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Yet there is a serious problem with our idea of sacred nature, and that is that the idol is a false one.
– False Idyll | J.B. MacKinnon | Orion Magazine -
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle (by CUSEC)
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What If The Peak Oil Movement Isn't About Peak Oil At All? →
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Bruce Sterling:
“Idealism” is Platonic of course, but there’s a lesser-known classical notion called “enantiodromia” that Plato, Heraclitus and even Karl Jung used to carry on about. Enantiodromia can’t be measured with an “enantiodrometer,” so it’s not science any more than the Platonic ideal is. But whenever people talk to me about eternal human truths, I contemplate enantiodromia. Enantiodromia is the dynamic process of things turning into their opposites. The metaphysical nature of things is ornery. Things aspire to become contrarian.
Good intentions aren’t enough. Power to act isn’t enough. Not only is “the power to be your best” also the power to be your worst — the fact that it IS powerful is likely to conjure up your worst, by expanding your opportunities for temptation.
A cute little girl is one of the nicest things in the world. But when time passes, and you become the mother of a cute little girl, then it’s no good to remain a cute little girl yourself. That must be foregone. Instead, you have to become the little girl’s opposite, the mom. Mom is a major source of irritation to this cute little girl, with that ceaseless flow of motherly homilies about standing up straight and using a fork.
There’s nothing so “timeless” as motherhood, but motherhood is a very time-bound and dynamic condition. Nobody who has a baby keeps a baby. What you’ve got there is an instantiation of the human gene-pool, an entity through whom time flows.
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Venkatesh Rao:
Without realizing it, the hundreds of entrepreneurs, startup-studios and incubators, 4-hour-work-weekers and lifestyle designers around the world, experimenting with novel business structures and the attention mining technologies of social media, are collectively triggering the age of Coasean growth.
Coasean growth is not measured in terms of national GDP growth. That’s a Smithian/Mercantilist measure of growth.
It is also not measured in terms of 8% returns on the global stock market. That is a Schumpeterian growth measure. For that model of growth to continue would be a case of civilizational cancer (“growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell” as Edward Abbey put it).
Coasean growth is fundamentally not measured in aggregate terms at all. It is measured in individual terms. An individual’s income and productivity may both actually decline, with net growth in a Coasean sense.
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Compared to where I have been, this world is so tamed, so mediated and commoditized, that something within it seems to have broken off and been lost beneath the slabs. No one has noticed this, or says so if they have. Something is missing: I can almost see the gap where it used to be. But it is not remarked upon. Nobody says a thing.
– Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist — www.orionmagazine.org — Readability -
By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.
– The Human Lake | The Loom | Discover Magazine -
…this is very likely to lead to an AGI [artificial general intelligence] system with recursive self-improving capability… Before that point, I hope that we will have developed a science of general intelligence that lets us understand issues of AGI ethics and goal system stability much better than we do now.
– The Multiverse According to Ben: My Goal as an AGI Researcher -
buzz:
“We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!” Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something.”
— Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via implodr) The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness. Steve has long been, and always will be, one of my heroes, but I really worry that an entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one. There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others. I think there are a lot of reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple, but I suspect one of the biggest is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people (like Chiat Day’s Lee Clow) who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.
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For some, the wise traditions of natural life rebel against the cold touch of technology, against its military heritage, the suffering and imperialism that formed its cradle. But, when studied from within, it reveals itself as another kind of natural life, one that has extruded from us, as it were; we nurtured it while thinking we were accomplishing other goals. And it must be acknowledged as one of our children, a curious one indeed, but worthy of the rights and privileges given to every life.
