TOK Friends

Carr argued that the ease of online searching and distractions of browsing through the web were possibly limiting his capacity to concentrate. "I'm not thinking the way I used to," he wrote, in part because he is becoming a skimming, browsing reader, rather than a deep and engaged reader. "The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author's words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas.... If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with ‘content,' we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture."

force us to get smarter if we are to survive. "Most people don't realize that this process is already under way," he wrote. "In fact, it's happening all around us, across the full spectrum of how we understand intelligence. It's visible in the hive mind of the Internet, in the powerful tools for simulation and visualization that are jump-starting new scientific disciplines, and in the development of drugs that some people (myself included) have discovered let them study harder, focus better, and stay awake longer with full clarity." He argued that while the proliferation of technology and media can challenge humans' capacity to concentrate there were signs that we are developing "fluid intelligence-the ability to find meaning in confusion and solve new problems, independent of acquired knowledge." He also expressed hope that techies will develop tools to help people find and assess information smartly.

76% of the experts agreed with the statement, "By 2020, people's use of the internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."

Tinderbox “the tool for notes.”

The power of Tinderbox comes from its ability to display those notes in a number of different and helpful ways, and its array of mechanisms for manipulating those notes.

Tinderbox is a toolbox full of tools that let you play with information. DevonThink Pro is a better tool for research, particularly when linked with Devon Agent, OmniOutliner is a better outliner, Scrivener is a better writing tool, and Omnigraffle does a better job of drawing. All of these tools are great, but while they overlap some, they don’t cover everything Tinderbox does.

Obama, is what we call, a TCK—A Third Culture Kid. TCK’s grow up as the children of missionaries, or as military brats, or as the children of businessmen. It means that you grew up during your early developmental years in a culture outside of your parents’ home culture.

TCK’s are usually unable to view the world in a simplistic dualistic way. On the contrary, they are usually over-achievers, get advanced degrees, and are infinitely curious about the world. They can accentuate different facets of their personality and experiences based on who they are talking to—and it’s not fake.

Obama is the classic TCK. This is why he represents the new America so well—he is post-racial, globalized, and a great example of America’s own Third Cultural nature.

Is there any doubt that online resources will get better and cheaper as the years go by? Kids don't shlep to the library to use an out of date encyclopedia to do a report on FDR. You might want them to, but they won't unless coerced. They need a librarian more than ever (to figure out creative ways to find and use data). They need a library not at all.

Post-Gutenberg, books are finally abundant, hardly scarce, hardly expensive, hardly worth warehousing. Post-Gutenberg, the scarce resource is knowledge and insight, not access to data.

The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian who understands the Mesh, a librarian who can bring domain knowledge and people knowledge and access to information to bear.

you could just as easily argue that TCKs will never know some really important things - can never know them - precisely because they've never had the experience of growing up in one culture which they knew (however erroneously) to be the way the world is. 

That isn't simply an indictment of the kind of smug and self-important cosmopolitanism on display in your reader's letter.  Nor is it simply a defense of the kind of organic experiential knowledge that is only possible when one is rooted to a particular place and time.  At bottom, it is a profound statement about the limits of human knowledge itself. 

Travel the world and try to transcend your culture all you want, but you won't ever succeed.  Not really.  As Alasdair Macintyre put it, we are never more (and sometimes less) than the co-authors of our own narratives.  There will always be a part of us that it is the product of the time and place and family in which we first came of age, perhaps especially when we are reacting to that experience and trying to "transcend" it.  And even if by some miracle we actually succeeded in that project, then whatever else we may have gained, we will also have lost the ability to be truly a part of any culture from the inside. 

innovation often comes at a price. And sometimes I wonder if the price is a piece of ourselves.

Basically, we are outsourcing our brains to the cloud. The upside is that this frees a lot of gray matter for important pursuits like FarmVille and “Real Housewives.” But my inner worrywart wonders whether the new technologies overtaking us may be eroding characteristics that are essentially human: our ability to reflect, our pursuit of meaning, genuine empathy, a sense of community connected by something deeper than snark or political affinity.

Twitter is not just an ambient presence. It demands attention and response. It is the enemy of contemplation.

Philosophers often refer to this as the principle of economy, while scientists tend to call it parsimony. Skeptics invoke it every time they wish to dismiss out of hand claims of unusual phenomena

The obvious question to ask about Ockham’s razor is: why? On what basis are we justified to think that, as a matter of general practice, the simplest hypothesis is the most likely one to be true? Setting aside the surprisingly difficult task of operationally defining “simpler” in the context of scientific hypotheses (it can be done, but only in certain domains, and it ain’t straightforward), there doesn’t seem to be any particular logical or metaphysical reason to believe that the universe is a simple as it could be.

Pierre Duhem suggested in 1908 that, as Sober puts it: “it is wrong to think that hypothesis H makes predictions about observation O; it is the conjunction of H&A [where A is a set of auxiliary hypotheses] that issues in testable consequences.”

