John Ralston Saul - Positive Nationalism

If people who know each other well serve the welfare of their fellow citizens, they may learn something unexpected about each other, perhaps about how different they are. If people who do not know each other well, perhaps because they come from different cultures, serve the welfare of their fellow citizens, they may well discover how similar their values are.

In both cases, this would be the process of positive nationalism.

Ralston Saul, John. (2005) "The Collapse of Globalism." New York: Penguin. p. 280

Nibbled to Death by Ducks

...you can see the destructive effect of managerial dominance in the gradual growth of detail as the mainstay of the employee's life. The effect of new technology has been to draw even senior managers into minutiae. People paid to think and lead now spend much of their time typing and responding to or sending an endless stream of unnecessary messages, simply because communications technology invades every second and every corner of their lives. This bureaucratization of both the leadership and the creative process makes thought seem irresponsible and clear action seem unprofessional. It provides a sensation of activity while creating a broader sense of powerlessness. This is what used to be called being nibbled to death by ducks.

Ralston Saul, John. (2005) "The Collapse of Globalism." New York: Penguin. p. 230

John Ralston Saul: "The End of Belief"

Ideologies resemble not very good theatre of the romantic sort. That is why Coleridge's formula - the willing suspension of disbelief - applies so neatly to the natural life of any ideology. In defence of the poet, he had in mind a far nobler use of the human ability to choose to suspend our disbelief -- a nobler idea of theatre and of the romantic ideal. but you could argue that the more flimsy the theatrical device -- a romance novel, a Schwarzenegger adventure -- the greater the demonstration of our ability to suspend our critical faculties.

How we arrive at the decision to suspend our disbelief when it comes to ideologies is mysterious. Historians and social scientists spend their lives trying to explain the phenomenon. Creative writers usually do a better job at explaining this sort of politics, because in a curious way they are in the same business as the ideologues. Both are dealing with the human heart.

Less mysterious is how we decide to drop our suspension. The inevitable -- and here the word is accurate -- failures of any ideology gradually build up. A growing number of people notice. The propaganda of triumph evolves into one of denial. Language that was once enthusiastically received by the public is increasingly treated as the equivalent of elevator music, then as an actively annoying noise, and finally as inadvertent comedy. When the voice of power is heard by the public with irony, skepticism and, at last, as if from a farce, our willingness to suspend our disbelief has seeped fully away. The ideology may go on for a time because its advocates hold so many of the mechanisms of power. But this is simply power.

While the true believers continue to insist -- sometimes enthusiastically, but more often angrily these days -- on global inevitabilities, you will hear, if you listen carefully, a rising babble of contradictory sounds. A growing number of nation-state leaders, along with the more interesting businessmen, have changed their vocabulary, gradually weeding out the global assumptions. The new discourse is more complex, sibylline, less grandiose. Much of it is built around the idea of citizens and society. On the other hand, some of it suggests an accelerating political meltdown matched by rising levels of disorder. There is a growing incidence of old-style nationalist violence. Our memory has changed again.

Ralston Saul, John. (2005) "The Collapse of Globalism." Penguin, New York. pp.171,172

TEDTalks: Helen Fisher (2006) Biochemical foundations of Love and Lust

2 biggest social trends in the next century?

1. Women moving back into the job market
2. The aging population

fMRI scanning of people in various states of love (or being out of love)

Main characteristics of romatic love: craving, motivation and obsession.

She claims that romantic love is not an emotion but a drive, ie, motivation or craving. "I think it's more powerful than the sex drive."

3 basic brain systems that have developed as a result of evolutionary/reproductive cycles: sex drive; romantic love; attachment (sense of calm and security).

These 3 systems translate as Lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner.

As woman are moving back into the job market in many cultures, they're acquiring the status that that had in earlier human societies.

Differences between male/female brains - woman have greater verbal ability (people skills, long term planning, putting ideas into more complex patterns, holistic thinking); men tend to get rid of what they consider as extraneous so they can focus.

Moving towards a collaborative society where the talents of both sexes are valued and employed together.

Return to an ancient form of marriage equality. "The symmetrical marriage"; "The peer marriage" whereby partners are equal.

SECOND TREND: The aging population. Trend - the older you get, the less likely you are to get divorced.

The 3 brain systems aren't always connected to each other, eg. you may feel deep attachment to someone while you feel sexual attraction to someone else.

"I don't think honestly we're an animal that was built to be happy - we were built to reproduce."

Fisher is worried about antidepressants (eg. serotonin enhancing). Serotonin enhancing drugs supress dopamine, therefore suppressing sex drive. Therefore, if you tamper with one system you tamper with other systems.

TEDTalks: Ken Robinson (2006) - Creativity in Education

It's funny - I've seen this before, but I decided to watch it again and take some notes.

Robinson begins by claiming one of ideas we need to grapple with is that we don't know what future holds or what it's going to look like, so how do we educate today's children?

"Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status."
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original."

He comments that by the time we're adults we stigmatize mistakes, "We're educating people out of their creative capacities."

"We don't grow into creativity - we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it."

Robinson is hilarious, and makes some great jokes imagining Shakespeare as a 7 year old in an English class.

"Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects... At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system, too, there's a hierarchy within the arts: art and music are usually given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance ever day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important."

"As children grow older we start to progressively educate them from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads - and slightly to one side."

Robinson claims that the people who come out at the top of this kind of system are the people who wind up as university professors, but typically those are the kinds of people who are disembodied and live in their heads. "They look at their body as a form of transport for their heads." (ha!)

