing data (Landsat ETM+, Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, Defense Meteorological Satellite, QuickBird) over three spatial scales (global, regional, local) to identify where bin Laden is most probably currently located.
We believe that our work involves the first scientific approach to establishing his current location. The methods are repeatable and can be updated with new information obtained from the US intelligence community.
The authors are from the same department as Jared Diamond. Last September, we discussed their work on Iraq. Decius wrote:
This raises a number of questions that are likely to be promptly ignored.
From 2006:
The best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style.
From 2008:
It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.
Recession? No, It's a D-process, and It Will Be Long
Topic: Economics
10:32 pm EST, Feb 17, 2009
A highly recommended interview with Ray Dalio:
Everybody should, at this point, try to understand ... that we are in a D-process. The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course.
2009 and 2010 will be the years of bankruptcies and restructurings. Loans will be written down and assets will be sold. It will be a very difficult time. It is going to surprise a lot of people. Everybody will be second-guessing everybody else.
If you think that restructuring the banks is going to get lending going again and you don't have to restructure the other pieces -- the mortgage piece, the corporate piece, the real-estate piece -- you are wrong.
There are too many nonviable entities. This is basically a structural issue. The '30s were very similar to this.
In late 2009, or more likely 2010, it is going to be a buying opportunity of the century.
From 1998, Stewart Brand:
This is a cross-generational issue. It's caring for children, grandchildren. In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years.
From a year ago, Barry Ritholtz:
You're supposed to raise your standard of living by working harder, being clever, earning more income -- not by using your long-term savings. And now this current generation is pretty much fucked.
From 2007:
"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."
Recently:
It’s hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.
From late 2008, Peter Schiff:
We need a serious recession in this country, and the government needs to get out of the way, and let it happen.
Feifer’s history of the Soviet misadventure in Afghanistan, in the nineteen-eighties, comes just in time for a proposed expansion of the seven-year-old American effort there.
It ought to be instructive, because the Soviet experience (“an increasingly senseless conflict”) closely mirrors our own—a lightly contested invasion later thwarted by a homegrown resistance and the “Afghan tradition of shifting allegiances.”
Feifer assiduously chronicles Soviet errors; some, like the indiscriminate use of explosives when searching villages and the shelling of wedding parties mistaken for bands of the enemy, have close analogues in the current war.
Yet, strangely, having pointed out all the parallels, Feifer persists in thinking of the American venture as a “historic opportunity” undermined by the second front, in Iraq, rather than as intrinsically hopeless.
From November 2008, an interview with a Soviet veteran of the Afghan war:
I can tell you which mistakes you made and which mistakes we made. They are the same mistakes.
From January 2009:
We will not be able to eliminate the Taliban from the rural areas of Afghanistan’s south, so we will have to work with Afghans to contain the insurgency instead.
All this is unpleasant for Western politicians who dream of solving the fundamental problems and getting out.
If there’s anything we philosophers really hate it’s an untenable dualism. Exposing untenable dualisms is a lot of what we do for a living. It’s no small job, I assure you.
Fodor quotes David Chalmers, from the forward to Andy Clark's new book, Supersizing the Mind:
My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me ... When parts of the environment are coupled to the brain in the right way, they become parts of the mind.
Fodor asks:
Roughly, how many parts would you say your mind has?
Andrei Codrescu:
A philosophical shift does not occur when a machine says, "I'm a human being." It does occur when a human being says, "I'm a machine."
It seems that a new "Mumbai model" of swarming, smaller-scale terrorist violence is emerging. But the fact is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates have been using these sorts of swarm tactics for several years.
Americans should brace for a coming swarm.
Yes, the swarm will be heading our way, too. We need to get smaller, closer and quicker. The sooner the better.
Arquilla from the archive:
We are trying to wage war as if it still mattered that our forces are comprised of ‘the few and the large' -- a few large heavy divisions, a few large aircraft carrier battle groups -- when in fact war is migrating into the hands of the many and the small -- little distributed units. We live in an era when technology has expanded the destructive power of a small group and the individual beyond our imaginations.
Another Arquilla, from right after 9/11:
To win the war against terrorism, we have to think like a street gang, swarm like a soccer team, and communicate like Wal-Mart.
Finally:
In the long run, the "swarming" that really counts is the wide-scale mobilization of the global public.
Today's advanced research and education institutions are essential to tackling the grand challenges facing our planet, but they've been based on an implicit assumption of technological scarcity — advances in those technologies now allow these activities to expand far beyond the boundaries of a campus.
Research requires funding, facilities, and people; I came to MIT to get access to all of these. State-of-the-art research infrastructure, large library collections, and world-class faculty are all expensive resources that limit admission slots, classroom space, and research positions. But what would happen if these things were no longer scarce?
Recently, Bernardo Huberman:
Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.
