Gratitude Is What We Do

Speaking at IdeaFestival 2013, Oliver Burkeman says he approaches the subject of happiness as "a reporter," and suggests that an openness to failure may invite success.

To one extent or the other, we can all relate to the advice to be grateful for the little things. Being consumed by worry about what might, or has, gone wrong, is a draining experience, and unlikely to produce contentment and happiness.

At IdeaFestival 2013, Oliver Burkeman offered examples from his book, "Antidote, happiness for people who can't stand positive thinking," to demonstrate that a hard headed realism and the recognition that failure is an option may lead to better and more positive outcomes, personal and otherwise. He appears in the very brief interview posted above.

In particular, I remember his observation that "one needn't feel like something in order to do something."

Sound advice.

Recently I read an article on choosing gratitude that makes a similarly useful contribution to the subject of happiness. The author argues that acting grateful can make you grateful.

For many people, gratitude is difficult, because life is difficult. Even beyond deprivation and depression, there are many ordinary circumstances in which gratitude doesn’t come easily. This point will elicit a knowing, mirthless chuckle from readers whose Thanksgiving dinners are usually ruined by a drunk uncle who always needs to share his political views. Thanks for nothing.

...But we are more than slaves to our feelings, circumstances and genes. Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

What I liked about the article was its focus on the practice of gratitude, which does not require intellectual assent - think positive thoughts! - so much as our cooperation. Happiness flows from a sense of agency, regardless of circumstance.

So to find more gratitude, enlist your hands and feet.

Gratitude is what we do.

Stay curious™

Wayne

Why Build a 10,000 Year Clock?

The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock—a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas. The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems. http://www.publicrecord.tv/ Director: Jimmy Goldblum & Adam Weber Director of Photography: Will Basanta Associate Producer: Alice K. Dugan Line Producer: Elizabeth Ai Executive Producer: Jeremy Yaches Editor: Isaac Hagy Colorist: Seth Ricart for Ricart & Co. Original Music: Dan Romer and Michael Tuccillo Sound Design & Mix: Stephen Davies & Diego Jimenez for Hobo Audio Post Producer: Jason Goldman

In an age of impermanence, one team is building a clock designed to last 10,000 years. Watch the video to learn more.

Stay curious™

Wayne

Will You Want What You Find?

Image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Confusion can be your friend.

Read this lengthy essay on "the value of not knowing everything" for a powerful argument about the usefulness of the humanities and of not knowing, about poor focus and the process of discovering what wasn't being sought.

This excerpt appealed to me in particular.

McNerney brought up Darwin. Darwin, he explained, would never have read Malthus’s 1798 essay on population growth, and thus would never have developed his theory of natural selection, had he been 'searching for birds on Google.' The comparative looseness of information, the unchanneled nature of investigation, joined with Darwin’s innate curiosity, is what led to one of the most unifying explanations of physical existence the world has known. What sparked it all was pure serendipity.

In our age of endlessly aggregated information, the ultimate task of the humanities may be to subversively disaggregate in order to preserve that serendipity. After all, a period of confusion inevitably precedes the acquisition of concrete knowledge. It’s a necessary blip of humbling uncertainty that allows for what McNerney describes as 'the call and response' between disparate ideas. As long as that gap exists, as long as a flicker of doubt precedes knowledge, there will always be room for humanistic thought—thought that revels in not knowing. As long as that gap exists, we will not be reduced to the moral equivalent of computers."

Nicholas Carr also talks about the nature of search in a blog post that also recruits Robert Frost to shed light on the issue, "The Searchers."

Search, Carr says, should change us. Read the piece - and the poem.

Related, I've often thought that Jonathan Fields touches on something essential when he asked how long are you willing to live in the question?

So don't be too hasty to avoid confusion. It may be signalling that discovery is nearby.

Stay curious™

Wayne

"A Crossroads, A Framework, An Oasis for Ideas"

Image: Some rights reserved by CC Chapman

They have crafted a crossroads, a framework, an oasis for ideas, creativity, potential, and infinite possibilities. When people speak together face to face, extraordinary things can happen.

Sarah Ivens, Louisville Courier-Journal

What happens at the IdeaFestival never stays at the IdeaFestival.

Here are some of the articles written during and after IdeaFestival 2015. I hope you'll enjoy reliving some of it!

TechRepublic was actively involved with the festival this year, contributing a number of articles by a team of writers, including Jason Hiner and Hope Reese, that appeared smartly after presentations. I happen to know that they worked very, very hard. Thank you!

One of our favorites included alternative pathways to higher education. It's no secret that the cost of higher education has soared in the last couple of decades. Affordability is a major problem for many people. Fortunately many smart entrepreneurs are actively working to disrupt the accreditation market.

Here's to their success.

In another session, astronomer and author Bob Berman challenged the audience to broaden its ideas about what can be known about the universe to include personal experience, asking whether empiricism can ever truly describe all that there is to know. The "great unsolved problem of consciousness" produces, for example, the widespread yet utterly singular feeling for each of us of being love, an emotional cosmos, "the sun and the stars," as the Bard said, generated for an audience of one. Not everything is accessible to scientific method because the ledger is infinite.

