Language as an evolutionary map

I love it when fiction merges with non-fiction, and a book that was recently passed on to me by a friend in Beijing is a prime example of this.  Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash is a hyperlinked mesh of references to science, mythology and linguistics.  

There are two schools: relativists and universalists.  As George Steiner summarizes it, relativists tend to believe that language is not the vehicle of thought but its determining medium.  It is the framework of cognition.  Our perceptions of everything are organized by the flux of sensations passing over that framework.  Hence, the study of the evolution of the language is the study of the evolution of the human mind itself.

Stephenson, Neal.  (1992) Snow Crash.  Bantam Dell: New York. p.275

Information Dieting

In the spirit of Tim Ferris's bestselling book The 4-Hour Workweek, I'll try to keep this post short, especially for those of you on a low information diet. Keep in mind that Ferris would actually like to disrupt the current trend of information overload, and to terminate our movement toward being an always on culture!

Pareto's Principle (the 80/20 principle):
20% of your actions will produce 80% of your results

Parkinson's Law:
Batching tasks - letting similar tasks accumulate, then batching them, eg. only emailing or responding several times a week.

Ferris's advice for trying to break non-productive cycles of using information technologies? Ask yourself this questions 3 times daily:
"Am I being productive, or am I being busy?"

Zero-sum thinking

As we spend our time scrambling for that job, salary, spouse, apartment or lifestyle, it's good to be able to shift to a more creative, optimistic perspective of life.

More succinct, evolved thinking from Rich Karlgaard at Forbes:
The World's Worst Disease

The Human-Potential Principle

A tragedy of humankind today is that most people fall outrageously short of their potential.  A principle of a great civilization ought to be that it focuses intensely on how to develop the capability latent in everybody.  The more that is done, the more we all benefit from one another.

Today most human beings are trapped in jobs, lifestyles or social conditions in which they develop only a fraction of their potential.  Lives can be wasted in so many ways - drudgery work, watching bad television many hours per day, women being denied the potential that men have, a shop-till-you-drop culture or the conceits of high fashion.  Most people could be far more creative.  The potentials of human capability will become much greater because of the cornucopia of new technology and fundamental changes in the way enterprises are managed.  The most important aspects of new technology are those that make people excited about what they do.  Human capability that we now regard as brilliant will become widespread because of the amplifying power of technology.  Higher forms of brilliance will emerge, and many of those will become commonplace.

The 19th century philosopher John Ruskin preached that machines robbed workers of their nobility, freedom and individuality.  The machines of the 21st century will be the opposite.  Inability to use them will rob workers of their nobility, freedom and individuality.

In the poorest countries, one can walk among multitudes of malnourished eager-eyed kids who have no hope and know that if any one of them had been adopted as a baby and brought up in a good home in Singapore or Rome, he or she might have been a teacher, musician or scientist.  The human-potential principle needs to be pervasive, from the poorest destitute society to the richest high-tech society.

Martin, James (2006) The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for ensuring our Future. London: Transworld. (pp. 386, 387).

The Skill/Wisdom Gap

Deep wisdom about the meaning of the 21st century will be essential. A serious problem of our time is the gap between skill and wisdom. Science and technology are accelerating furiously, but wisdom is not. We are brilliant at creating new technology, but are not wise in learning how to cope with it. To succeed in today's world, people will need intricate skills in narrowly specialized areas. Skills need detailed, narrowly focused study of subjects that are rapidly increasing in complexity, whereas wisdom needs the synthesis of diverse ideas. Wisdom requires judgement, reflection about beliefs and thinking about events in terms of how they might be different.

Today, deep reflection about our future circumstances is eclipsed by a frenzy of ever more complex techniques and gadgets and preoccupation with how to increase shareholder value. The skill/wisdom gap is made greater because skills offer the ways to get wealthy. Society's best brains are saturated with immediate issues that become ever more complex, rather than reflecting on why we are doing this and what the long-term consequences will be.

University education today is much more pressured than when I was at university. The curricula have become overstuffed, the subject matter intensely complex and the examinations frequent and demanding. The student sticks to the curriculum and can deal with little else. The professors stick to their discipline; they are judged by the papers they publish in the professional journal of that discipline. Most areas of education have almost no interdisciplinary scholarship. As disciplines become deeper and more complex, the brilliance expended on them is formidable, but we don't think much about its consequences or what impact it has in other areas. In specialized areas, computers will become vastly more intelligent than people, but such intelligence is not human wisdom. As computers become more intelligent, with intense self-improvement of non-human intelligence, the skill/wisdom gap will widen at a furious rate.

We have vast numbers of experts on how to make the train work better and faster, but almost nobody is concerned with where the train is headed or whether we'll like its destination.

Wisdom is essential and comes from the synthesis of a large amount of knowledge and experience that may take much of a lifetime to acquire. Not everyone can handle such synthesis. We must ask where the broad wisdom about the future will come from. The answer is, we must set out consciously to develop it. Wisdom, like advanced civilization, will come when we learn to relax. Our best brains need to stop chasing the most highly paid careers, the fastest boats and the smartest country clubs. A mature society should exhibit deep respect for deep wisdom.

We need to set out very consciously to foster and nurture the wisdom that the 21st century will require. This should be a task for our greatest universities.

Martin, James (2006) The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for ensuring our Future. London: Transworld. (pp. 292, 293).

Header sketch by Jonathan Chambers.