"Religion is man's way of accepting life as an inevitable defeat.

One can accept life, and accept it, at the same time, as a defeat only if one accepts that there is a sense beyond that which is inherent in human history - if, in other words, one accepts the order of the sacred.

A hypothetical world from which the sacred had been swept away would admit of only two possibilities: vain fantasy that recognizes itself as such, or immediate satisfaction which exhausts itself.

"Faith is not a theory that one can take up or lay aside. It is something very concrete: It is the criterion that decides our lifestyle. In an age in which hostility and greed have become superpowers, an age in which we witness the abuse of religion to the point of culminating in hatred, neutral rationality on its own is unable to protect us."

This attack on reason as a neutral way of understanding the world is what makes Benedict an ally of the fundamentalisms we see colliding and resurging around us. As humans, we only have reason to temper the passions and the demands of religion.

Best-selling atheist Sam Harris and pro-religion blogger Andrew Sullivan debate God, faith, and fundamentalism.

Is Religion 'Built Upon Lies'?

The “I believe” state of mind is quite far from being neutrally ready to adjust its opinions in the light of further evidence. Far better to instead say “I feel,” which directly warns listeners of the speaker’s attachment to an opinion.

In my experience “I believe X” suggests that the speaker has chosen to affiliate with X, feeling loyal to it and making it part of his or her identity. The speaker is unlikely to offer much evidence for X, or to respond to criticism of X, and such criticism will likely be seen as a personal attack.

Just a few well-placed words can change the way we think about serious issues

Stanford University demonstrated how influential metaphors can be through a series of five experiments designed to tease apart the "why" and "when" of a metaphor's power.

very few of the participants realized how affected they were by the differing crime metaphors.

our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to our fantasy ideal of an erotic relationship, in which the beloved object asks for nothing and gives everything, instantly, and makes us feel all powerful, and doesn’t throw terrible scenes when it’s replaced by an even sexier object and is consigned to a drawer.

the ultimate goal of technology, the telos of techne, is to replace a natural world that’s indifferent to our wishes — a world of hurricanes and hardships and breakable hearts, a world of resistance — with a world so responsive to our wishes as to be, effectively, a mere extension of the self.

the world of techno-consumerism is therefore troubled by real love, and that it has no choice but to trouble love in turn.

They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface.

To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors.

There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.

This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role

you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. This is the litany of expressive individualism, which is still the dominant note in American culture.

We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions. It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them. If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

After the publication of Envisioning Information, Tufte decided, he told me, “to be indifferent to culture or history or time.” He became increasingly consumed with what he calls “forever knowledge,” or the idea that design is meant to guide fundamental cognitive tasks and therefore is rooted in principles that apply regardless of the material being displayed and the technology used to produce it. As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too.

As Tufte sees it, graphic design has become a tragic field, a rich and storied craft knowledge that has been taken out of the realm of “nonfiction,” as he calls it, and into that of “fiction,” or marketing and propaganda. He told me several times of his contempt for “commercial art,” the graphic design that is “part of a fashion and a style and will be different someday.” Most designers, he said, want to do something new each time. “But I’m interested in the solved problem,” he said. “I’m interested in high art and real science.”

My newfound friends came courtesy of a Chicago start-up business called Grubwithus, an online service with the seemingly modest aim of bringing strangers together to have a meal. The concept is simple enough: People browse through a list of dinners in their cities and buy tickets, usually for around $25. Before the event, they can share a few online tidbits about themselves with their dining partners

It is using contemporary techniques to foster a kind of social networking that predates the dawn of services like Facebook and Twitter: old-fashioned conversation among casual acquaintances, without keyboards and screens.

a new generation of services that rely on the ubiquity of social networking to prompt contact that the Web calls IRL, or “in real life,” sometimes known as the real world.

what it meant to have good character

Many Americans today assume that people are born with a good Inner Self but get corrupted by politics. American voters are always looking for the Innocent Outsider who can come in and bring sweeping change. Trollope admired Prudent Insiders, not Innocent Outsiders. His most admirable characters have been educated by long experience. They have grown mature by exercising responsibility. They have been ennobled by custom and civilization.

Trollope’s ideal leaders are not glamorous celebrities of the sort we have come to long for since J.F.K. They are more like seamen or carpenters. They are judged by their professional craftsmanship. They are thin-skinned about any moral transgression they might commit and rigorously honest when judging the

We are in a special moment that will not last beyond the end of this century: Paper books are plentiful. They are cheap and everywhere, from airports to drug stores to libraries to bookstores to the shelves of millions of homes. There has never been a better time to be a lover of paper books. But very rapidly the production of paper books will essentially cease, and the collections in homes will dwindle, and even local libraries will not be supported to house books -- particularly popular titles. Rare books will collect in a few rare book libraries, and for the most part common paper books archives will become uncommon. It seems hard to believe now, but within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion.