Month: January 2010

As a parent I have more than a passing interest in this talk. This “famous” last lecture of Randy Pausch in 2007 has been cited as “inspirational” by many. I beg to differ.

Yes, you have to be impressed with a man in the last months of terminal cancer being this upbeat and positive to the last. I am impressed. And amongst all the private in-jokes for his geek friends in Virtual Reality at Carnegie Mellon, which one can indulge given that context, his message about following your dreams, is really a message about living life. Learning through the fun of doing creative things and living life the right way, with honesty, integrity, trust, loyalty, saying thank you and sorry, and of course hard-work. Hard work verging well over into workaholism, if his response is this boastful, “well if you wanna know, call me at 10pm in the office any day”. That message is at odds with the real “head fake” here – that this really is a message for his kids, not the faculty attending his last lecture.

If you want an inspirational lecture (pre YouTube and TED – yes, you have to read it) for kids, the future in general, as well as one’s own try this commencement address, from Richard Russo in 2004. But perhaps I should have head-faked that too ?

(“Head-fake” is the idea that doing fun creative things IS learning … you don’t have to be explicit in who or what is being learned and taught.)

Already the 3rd week of 2010 and I’ve still read only a smattering of the responses to the 2010 Edge Question “How has the internet changed the way you think ?”

This George Dyson response is a good one.

We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.

I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.

Too true. More needs to be less.

And in fact that is a recurring theme. Dawkins concludes net gain, TBL for the Nobel Peace Prize even, after bemoaning the anonymized rubbish that pads out the web. For Dave Morin, context is more important than the content; Nassim Taleb, the degradation of knowledge … Kevin Kelly

My certainty about anything has decreased. Rather than importing authority, I am reduced to creating my own certainty — not just about things I care about — but about anything I touch, including areas about which I can’t possibly have any direct knowledge . That means that in general I assume more and more that what I know is wrong. We might consider this state perfect for science but it also means that I am more likely to have my mind changed for incorrect reasons. Nonetheless, the embrace of uncertainty is one way my thinking has changed.

More likely to have one’s mind changed for the wrong reasons. The mimetic risk – ideas that stick because they are “sticky” not because they are any good.