Many thanks to CC Chapman for posting his video of Al Letson performing at Thrivals during the IdeaFestival. Al is a poet, actor and public radio host, and this was a day one highlight.
Wayne
"Everything is obvious once you know the answer"
Reading this Freakonomics post, I was struck by its similarities to what Leonard Mlodinow had to say last week at the IdeaFestival. In a world where complexities demand more than a simple - and often wrong - answer, what should we make of "common sense?"
There is hard won information about the practicalities of carpentry and building cabinets, of course, but when it comes to making judgements about climate change, to use another example, conclusions based on the material at hand, from a glance at the local weather, can't hope to say much of anything that is true about the bigger reality because the bigger reality is so much more complex.
Duncan Watts, the author of "Everything You Know is Obvious, Once You Know the Answer:"
Why is the Mona Lisa the most famous painting in the world? Why did J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter books sell over 300 million copies? And why is Madonna the most successful female musical artist of all time? Now that we know who these superstars are, their success seems easy to explain—common sense even. They simply outperformed the competition. Whether they did that through pure genius, clever marketing, or sheer tenacity is a matter of debate (you be the judge), but in the end, it doesn’t really matter. In the competitive marketplace of ideas, a product succeeds because it represents what people want—otherwise, they wouldn’t have devoted their scarce time, money, and attention to it. Right?
Well, sort of....
Common sense... is extremely good at making the world seem sensible, quickly classifying believable information as old news, rejecting explanations that don’t coincide with experience, and ignoring counterfactuals. Viewed this way, common sense starts to seem less like a way to understand the world, than a way to survive without having to understand it.
That may have been a perfectly fine design for most of evolutionary history, where humans lived in small groups and could safely ignore most of what was going on in the world. But increasingly the problems of the modern world—distributions of wealth, sustainable development, public health—require us to understand cause and effect in complex systems, with consequences unfolding over years or decades. And for these kinds of problems, there’s no reason to believe that common sense is much of a guide at all.
Wayne
Ideafestival about nothing at all
Struggling to put into words what I’ve learned from attending IdeaFestivals over the years, I have finally come to realization that it's an impossible job. It’s about everything. Good luck with that.
But in one important sense, the IdeaFestival has nothing to do with “things” at all.
Here’s what I mean. In one of the morning mash-ups at the festival last week, Don Stewart talked about leaving the Mayo Clinic and a potentially lucrative career as an MD to pursue his art, despite the prestige that attaches to surgeons and medical practice in general. Azure Antoinette described quitting her corporate job for poetry and the spoken word, and the silence on the other end of the phone when she told her mother, who naturally worried about her daughter’s financial prospects.
Neuromarketing appeals to to the the decision-making, reptilian part of our brains, according to Patrick Renvoisé, and clever people right now are taking advantage of this knowledge to push your buy button. Displaying a doctor’s stethoscope and describing its importance as an authority symbol, he draped it over his shoulders early in his talk - and left it there for the remaining 20 minutes or so.
I left wondering whether marketers would ever love me for my pre-frontal cortex.
There have been and will always be things about which we should be wary. Cable news comes to mind. Over time I have come to understand that hyperviligent, zero-sum thinking comes at a cost because it can effectively disable our ability to evaluate new ideas on their own merits, to do much of anything at all. Like a wriggling, mewling virus, fear finds its way into our brains only to bore out any sense of hope.
Using language as only he could, David Foster Wallace made a related point in a 2005 Kenyon College commencement address.
If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
So here’s my new take on the IdeaFestival. It’s about no-thing at all. It's about losing yourself in a wonderful way, about being eaten alive by hope in our fellow travelers. It's a stand-up-straight, throw-your-shoulders-back affirmation of possibility. The festival has never been about the intellect. Everyone has a mind. Rather, it's about an orientation, of being open to the future, of being aware that the physics of fear are profoundly disabling, and above all, about the deep, and deeply freeing, understanding that we know very little at all. The festival is about this too.
Wayne
Aging can be defeated, Aubrey de Grey
Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee
There are two certainties in life, death and taxes. The chief scientist of the SENS Foundation, would like to edit that statement.
He asks if aging is a side effect of metabolism - which leads to damage - which leads to pathology. If so, could aging be an engineering problem? That's the fundamental question posed Aubrey de Grey this afternoon.
Regenerative medicine "seeks to restore a tissue or organ to its state before it suffered damage." While expressing suitable humility about the complexity of the challenge, he compares the body to a machine. Within ten years, he believes that proven therepeutic avenues will open that will add 30 years of healthy life to middle aged men and women.
As for why should we defeat aging. "It kills far more people than malaria. It's very, very bad for you."
Wayne
"Junior" at Cesar Millan show
Photo: Geoff Oliver Bugbee