Responding to my End Times theory, Brian commented “Can we show that one reality is better than another? I hope so!” I’ve been struggling on and off with this question of what makes one reality “better” than another for at least six years. In that rant (itself a follow-up to these thoughts on morality), I […]
Category: people
Three realizations
Last week, after getting back from the work trip to DC, I went to a holiday party hosted by Chris Heuer, organizer of BrainJams. I figured I’d stop by, chat with a few people, and head home. Instead, I ended up in this fascinating conversation with Brian of CivicEvolution (thus meeting the challenge from my […]
Responsibility
The topic of the week is responsibility. Individual responsibility. Community responsibility. Societal responsibility. How do we divide up responsibility among all affected parties? Who should be held accountable when something goes wrong? Where does the balance lie between being free to do as one wishes vs. being responsible to others? I don’t have answers in […]
Collaborative selves
A couple days ago, I was trying to explain to my friend Wilfred the ideas of Latour; in particular, the notion of an iterative reality constructed via consultation. As a scientist, he was somewhat distressed by this idea, given that he believes in a Platonic reality, where there is a “real” world that we are […]
Skinner as self-manager
I’m not sure how I came across it, but I saw a link to a paper on B.F. Skinner’s self-management skills. Skinner is well-known as the father of behaviorism and for developing operant conditioning, where people simply respond to the environment around them, thus leading his critics to accuse him of denying the existence of […]
Contextual considerations
I was reading an interesting thread over at Joel on Software yesterday. The original poster wanted to know how to figure out in the interview process whether a given candidate was the type of person who would be gung-ho and eager to work hard for the glory of the company, or the type of person […]
Cultural geography
My friend Jen pointed me at this column by David Brooks, describing the concept of cultural geography, a field he doesn’t really define, but comes across as the study of how and why different communities believe different things. Given my current belief in the idea that everybody has different realities, she thought I would find […]
Conflicting Realities
In my ongoing explication of the “everybody lives in a different reality” theme, today we’re going to discuss the smart-aleck question that everybody always brings up, which goes something like “Well, in my reality, it’s okay for me just to take whatever I want without paying; how come the police come and arrest me if […]
My personal blogosphere
There’s been lots of talk echoing around my personal blogosphere recently about the aftermath of the BlogHer conference. In particular, the initial BlogHer session involved discussion over how men tend to network widely but shallowly and women tend to link narrowly but deeply. Given a link-based economy, the former strategy tends to be rewarded more […]
Irony as pointer
I was listening to the Smashmouth song, Walking on the Sun, on my MP3 player on my way back from BART this afternoon. A former acquaintance of mine once dissed the song to me by pointing out that the initial lyrics were ripping off the Coke ad “I’d like to teach the world to sing […]
