Max Linsky - Five idea that stuck with me

Max Linsky is a writer and curator of the nigh-indispensable and writerly Longform.org who attended the 2011 IdeaFestival. In this guest post, he passes along some of his thoughts on IF 2011. Thanks Max! - Wayne

It's been a little over a month since IdeaFestival 2011, but I'd rather think of it as 11 months until the next one. That's a central theme of IdeaFestival, of course: looking ahead to what's coming next. Whether it's what experiments in space can teach us about medicine or what the infinite universe can teach us about ourselves, the topics discussed at IdeaFestival all face forward. You can't help but leave inspired. And, if you're lucky, a month later you'll still remember a few things. Here are five ideas I picked up during IdeaFestival that I haven't been able to shake:

Elizabeth Scarpf and the Power of Persistence
Don't know who Elizabeth Scharpf is? You will. The young founder of Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE), Scharpf changing the lives of women in Rwanda by creating low-cost sanitary pads—a glaring need around the world. Just tremendously inspiring work. But there was another part of her talk that I haven't been able to shake: once she had the idea for inexpensive pads, Scharpf threw herself utterly and completely into the making it a reality. She volunteered at conference after conference to network, cold called anyone she could think of, worked long hours for nothing. The takeaway: you can have no shame if you're trying to change the world.

Tim Donaghy's Can Teach You About Something Other than Gambling
For the non-sports fans out there, a quick primer: a few years ago, Tim Donaghy, an NBA referee, was busted for betting on basketball games. That's about as cardinal a sin as you can find in the sports world—information from Donaghy was being passed along to the mob—and he was rightly vilified. What happened next, though, is where the story gets interesting: Donaghy didn't decamp to some cave somewhere and hide. Instead, he started talking about what he'd done. He did it in a book, he did on 60 Minutes, and he did it at this year's IdeaFestival. The guy stood on stage and told his story, (numerous) warts and all. Yes, he was selling books. And, yes, he had the uncomfortable air of someone desperate for forgiveness. But he was also sending a message to everyone in that room: even if we make a mistake—even if it's an epic, catastrophic, front-page-news mistake—the story isn't over.

Wes Moore Is Going to Be President
I'm not going to try to put into words the hold Wes Moore had over the room. Let's just say it was total. The guy has a riveting story—you should read it for yourself. Or just wait until, say, 2028, when he's campaigning for the White House.

We're Not Alone
Here's a challenge: condense the entirety of humanity's understanding of physics into a 50-minute lecture, use that knowledge to make the case for infinite universes, and try to have anyone in the crowd understand what you're talking about. That was what Suketu Bhavsar tried to do, and while he wasn't entirely successful—an embarrassing amount went right over my head—I latched onto one part of his talk. The laymen's version: OK, so say the universe is infinite. (Just give me and Suketu the benefit of the doubt.) That means there is another world exactly like ours. There's another you. There's another me. And, while I know this sounds kinda ridiculous, I've found myself taking comfort in that idea over the last month. Particularly when I screw up. There's something comforting about knowing that, even if I put my foot in my mouth or bungled a presentation or missed a deadline, there's another me out there who knocked it out of the park.

Louisville Is a Foodie Paradise
A short list of things I loved about Louisville: the bourbon, running by the river, the bourbon, the Muhammed Ali Museum, the bourbon. But the hands-down highlight of my non-Festival activities was a dinner at the Brown Hotel hotel prepared in the kitchen by executive chef Laurent Geroli. I'll avoid the details—no need to make you jealous—but, trust me, folks in Louisville know how to cook and they know how to eat. It was a meal I'll never forget.

Same goes for the IdeaFestival. See you there in 11 months.

Max Linsky

Focus on the love making

A wandering mind can be a creative mind. "The Importance of Mind Wandering," from Jonah Lehrer:

In recent years... neuroscience has dramatically revised our views of mind-wandering. For one thing, it turns out that the mind wanders a ridiculous amount. Last year, the Harvard psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Matthew A. Killingsworth published a fascinating paper in Science documenting our penchant for disappearing down the rabbit hole of our own mind. The scientists developed an iPhone app that contacted 2,250 volunteers at random intervals, asking them about their current activity and levels of happiness. It turns out that people were engaged in mind-wandering 46.9 percent of the time. In fact, the only activity in which their minds were not constantly wandering was love making. They were able to focus for that.

Very nice, Jonah. Let me take that thought in a different direction.

I'm reminded of web posts and online articles that regularly ask where the serendipity has gone, and I wonder whether day-dreaming is a reaction to an information-soaked environment. An acquaintance of mine, Rob May, a successful entrepreneur who happens to share the same introverted and creative nature that I do, wrote yesterday that to really gain a new perspective on things in our wired, wired world - unplug, because the web "just encourages consolidation around the same pieces of information." Even scholarship, he points out, has narrowed. Having showed up on the scene over the past decade or so, the same old media actors have reestablished the same old rules. Power laws push serendipity into the long tail.

