Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Genesis of creativity ...

I was reading Midnight Disease, a book by an MD with research access to an fMRI. She wanted to link creativity to bipolar disorder, which was an idea I found annoying. She was saying about how creative people wrote, on paper, in long-hand, and they went back over it and highlighted and underlined stuff, and categorized it with different color pens. "SO WHAT ?!?!" I was thinking by this time ... good grief ... maybe people weren't allowed to synthesize new ideas, to develop systems, to have generative thought in whatever kind of proscribed consciousness this woman had been stuck in. But creating new structures like that, to me, is the ultimate productive consciousness, and it often happens on paper and not through the intermediary of the computer.
I have gone over David Allen's Getting Things Done a few times. He talks about optimum and lesser states of consciousness and choosing the right kind of work, errands, list-making, planning, full-bore project work, dependent on an energy level, a current state of consciousness, that one can more-or-less plan and count on. Also, he talks about knowledge workers' needing to decide how something should be done, more than considering the on/off state of "doing" or "not doing."
It is interesting to me how I am finding a dialog between examinations of individual consciousness and management practices.

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

The Geese

Then one day I noticed they were aligned to watch the cars on the street. They aren’t particularly good at even saving themselves from traffic. One day I rushed some to see them fly out of the way, and I had to brake hard, realizing they weren’t going to make it.
So one day I was in the park, and noticed them aligning to look at the road and along came a UPS truck. It stopped and the driver carried out a stack of packages, set it on the curb and gestured for the head goose to sign. Each goose in the gaggle that was waiting tore open a package with its bill and took out a waterproof iPad, and waddled down to the riverbank and dropped it to the bottom. It took a week before someone cleaned up all the trash, and people were grumbling “typical …,” but the geese were happily iPadding away underwater.

Friday, September 17, 2010

Making my Cyborg Self Work for Me

I was very taken with Clive Thompson's essay in April's WIRED, "Advantage: Cyborgs."

I suppose I had launched into every new web endeavor with a sense of reinvention. Not that I was drastically changing my identity each time, mind you, although sometimes I was exploring different themes, and mainly with whole new groups of friends.

So, my concept of myself, as it has been on the web, is an unconnected center with spider-legs radiating out from it.

Now, it seems some bloom is off the rose with social marketing; the days of freewheeling friending are passing. Link-chasing, because someone says so, has lost its luster for me. I am less in awe of all the things I can find and the fact of finding, for instance, related Youtube content keying into the key theme of a friend's blog than more targeted pursuits. I suppose I am no longer game for shoulder-shrugging casual play, as I see what this thing can do.

I recently read Dan Schwabel's Me 2.0, and started thinking about how to take these disparate personae and make myself a more singular, cleaned-up, image.

The idea of being "on message," with the robotic repetition of the same phrases over and over again, does not appeal to me as a multifaceted individual, as a writer, as a funny person, as a problem-solver, as an inventor, as a genius of making-do.

But slowly, I'm bringing things together.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Re-reading: Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

I was going over the table of contents of Peter Bernstein's Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk (1996). Something about a program I am developing made me want to recall what can be known about chance and decision-making. [I had, at some point, tucked into the book an article dunning Bernstein for his optimism about derivatives.]
The contents of the book is organized as a history:

To 1200: Beginnings
1200-1700: A thousand outstanding facts
1700-1900: Measurement Unlimited
1900-1960: Clouds of vagueness and the demand for Precision
and, finally:
Degrees of Belief: Exploring Uncertainty

Bernstein makes the point that without probability, great bridges ... power companies ... polio vaccine ... airplanes ... space travel would not happen. Also, "... the free economy, with choice at its center, has brought humanity unparalleled access to the good things in life. The ability to define what may happen ... and to choose among alternatives lies at the heart of contemporary societies." It had not hit me before the absolute importance of mathematical understanding to the growth of civilization.

What struck me was that to a large extent, the story is about examining what we are uncertain of, and trying to find ways in which we can know something about these things. [My last examination of cognitive uncertainty concerned, among other things, uncertainty about the rightness of decisions that had already passed as well as uncertainty in cases where an experience does not necessarily become an accrual of personal skill.]

Bernstein points out that the ancient Greeks were inclined to make singular mathematical proofs of things, but did not throw dice repeatedly to make a determination about "tendencies." In other cases as well, he writes that a fatalistic mindset might have kept some peoples from drawing rational conclusions about probabilities for which they had already figured out the math.

Note: Behavioral Economics

I was listening to a podcast of David Fetherstonhaugh on "Behavioral Economics," in which someone asked how to find an overview of the history of the topic. He responded by saying that behavioral economics had come out of cognitive psychology, as it advanced from sensory input observations (at the time I studied it, to my constant disappointment) to the more complex variables of decision-making.
He said the best place to start was with the book, Nudge, by Thaler and Sunstein (2008), and work back from there.
The book is largely about "tricking people into doing what they ought," like, planning and saving for the future, by designing programs that ride on their natural inclinations in decision-making. While I would prefer a pro-active, reasoned, caring explanation of what I ought to do; here, in real life, is the more ad-hoc husbanding of [what people do] to [programs that will take care of these oughts]; they even use the term, "paternal libertarianism."

News-searching Habits

I use my twitter account, @conzatorium, mainly as a news aggregator. I follow about 350 sources, including general news, high tech, marketing, Boston-area events, and comedy.

For news, I like to hit Google news first thing in the morning, but that doesn't give a satisfactory number of headlines. I also punch "Business" and "Sci/Tech" from there.

Some people breathlessly post links on Twitter that sound interesting, but when I follow them, I find myself spending more time trying to figure out if it means anything at all rather than absorbing what it means. Often it has one, two or three interesting buzzwords or -phrases, but it doesn't constitute a whole notion.