When it comes to the universe, we run out of symbols.

Find all of the TechRepbulic articles on the other side of this link!

In her wide ranging write up, We Blog the World's Renee Blodgett said that "It’s no secret that Idea Festival is one of my favorite annual 'moments' in the South every year."

Unlike TED which focuses on shorter talks and no Q&A, Idea Festival gives every speaker an hour which includes interaction with the audience, many of which are smart students who are eager to change the world, even before they graduate. With a heavy academic and cultural focus, the speakers are vastly diverse, and insights come from a variety of disciplines, including literature, history, politics, culture, arts, music, science and technology.

We're glad to see Renee make the point about speaker access. Speakers at the IdeaFestival are always encouraged to interact with attendees during the question and answer session following talks, of course, but also to talk with people during the many book signings and during the festival's unique Ideas Night Out dinners, an event where attendees can dine and converse with their favorite presenters. Now two years old, Ideas Night Out is becoming a signature IdeaFestival food event, along with the annual and ever popular "Taste" evening, which this year visited Butchertown’s Copper & Kings Distillery.

Locally, Insider Louisville was on hand to document the festival and contributed a number of articles, covering, for example, Scott Barry Kaufman's talk on the often misguided measures of intelligence. Using his all-too-personal experience as a youth in special ed, Kaufman pointed out that the narrow confines and measures of intelligence miss talents. They certainly missed his. Since that inauspicious beginning, he has become one of the world's leading cognitive researchers on the psychology of creativity and is seeking to develop a "creativity quotient" that measures the human capacity for invention. While not unique in the animal kingdom, this instinct in humans for the unknown is surely the most well developed.

Insider Louisville also contributed a piece on the stirring talk by Stephanie Fried on her sometimes harrowing, sometimes touching experiences as a war correspondent.

Find all the Insider Louisville contributions here.

Louisville Business First covered the exomedicine session, which asked, "what if the next breakthrough in medicine isn't on Earth?" and pointed out that for the first time in human history, we mortals can control for gravity. By temporarily suspending one of the four fundamental physical forces of the universe, all kinds of basic research into disease dynamics may be conducted while on orbit.

And as a matter of fact, it is.

That's thinking outside the atmosphere.

The journal also highlighted the thoughts of festival founder, Kris Kimel. It's well worth your time. And don't forget to look up the the full list of Louisville Business First contributions.

"What," Louisville Mayor Greg Fischer asked 74-time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings, "is bourbon, bitters, sugar and water?" The question stumped the quiz show champion. Find out the answer here.

"Jennifer Lawrence, Johnny Depp, George Clooney...," the Louisville Courier-Journal asked a different sort of question. "Why do Kentuckians make the best celebrities?" The hometown newspaper also contributed an article on the power of serendipitous connection to change - and perhaps to save - a life. The quote at the top of this page is pulled from Sarah Givens' piece for the Courier-Journal. Thank you, Sarah!

As for the IdeaFestival blog, I liked very much Kaufman's talk. And my favorite quote came from the artist Titus Kaphar, who, in response to an audience question about how he could be "so real," paused, and at length said that when he makes work, he never wants "to lie to himself." As directors of our own lives, we prosper, I think, in direct proportion to our honesty, in sure relationship with what's true about each of us.

Every artist knows who she is.

Stay curious.™

Wayne

Free to Choose

Image of Stephen Cave at IdeaFestival 2014, Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Can free will be measured?

In a piece for the popular online magazine Aeon, IdeaFestival 2014 speaker Stephen Cave has suggested that free will, like some measures of intelligence or creativity, might be measured, and offers one convenient proxy for this ability.

It is often thought that science has shown that there is no such thing as free will. If all things are bound by the same impersonal cosmic laws, then (the story goes) our paths are no freer than those of rocks tumbling down a hill. But this is wrong. Science is giving us a very powerful and clear way to understand freedom of the will. We have just been looking for it in the wrong place. Instead of using an electron microscope or a brain-scanner, we should go to the zoo....

Take, for example, the ability to delay gratification. For a hungry cat, this means being able to hold back from pouncing until it is sure the sparrow is within range and looking the other way. Experimenters measure this ability by testing how long an animal can resist a small treat in return for a larger reward after a delay. Chickens, for example, can do this for six seconds. They can choose whether to wait for the juicier titbit or not – but only if that titbit comes very soon. A chimpanzee, on the other hand, can wait for a cool two minutes – or even up to eight minutes in some experiments. I am guessing that you could manage a lot longer.

The chimpanzee therefore has more options....

Cave describes a naturalistic accounting of free will an "ability to generate options for oneself, to choose, and then to pursue one or more of those options." While pointing out that personal circumstance will limit the kinds of options that might be generated, he adds that a capacity for creativity and innovation are important. That connection between free will and its creative exercise interested me not solely because personal autonomy results, but because creativity and innovation are increasingly important to economic success, both personal and communal. On Cave's view, free will is an essential and creative faculty, not dissimilar to a psychometry that Scott Barry Kaufman has proposed that accounts for the transformative skills that enlarge creative possibility.

It's how we as human beings freely exercise our humanity.

Stay curious.™

Wayne