Video: Baratunde on the difference, difference makes

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Saying that what makes him curious was his early exposure to difference, Baratunde Thurston, digital editor of America's Finest News Source, answers the question put to many IdeaFestival 2011 participants and speakers in the IF Conversations series.

Over the next several months we'll roll out the conversations here, on the blog, as well as in the right sidebar of the web site.

If you've ever been to the IdeaFestival, you know we're big on difference, and for good reason. Difference in social networks has been said to be the key to successful entrepreneurs, according to Jonah Lehrer. Homogenized institutions, like thinking, eventually become stale. Before she became known as the Tiger Mother, Amy Chua argued at IdeaFestival 2008 that a tolerance for diversity had been the key to the success of history's hyper-powers, and offered many examples how some societies had became powerful and wealthy by offering the different and marginalized a way forward. There really isn't a mind to waste.

We believe that the key to innovation is diversity in ideas. Business can learn something from gaming, improvisation and stand-up comedy. Philosophy of mind now informs the development of artificial intelligence and vice versa. Take gravity out of the equation and human cells and genes behave differently. Why that happens in space may eventually lead to therapies for disease on Earth.

The IdeaFestival works very hard to include everyone who wants to participate, and seeks sponsors - thank you! - to make entry affordable. That's good. At this year's festival, some of the most interesting and penetrating questions came from the many high school students who were in attendance. They challenged IBM's Watson and grilled speakers throughout the four days. As someone who has lived a great many places and for the past 20 years has called Kentucky home, the fact that the nerdocalypse happens here thrills me.

There's comedy gold there Baratunde, gold.

Wayne

Study: Gratitude sheds extra helping of potatoes

Well maybe not quite, but we know now that a conscious gratitude confers a host of lasting benefits. Thanks for reading. Thanks for being curious. Thanks for supporting the IdeaFestival throughout the year. We're grateful for you.

See you on Monday.

Wayne

Boats against the current

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Describing this video, the World Science Festival says that "Mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and author Simon Singh explain how, once one gets past arithmetic and into the big ideas driving mathematics, it can become a highly creative, artistic, and even emotionally charged endeavor."

I freely admit that when it comes to math I was emotionally charged once, just prior to a high school Algebra II final. The fear of failure - I did - has that effect. But loving and appreciating how the great writers can build worlds made right with words, I was intrigued by Robert Krulwich's too-simple and rather unfair comparison between natural and symbolic language. I was intrigued because I knew what was coming next. Not surprisingly, the mathematicians on stage promptly called him on it - poor guy.

Thinking about the descriptive power of natural language - Melville's white whale - Shakespeare's wavering Hamlet - Dickinson's eremitic prose, it's of course immediately obvious that words are more than just symbols with meaning and a one-to-one relationship to an idea or object. As suggested in the video above, the idea that one might subtract six from three introduced a new thought with lasting implications.

I also thought of this passage from The Great Gatsby:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

Later in life I've come to have an amateur's appreciation for how mathematicians like du Sautoy must bring a writerly quality to their craft. I wonder what it's like to breathe in topologies that describe the contiguous features of space and time itself, or suggest hidden folds in realities much too small to experience directly. Just like Fitzgerald, mathematicians can also explore infinities and emptiness, and, once mastered, the experience of taking in the complexities commensurate with our capacity to wonder, the experience of making sense of an unfamiliar terrain, of producing an ineluctable result, is a profound and enviable skill that eludes all be a select few. For those few, the exhale must be endlessly satisfying. Oh, so that's it.

Wayne

Don't like my wisecracks? Excuuuuuse me

Sarcasm is a language just about anyone living in the 21st might understand. Why? In an age suffused with enough irony to support The Colbert Report, The Daily Show and a host lesser comedic takes on current events, an age where The Onion can legitimately claim to be America's Finest News Source, the primary cultural divide today is not between liberal and conservative, but between sarcasm and a kind of oh-so earnest oblivion. Think the smart-alecky have just a little too much time on their hands? Don't be wise.

Sarcasm seems to exercise the brain more than sincere statements do. Scientists who have monitored the electrical activity of the brains of test subjects exposed to sarcastic statements have found that brains have to work harder to understand sarcasm.

That extra work may make our brains sharper, according to another study. College students in Israel listened to complaints to a cellphone company’s customer service line. The students were better able to solve problems creatively when the complaints were sarcastic as opposed to just plain angry. Sarcasm 'appears to stimulate complex thinking and to attenuate the otherwise negative effects of anger,' according to the study authors.

So if you want to be taken seriously, try a little humor. Hat tip: 3 Quarks Daily

Wayne

Does thinking deeply matter?

Does thinking deeply matter? That was my thought while watching a video of the philosopher Frederick Neuhouser at The Stone, a video series with contemporary thinkers "on subjects that matter." Thinking about thinking is favorite subject of mine. I'm sorry about that.

The philosopher David Chalmers' formulation on what it means to be conscious and the gob-smacking fact that we're free to consider alternatives, to hold out possible futures for examination and to act on those choices, thrills me. It thrills me in part because, like great art, it is both meaningful and deeply considered. There is something that it is like to be you and something that it is like to be me. Our first person experiences of the world are utterly and hopelessly unique to us as individuals. Chalmers' so-far insoluble "hard problem of consciousness" is widely referenced now in forums ranging from academic gatherings - of course - to The Big Think to Andrew Sullivan's popular blog.

Neuhouser reflects in the linked video on just how hopeless and unique we are as he grapples with the age-old question of theodicy. Despite every bit of suffering and loss, and referencing Rouseau for the philo nerds out there, Neuhouser finds life and living worth affirming. "There is nothing in the nature of things that says you will not succeed." Stirring, right?

In a curious way, though, I find it satisfying. If you asked about what I've learned most from the years that I've been writing for the IdeaFestival, it would be that life is about this too - all of it, from the deepest horrors to the most generous lives. So "thinking deeply" for me does not result in the affirmation of a series of propositional statements, particularly when those statements have the effect of denying another's humanity or are used to cut off further debate, but in living with the creative tension of a world that can be cruel, yes, and sublime as well. No, I don't know how to reconcile the senseless butchery of a Pol Pot with soaring humanity of Zbigniew Preisner's interpretation of Mozart's Lacrimosa. I never will. But thinking deeply for me means being open to the honest questions and resolving to try again tomorrow.

Wayne