Lone Gunman

In a review of Stephen Hall’s Wis­dom, Bookslut’s Jessa Crispin asks ‘Can we under­stand wis­dom?’ and looks at the evi­dence for and against.

Wis­dom is not the same as knowl­edge, and so it seems odd it has attracted the atten­tion of sci­ence. There is such a thing as “wis­dom stud­ies” now, and in his book Hall talks to researchers and neu­ro­sci­en­tists in a search for the lat­est infor­ma­tion about wis­dom. Sci­en­tists treat wis­dom the way they treat any­thing else. They break it down into its small­est com­po­nents to iden­tify and test, and they attempt to fig­ure out how it works, how to obtain it, and what it is. [Hall says:]

To be wise is not to know par­tic­u­lar facts but to know with­out exces­sive con­fi­dence or exces­sive cau­tious­ness. Wis­dom is thus not a belief, a value, a set of facts, a cor­pus of knowl­edge or infor­ma­tion in some spe­cial­ized area, or a set of spe­cial abil­i­ties or skills. Wis­dom is an atti­tude taken by per­sons toward the beliefs, val­ues, knowl­edge, infor­ma­tion, abil­i­ties, and skills that are held, a ten­dency to doubt that these are nec­es­sar­ily true or valid and to doubt that they are an exhaus­tive set of those things that could be known.

Accord­ing to Hall and the researchers he has spo­ken to these are the eight “attrib­utes of wisdom”:

• Emo­tional Regulation
• Know­ing What’s Important
• Moral Rea­son­ing
• Com­pas­sion
• Humil­ity
• Altru­ism
• Patience
• Deal­ing with Uncertainty

via Intel­li­gent Life

In the com­mence­ment speech he deliv­ered to the grad­u­ates of Stanford’s School of Med­i­cine ear­lier this year, Atul Gawande elo­quently (as ever) exam­ined the state of mod­ern med­i­cine (in the U.S. specif­i­cally, the world gen­er­ally), the prob­lem with spe­cial­ism, and the prob­lem of spe­cial­ists try­ing to fit into a sys­tem not nec­es­sar­ily designed for it.

I par­tic­u­larly like Gawande’s anal­ogy on the expe­ri­ence of a sci­en­tific edu­ca­tion:

The expe­ri­ence of a med­ical and sci­en­tific edu­ca­tion is trans­for­ma­tional. It is like mov­ing to a new coun­try. At first, you don’t know the lan­guage, let alone the cus­toms and con­cepts. But then, almost imper­cep­ti­bly, that changes. Half the words you now rou­tinely use you did not know existed when you started: words like arterial-blood gas, naso­gas­tric tube, microar­ray, logis­tic regres­sion, NMDA recep­tor, vel­lu­vial matrix.

O.K., I made that last one up. But the vel­lu­vial matrix sounds like some­thing you should know about, doesn’t it? And that’s the prob­lem. I will let you in on a lit­tle secret. You never stop won­der­ing if there is a vel­lu­vial matrix you should know about.

via Intel­li­gent Life

In this brief pro­file of the Czech-Canadian aca­d­e­mic Vaclav Smil–dubbed as Bill Gates’ tutor–we are treated to his thoughts on “the main things we should be wor­ry­ing about (or not)” from his lat­est book and his opin­ion on sci­ence edu­ca­tion and the mat­u­ra­tion time­line of new tech­nolo­gies:

[Vaclav Smil] is (almost) resigned to the fact that our great debates about energy and the envi­ron­ment are largely point­less, because they are hugely dis­torted by pol­i­tics and sadly unin­formed by basic facts. We are a cul­ture of sci­en­tific ignoramuses. […]

“We are struc­turally cooked,” he recently explained. “Every new tech­nol­ogy takes 40 to 50 years before it cap­tures the bulk of the mar­ket. […] That’s why “we’re going to be a fossil-fuel soci­ety for decades to come.” […]

As some­one who was rig­or­ously schooled in all the sci­ences, he regrets people’s wide­spread igno­rance of sci­ence, tech­nol­ogy and basic eco­nom­ics. As he told energy writer Robert Bryce, “With­out any phys­i­cal, chem­i­cal, and bio­log­i­cal fun­da­men­tals, and with equally poor under­stand­ing of basic eco­nomic forces, it is no won­der that peo­ple will believe anything.”

Truth is, the great value in most MBA and JD pro­grams can be boiled down to 5 to 10 talks, pre­sen­ta­tions, classes and con­ver­sa­tions that changed the way you expe­ri­enced the world.

Fol­low­ing up on this com­ment, Jonathan Fields presents The Seven Keynote MBA: seven keynote speeches, from a diverse group of peo­ple, that together Fields believes will pro­vide you as much real-world advice as an MBA.

The talks (videos, length in parentheses):

1. Guy Kawasaki, TiECon 2006: The Art of the Start (39:46)
2. Mal­colm Glad­well, TED 2004: What We Can Learn From Spaghetti Sauce (18:16)
3. Gary Vayn­er­chuck, Web 2.0 Expo NY: Build­ing Per­sonal Brand Within the Social Media Land­scape (15:27)
4. Annie Leonard: The Story of Stuff (21:16)
5. Jimmy Val­vano, 1993 ESPY Awards: Arthur Ashe Courage and Human­i­tar­ian Award accep­tance speech (9:59) (tran­script)
6. Seth Godin, TED 2009: The Tribes We Lead (17:24)
7. Tony Hsieh, Web 2.0 Sum­mit 08: Build­ing a Brand that Mat­ters (16:46)

via @evbogue

Designer Frank Chimero presents his ‘Ideas’: his man­i­festo of sorts prin­ci­ples on cre­ativ­ity, moti­va­tion and inno­va­tion. Chimero briefly cov­ers seven top­ics, entitled:

• Why is Greater Than How
• Not More. Instead, Better.
• Sur­prise + Clar­ity = Delight
• Sin­cire, Authen­tic & Honest
• No Sil­ver Bul­lets, No Secrets
• Qual­ity + Sin­cer­ity = Enthusiasm
• Every­thing is Some­thing or Other

I’m par­tic­u­larly fond of the final two top­ics and this, from Why is Greater Than How:

This com­plex world has made us over-emphasize How-based think­ing and edu­ca­tion. Once the tools are under­stood, under­stand­ing why to do cer­tain things becomes more valu­able than how to do them. How is recipes, and learn­ing a craft is more than fol­low­ing instructions.

How is impor­tant for new prac­ti­tion­ers focused on avoid­ing mis­takes. Why is for those who wish to push, are not risk-averse and seek to improve. How is coulda, Why is shoulda. How is fin­ish­ing tasks, Why is ful­fill­ing objec­tives. How usu­ally results in more. Why usu­ally results in better.

via Link Banana