I'm also reminded of the perceptive William Deresiewicz, who wrote a timely address on solitude and leadership, beseeching the West Point Plebes in his presence to find time as future participants in the military's vast bureaucracy to be alone with their thoughts. How, otherwise, would they know what they really think? In the absence of original thinking, could they expect others to follow? In a related and earlier essay, "The End of Solitude," he writes, "Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone."

To the extent that alternate reality games blend the virtual and physical, or that web sites like Longform and a new one, Findings, encourage the swapping and digestion of complete sentences and, heaven forbid, whole paragraphs, or that the making movement finds satisfaction in real world objects not Google results, I think there's an emerging understanding that information is good, but it can't be ripping entirely from context without losing meaning. We know more than we can tell, and conditioned as we have been by an ancient history of connecting information - sound, sight, the scent of baked goods - to something, we've grown up with a sense that meaning has a subject and predicate. Without a there, there, we just think we know more, which given the information ghettos to which everyone seems to have retreated, has lost entirely what little charm it may have once held.

Of course the mind will wander. It's looking for a wall to scale.

And yes, of course I get the irony of writing this for a web log. Yes, I still hope that it will make you think. But more than that, I hope you'll spend some time - more than you usual - away from bright and glowing screens. Go outside and spend some time on a park bench people-watching during lunch today. This evening, cancel the reservations. Cook. Try that new recipe you've been meaning to try without worry about how it might turn out. The importance of mind wandering to creativity, according to Lehrer, is the ability to maintain a bit of "meta-awareness" in the process. I might suggest that happens more meaningfully in the presence of the world. The focus, the attention, the love making? That's just the gift.

Wayne

Report: 65 percent of near-future jobs not yet invented

If you're living through the Great Recession and thinking there are larger forces at work, you're right. Squeezed in the middle by relentless automation, employees are feeling the pinch. The link between technology investment and employment growth seems to have been permanently severed, according to Chris Jablonski at ZDNet. Then there's this:

According to the U.S. Department of Labor, 65% of today’s grade school kids will end up at a job that hasn't been invented yet. It may behoove educators, academic institutions, and policy makers to prepare them for tomorrow’s challenges by harnessing the power of computing, collective intelligence and human ingenuity.

Frankly, I don't know how "educators and policy makers" as a group can react nimbly enough to make useful suggestions, and, contrarian that I am, I'm not sure I'd take their advice in any case. But if 65 percent of jobs twenty or thirty years hence haven't even been created yet, the way I see it, there is still time to get the world's first space-based art-science collaborative - ahem - off the ground.

Jablonski links to Douglas Rushkoff's piece, "Are Jobs Obsolete?" And for some really big-picture perspective, Rushkoff links to the dreadlocked digital-skeptic, Jaron Lanier.

Like many of you, I feel the pinch. I wonder whether I'm still useful, and work harder than I ever have to remain so. Jablonski ends his piece on a positive note: "thinking, dreaming, learning, communicating and feeling" are human, not machine, skills. So take heart. Like you, I don't know what those new jobs will be, but whether employed or self-employed, entrepreneur or entry level, meaning making will always have a place.

Wayne

Everybody talks about the multiverse, but nobody does anything about it

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Paraphrasing Twain, everybody talks about the multiverse, but nobody does anything about it.

There's a reason. Light, after all, travels only so fast, and right now its reach is about 13.7 billion light years. So there's no way of knowing what might have come before the Big Bang or what lies beyond its accelerating reach.

Inflationary theory explains the universe we see with precision. But CalTech theoretical physicist Sean Carroll, who attended and spoke at IdeaFestival in 2010 on the subject of time, wonders if the addition of string theory to what we know about inflation might yield "pocket universes," each of them ordered by just some of the physical laws made possible by string theory and inflated to 12-dimensional worlds with 7 primary forces, for example, instead of the three dimensions and four forces of energy to which we're accustomed.

In short, string theory predicts that the laws of physics can take on an enormous variety of forms, and inflation can create an infinite number of pocket universes. So the different laws of physics predicted by string theory might not be just hypothetical. They might really be out there somewhere among the countless parts of the multiverse. This is not a situation that cosmologists dreamed up in a flight of fancy; it is something we were led to by trying to solve problems right here in the universe we observe. The question is, now that the multiverse is here, what are we going to do about it?

The answer is not much. Because not all theories can be tested, and the multiverse, while logically consistent, can't yet be tested even if there may be hints in the cosmic microwave background of other possible universes. We are, after all, stuck with the physical laws that obtain in this universe, and the corresponding limits they impose on what we might know.

But that's the part of the scientific fun, according to Carroll. Not all predictions made by science will be accompanied by data; and in this case, the corresponding data may be permanently opaque. Astrophysicist Adam Frank offers a modest counter, wondering whether science can be science without empirical data.

As for what might be done about it, here's a thought: Put in your earbuds at work and listen to the music in the video above. Turn it up. Listen in awe at Lacrimosa, scored to images from the film The Tree of Life. You will be goose-pimpled.

Wayne

Do we still need photojournalists?

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Ron Haviv: There Is a Need for Photojournalists from TakePart on Vimeo.

Watch this very nicely done TakePart video featuring photojournalist Ron Haviv on his craft and why we still need photojournalists - "authorship" - in a media-saturated world.

Wayne