"The education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability, and there's a reason... There were no public systems of education before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is based on two ideas: (1) The most useful subjects for work are at the top, so you were probably steered benignly away from things when you were a kid - things you liked - on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that...
Benign advice - now profoundly mistaken. The whole world's engulfed in a revolution.
And the second is: (2) Academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole systsem of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not.
Because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized."

"In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people will be graduating through public education than since the beginning of history....
Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything." (ie. now you may need an MA to get a job - "the process of academic inflation."
"We know three things about intelligence:
(1) It's diverse. We think about the world in all of the ways that we experience it - we think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically; we think in abstract terms; we think in movement.
(2) Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at all of the interactions of the brain...intelligence is wonderfully interactive."
Creativity = the process of having original ideas that have value
Creativity, more often than not, comes from different disciplines and ways of seeing things.
(3) Intelligence is distinct.

"I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology. One in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we stripmine the Earth for a particular commodity, and for the future it won't service. We have to rethink the fundamental principles upon which we're educating our children."

"Our task is to educate their whole being."

Hobbes on Want of Understanding

Ignorance of the signification of words; which is, want of
understanding, disposeth men to take on trust, not onely the
truth they know not; but also the errors; and which is more,
the non-sense of them they trust: For neither Error, nor non-sense,
can without a perfect understanding of words, be detected.

(p.61) Hobbes "Leviathan"

This seems like such a patently obvious statement, but failure to understand this follows us around for entire lifetimes. Essentially, we trust nonsense.

Hobbes on lack of timely resolution

Timely Resolution, or determination of what a man is to do,
is Honourable; as being the contempt of small difficulties, and dangers.
And Irresolution, Dishonourable; as a signe of too much valuing of
little impediments, and little advantages: For when a man has weighed
things as long as the time permits, and resolves not, the difference
of weight is but little; and therefore if he resolve not,
he overvalues little things, which is Pusillanimity.

Hobbes: Leviathan (1651), p.55 of my version of the Gutenberg e-text.
Chapter X: "Of Power, Worth, Dignity, Honour and Worthiness"

Lack of timely resolution is a sign of too much focus on little impediments and little advantages. Hobbes claims that lack of courage or determination lies at the core of this inaction. Hobbes repeats this idea in Chapter XI:

Irresolution, From Too Great Valuing Of Small Matters
Pusillanimity disposeth men to Irresolution, and consequently
to lose the occasions, and fittest opportunities of action.
For after men have been in deliberation till the time of
action approach, if it be not then manifest what is best to be done,
tis a signe, the difference of Motives, the one way and the other,
are not great: Therefore not to resolve then, is to lose the occasion
by weighing of trifles; which is pusillanimity.

John Ralston Saul on Trade vs. Wellbeing of People

"There is one free trade issue that is rarely mentioned in the context of Cobden and the great movement. During the eighteenth century, the British, followed by the French and the Americans, wanted to buy high-quality Chinese goods - tea, silk, porcelain. The West could not produce these goods, or at any rate could not match the Chinese level of excellence. The problem was the the Chinese didn't want any Western goods. There being no two-way trade, the West had to pay cash. The British used silver they received in trade with Spain. In 1781 there was no silver, so Warren Hastings, the first governor-general of India, sent off Indian opium to be sold in China to pay for British imports. This eventually led to two Opium Wars in which the West - pretending to be at war over the treatment of their traders - fought China to force the country to go on importing opium, thus addicting its citizens. By 1830 this trade was probably the largest single commodity business in the world. The same House of Commons, so enthusiastic about the moral virtues of free trade, defeated motions to ban the opium trade in 1870, 1875, 1886 and 1889. The trade ended in 1913 as part of the winding down of the first free trade experiment.

Put bluntly, Britain in particular and the West in general asked themselves whether the moral principle of fair trade trumped the well-being of a people. They answered that it did.

This is a question valid for all time; even if we refused to raise it at appropriate moments, history will, when the time comes to describe our actions for future generations. In what possible context could a question relevant to the opium trade be raised today? What about the pharmaceuticals essential to combat AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis in the developing world and the way in which their prices are artificially kept high by the Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) regime in the WTO? Or what about Western industrial agriculture and its effect on gragile societies? Or the destructive effect of unregulated financial markets on weaker economies?"

p.43,44 John Ralston Saul, "The Collapse of Globalism." (2005) Penguin, New York.

TEDTalks: Richard Branson (2007)

When asked a question about how he manages to start up and manage so many companies, he responds that if you can run one company then you can run many
- running companies is about finding good people and then bringing out their best.
- previews the interior design of the Virgin Galactic craft.
- discusses the fact that he's dyslexic and left school at the age of 15.
- "capitalist philanthropy" - alludes to the fact that in a capitalist system extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and that responsibility goes with that wealth, and that it's important for those individuals to use that money to create jobs or to tackle issues, eg. global warming/alternative fuels; social problems in Africa (including AIDS)

TEDTalks: "Uncertainty" Peter Donnelly (2005)

Peter Donnelly: How juries are fooled by statistics

Discusses probability theory in relation to genetics (ie. the patterning of G/A/T/C).
Human Genome Project - attempting to understand how differences make people susceptible to diseases.

Currently studying thousands of individuals with different diseases to look for genetic correlations.

Discusses the idea that if a person is tested as 'positive' with a disease then not only the accuracy of the test is in question, but also the frequency/proportion of the population with the disease. As a result, false positives can be frequent.

"We are not good at reasoning with uncertainty."
Errors are very frequently made in terms of grappling with statistics and arguments of (false) logic. In the early days of DNA profiling evidence was misrepresented, (ie. "the chance that this guy is innocent is one in 73,000,000" - was frequently incorrect).

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/67