Peter Sims' IF Conversation: Creativity a series of "little bets"

A lifetime removed from an earlier education that focused on finding the right answers and high achievement, "Little Bets" author Peter Sims believes that "life is much more rich when you're doing creative work."

Appearing last year at the IdeaFestival, Sims talks in this IdeaFestival Conversation about his nickname in high school (and why it may be less relevant than it once was), compares this period in U.S. history to another, and explains why he's so optimistic about the future.

The beauty of uncounted and culture-wide "little bets" is that they eventually result in new professions, companies and whole new industries.

To innovate, explore.

Festival passes for IdeaFestival 2013 are on sale now, but don't wait too long to make that purchase. We are expecting to sell out again this year!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Hacking Space - Five Questions for Ariel Waldman

Do particle collisions make a sound?

Slated to speak at IdeaFestival 2013 on the "Hacker's Guide to the Galaxy," Ariel Waldman took a few moments to talk recently with us for our Five Questions series

Thanks to a burgeoning citizen science movement that, for example, recruits human eyes to pour over data from our robotic emissaries, galaxies are identified, pulsars discovered and astronomical images are processed for clarity and beauty by amateurs the world over.

As Ariel suggests, these vantages can can, and do, connect ideas that had previously been unrelated, particularly when those sets of eyes come together. IdeaFestival fans will certainly recognize the delight in THAT process.

As for the answer to the first question, why, yes, particle collisions do make a sound!

Festival passes are now on sale - but don't wait too long to make that purchase. We're expecting a sell out again this year. 

Stay curious!

Wayne

"Extremists are afraid of books and pens"

Speaking at the United Nations, Malala Yousafzai, shot in the head by the Pakistani Taliban for speaking out about her right to an education, reminded world leaders that 57 million children are denied schooling. About her own story, she says that the bullet meant to silence her only killed her "weakness, fear and hopelessness."

Be inspired.

At IdeaFestival 2013 Tererai Trent will speak on her global quest to ensure that the right to an education for every child is protected.

Make plans now to be there!

Wayne

Can we still solve big problems? Five Questions with Jason Pontin

In the second of several new interviews in a revitalized "Five Questions" series, the editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review, Jason Pontin, connects with the IdeaFestival.

Watch the edited video to the right. Time stamps following each question (below) indicate where that question begins in the video.

Jason will appear at IdeaFestival 2013, where he will moderate a panel on Big Questions, Big Ideas and Intractable Problems that will include a name symbolic with blogging, Dave Winer, who created the RSS syndication standard. Digital syndication, combined with the then new medium of blogging, gave distinctive voices a chance for the first time to build audiences, just as their print counterparts did.

You don't want to miss Jason's panel! Festival Passes are now on sale, but don't wait too long to get yours. Sales are far ahead of last year's pace and we're expecting to sell out.

Wayne

1) Your most recent editor's note in Technology Review points out a couple of stories about the human role in "an automated world," and included the intriguing comment that "technological advances are not the same as progress." Do you believe the current divergence between wage growth and productivity in the United States is exacerbated by technology? If so, what technologies are responsible? And where do you see humans fitting in an "automated" future?

2) You're the editor of Technology Review. Since the IdeaFestival is all about the importance of innovation, how as a practical matter has Technology Review responded to changes in its industry? (2:22)

3) Today's media-saturated culture has of late drawn its share of critics, which include such people as Evgeny Morozov, Jaron Lanier and Nicholas Carr. If the medium is the message, how, in your opinion, are we being changed by the communications tools we use? What changes do you see on the horizon? (4:55)

4) Let's play Jeopardy! What question is an IdeaFestival audience member likely to ask following your panel? (8:00)

5) Isadora Duncan is quoted as saying, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” How do you "stay curious?" (9:30)

More beautiful than a ready made world, ctd.

I thought of this older post while sitting in on a meeting yesterday with the many shareholders of the IdeaFestival. The economics and business writer John Kay, on getting there from here:

Obliquity is equally relevant to our businesses and our bodies, to the management of our lives and our national economies. We do not maximise shareholder value or the length of our lives, our happiness or the gross national product, for the simple but fundamental reason that we do not know how to and never will. No one will ever be buried with the epitaph 'He maximised shareholder value'. Not just because it is a less than inspiring objective, but because even with hindsight there is no way of recognising whether the objective has been achieved.

Inspired yesterday by the resolute ambition of the people in that room, I thought I'd take another crack at an older post.

On Kay's view about what we can know about complex systems, certainty is never attained. Whether we are dealing with social networks, economies or the motes in quantum fields, the best that can be done is to approximate or model the whole, to live in concert, to react and adjust to the information at hand. I find this very satisfying.

I think you will too. How many times, for example, have you taken a personal risk only to be rewarded with a pleasant and unexpected outcome, or looked back with hard won contentment at the twist and turns your life has taken? You got the girl or the guy - or the job - or the happy prognosis. To become experts in our lives we must take risks, and having taken the risk, welcome what comes next with the understanding that the knowing is never complete. Contentment, after all, depends at least as much on acceptance as it does knowledge.

And speaking only for myself, we all could do with a little - no, make that a lot - less certainty from the so-called experts in the cable news magisterium, or anywhere else, who would warn us of the perils of change, or focus incessantly on any one outcome in the service of same. The problem is not that these individuals aren't, or can't, be right, but that the rightness or wrongness of any prediction made about economies or technologies or civil society can't be known in advance, or often, as John Kay says above, in hindsight.

For me that means a dialog built on faith is essential, never mind whether that faith calls on the supernatural or not. For me it means putting one foot in front of the other and trusting that I won't fall down.

Kay's uncertain route "relevant to our business and bodies" is also why I love the IdeaFestival. I didn't know exactly why in the beginning, but I knew I had to be a part of a celebration of possibility. What I have come to understand now is that a certain stance toward the future, a stand-up-straight, throw-your-shoulders-back affirmation that we're not, as Stanley Kunitz once lyrically said, "done with our changes yet," can't be separated from the future or futures we get. Nor can it be separated from any change worth having.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Photo of John Barker: Geoff Oliver Bugbee