The Uphill Battle of Creativity

Creative problem solving is needed now more than ever because the world is facing challenges bigger and more daunting that ever before: big, nasty, complicated problems like climate change, ecological collapse, social fragility from globalization, the disruptive effects of technology, and so on. But if you ask someone what we – humanity – should do about these challenges, more often than not, you’ll get some vaguely-optimistic variant of this: “Someone will think of something.”

In a way, it’s a valid response. After all, we have overcome some major hurdles in the past. We’re still here.

But if “someone will think of something” is our strategy, it seems only prudent that we should support the someones and encourage the thinking of creative somethings. Unfortunately, we do neither – and it starts in the schools.

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Book Review: Against Empathy by Paul Bloom

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“Empathy” has become a cultural buzzword. After all, people don’t have enough of it, and the world would be a better place if everyone could just develop a stronger sense of empathy with those around them. At least, that’s what people are saying:

The biggest deficit that we have in our society and in the world right now is an empathy deficit. –Barack Obama

The scariest aspect of bullying is the total lack of empathy. –Emily Bazelton

Behind every progressive policy lies a single moral value: empathy… –George Lakoff

For many, “more empathy” is the answer to a wide range of societal issues. But is it? Paul Bloom, psychology professor at Yale University, sets up his book – Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – provocatively enough:

I am against empathy, and one of the goals of this book is to persuade you to be against empathy too.

Let’s see what he has to say…

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Book Review: The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov

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Often enough it’s the book itself that draws us in, but sometimes it’s the author.

Isaac Asimov was an intellectual force of nature, a truly rare event. He was extraordinarily prolific, pumping out over 500 fiction and nonfiction books on a huge range of topics. As someone who is familiar with just how much effort it takes to put together a decent book-length manuscript, I am truly in awe. It’s also mind-boggling to think that this single man wrote more books than many people read in a lifetime. And he wasn’t putting out drivel either – he was widely considered one of or perhaps the best science fiction writer of his day, and his Foundation series earned him the prestigious Hugo Award for “Best All-Time Series” – beating, among others, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien!Read More »

Flat-Earth theory, climate change, and “the relativity of wrong”

Published in 1989 by the legendarily prolific Isaac Asimov, the essay “The Relativity of Wrong” makes a couple of punchy points about the progress of scientific understanding through time.

Throughout the essay, he convincingly argues that just because two ideas are both wrong, they are not necessarily equally wrong.

The basic trouble, you see, is that people think that “right” and “wrong” are absolute; that everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong. However, I don’t think that’s so. It seems to me that right and wrong are fuzzy concepts…

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No, we don’t see by shooting light from our eyes (but sometimes that’s not too far off)

One day I was driving alone through West Virginia on a nearly empty highway, enjoying the scenery of rolling hills and autumn leaves, when I began to notice something about my vision that I had never experienced before: sparkles. These kaleidoscopic and shimmering sparkles started at the center of my vision, and over the course of the next hour or so, became a ring that slowly expanded outward until my vision was normal again. Then I got a headache.

Pretty similar example of what I experienced. (By Mikael Haggstrom)

It wasn’t until years later that I finally learned what was going on. Read More »