Occupy Wall St "a business meeting?" and other links

Johnnie Moore links to an article on embodied thinking, which I recently wrote about in the context of making. We know more than we can tell. Moore is a professional facilitator and improv performer, and his post made me think about how this new understanding of thought and its embodied source is not just applicable to areas like artificial intelligence and philosophy, but has spread to other disciplines as well. Our bodies aren't there just to transport our heads.

On to the links:

• How are the Occupy Wall Street protests like a business meeting?
• Humans exhibit the kind of synchronized behavior of cicadas, which suggests why some successes are a matter of timing.
• Financial and other advisers are more motivated to offer unbiased advice when they are talking to one known person.
• According to the foresight paradox, you can be completely accurate or completely engaging. You can't be both.
• Watson wowed us at Thrivals, but "this brainy robot gets and A in biology."
• Here is another spectacular picture of the fountains of the Saturn moon Enceladus snapped by the robotic explorer Cassini. This moon's organics and water ice provide the raw material for Saturn's E ring, and planetary scientists believe a relatively warm ocean below may supply those geysers with their raw material.
• A small fold in the front of the brain may be responsible for making us aware of the boundary between real and imagined. The finding may eventually help sufferers from schizophrenia.
• Sigh. Does it pay, literally, to be a jerk? Do nice actually finish last?
• Using the Apollo program as a guide, Paul Gilster veers into management with this post on "premature choice."
• Putting People First links to an article on the death of market research. Long live design research.
• The Long Now Foundation has a blog post on the Museum of Post-Natural History, which you would have heard about at IdeaFestival 2011. You were there, right?
• Is humanity becoming less violent? Steven Pinker makes just that argument in his new book.

Wayne

Bicycles and the seaside equation

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During my one week hiatus from IdeaFestival blog, I caught up on my reading, lazily peddled a single speed around the Edisto island in South Carolina and devoured several dozen Longform.org essays on my Kindle. And while watching the sun set or my children playing in the waves or listening to a living and fecund marsh behind our vacation home, I was reminded that some things just are. They need no further explanation.

Describing emergent properties, like consciousness, that arise from simpler phenomenon, the physicist Murray Gell-Mann asks rhetorically "do we need something more to get something more?" in one of my favorite TED videos. Like Gell-Mann, I'm astonished at the staggering beauty that is everywhere. And while, much to my regret, I won't be able to understand the mathematics behind the processes he describes, I can say now that I'm much more comfortable than ever before in that relative lack of knowledge. Not knowing doesn't change the underlying realities at work in any case.

One of the reasons for that comfort is that the urge to find simple, single answers in everyday complexities misleads as often as it informs. For Gell-Mann, emergent properties need no further explanation, and not, I suspect, because there may not be, in principle, any underlying realities to be had, but because the underlying realities are much too grand for us to grasp. Our minds simply aren't up to the job of deciphering the exact nature of the quantum wave, or able to make predictions about the interaction of whole societies.

Not that some don't try. In an article headlined with appropriate Onionesque dryness, "Reaching the Singularity: It’s More Complicated Than We Think," IdeaFestival presenter Parag Khanna push back on the nerd rapture talk. I have to say, as much as I admire the contributions of people like Ray Kurzweil and Aubrey de Grey, predicting events like the singularity and radical life extension in the next 30 or 40 years ago smacks of the kind of just-so thinking against which they might otherwise declaim.

As another other great rhetorician, John Cleese, demonstrates here, reductionist thinking can afflict the scientific community as well.

It's good to be back.

Wayne

We Know More Than We Can Tell

Having taken a back seat in the past century to mass manufacture and store fronts, personal craft is staging a comeback, celebrated today in hackerspaces and gatherings across the country.

Often referred to as "making," there is something profoundly invigorating about creating unique and functional objects with one's imagination, skill and resources, and making spans the gamut from wearable craft to interactive art to forging to hardcore coding and robotics. I'm a maker.

The artist Mark Shepard's "under(a)ware" wearable tech, for example, might be considered a response to the need for autonomy in an increasingly surveilled world. I'm sure some maker, right now, is working on his or her take on the idea. I know from experience that studio furniture makers build spectacular and technically unmatched functional art. At the recent Ft. Wayne Maker Faire, amateur machinists brought jet turbines, fabricated in miniature.

Making touches on agency and meaning in ways that seem to have gone missing from today's matrixed and Google-optimized popular culture. One is practical, as mentioned. Making also takes time, which everyone seems to crave, but no one appears to have. If you're curious, lingering over a problem - living in the question, as it were - is a pleasure.

On Tuesday I walked into my local Starbucks to find a single row of professionals against the back wall, hunched over phones and computers like starlings on a telephone line, talking to clients, cadging what information they could. I am part of this chatter on many days. But the electronica feels much too much like an assembly line. One conversation follows another, follows another, follows another. You get the idea.

In the hands of a maker, a finely tuned chisel or a mason's slick is a far more personal instrument. Having grown up bookish and nebbishy in a family where skilled manual labor paid the bills, I'm thankful now for the time I spent working alongside my father in the cabinet shop - learning to shoot grade on sloping ground - listening again to instructions for making a wall plumb. Thought and finely-wrought things are not only complimentary, but bring a balance to the act of creation. There is vision in seeing the finished product long before it's finished; there is genius in wringing that vision from the materials at hand.

Over time, I've learned that each saw, and each combination of saw and wood species, has a sound all their own, that the hook on a card scraper is all important, that time spent in the presence of objects and the physical world, brings not only the relief of finishing well, but a clarity to the thinking along the way. I like these instruments because their magic is different, because I never worry that I've said too much, or not enough, or not enough of the right things. I'm glad for that. Unlike the eyes and ears, the maker's shoulder, arms and hands - they're never fooled. Do you understand that? Do you realize that we all know more than we can tell?

Wayne

IFblog on a short break

Well it's been an electric past four weeks, hasn't it? To all of our readers, festival attendees, fans and sponsors, thanks again for your support. We couldn't do it without your help.

And thanks for reading IFblog. Over the next several days, I'm taking a short short break to cool the vacuum tubes. I'll be back on Monday, Oct. 17 with new posts, new IF Conversations and guest posts from some of our favorite people. Don't go anywhere.

Wayne

How long do you "live in the question?"

The ability to live in the question long enough for genius to emerge is a touchstone of creative success....

But, for a far greater number of high-level creators, across all fields, the ability to be okay and even invite uncertainty in the name of creating bigger, better, cooler things is trained. Sometimes with great intention, other times without even realizing it.

That quote by author Jonathan Fields hit home with me. Uncertainty is an important feature in every creative resolution, and not because uncertainty has any power of its own, of course, but because it is an essential component of an outcome that hasn't been colored by the numbers. Break the tension too soon, and we run the risk of a false positive. We're acting, in one sense, on incomplete information. Ambiguity is linked to creativity, yes - but also to a kind of promise that hangs in the balance.

Wayne