IdeaFestival

"I, Gamer"

In a brief post at Terra Nova, Ren Reynolds wonders what the societal impact will be of a generation of game players that self-identify as "gamers." Without providing any answers - are there any now? - I just thought it was an interesting question, as was the title of his blog post.

Wayne

Measuring innovation takes faith-based failure

Freakonomics recently asked several individuals to provide their take on on innovation - as in, how can a company measure innovation? On Friday, it published a number of their responses.

I was intrigued by one suggestion in particular.

Using the example of the digital camera, one contributor suggested that since truly innovative products are often worse at a launch than competing products, perhaps the key metric is failure. The key then is to fail fast, recognize and embrace risk taking - to fail forward, some failures align with the company vision and some do not - and to identify where new ideas originate. Are they coming from all levels of the organization?

Since truly innovative outcomes aren't generally known until well after the fact, that made some sense. But succeeding at failure during the interim takes another key attribute, faith.

Wayne

Podcast: Why fashion matters

IF continues to release great audio from the 2007 IdeaFestival.

The very latest podcast features New Zealand fashion designer Karen Walker discussing her creative process, design style and the meaning of fashion. Podcasts may be obtained directly via RSS or from iTunes.

Wayne

Missed opportunities: venture capitalist lists "anti-portfolio"

How many successful companies were initially turned away by venture capitalists who at the time couldn't quite see the business case? Displaying good humor about its mistakes, Bessemer Venture Partners lists its "anti-portfolio," companies like Apple and Google on which it took a pass.   

Hat tip: Freakonomics blog

Wayne

Curry Stone global Design Prize makes IdeaFestival home

The Curry Stone Foundation, which funds activities to support healthy communities and public health, has announced the establishment of the Curry Stone Design Prize for “…exceptional emerging designers with extraordinary design projects or ideas that contribute positively to living circumstances for broad sections of global humanity.... Public health is best achieved when all people have access to shelter, health care, clean air, clean water, clean food, education and live in a time of peace," according to a news release accompanying news of the financial gift to the University of Kentucky.

This $100,000 design prize will be presented annually at the IdeaFestival beginning this year.

Developed in partnership with the University of Kentucky, College of Design, the prize is being supported through the foundation established by UK alumnus Clifford Curry and his wife H. Delight Stone of Oregon. 

IF is excited about the establishment of the Curry Stone Prize and the opportunity it presents to greatly expand the design content of the festival, which has hosted such design luminaries as Cameron Sinclair and Adriaan Gueze. More here.

Kris

Be thankful, be happy

Sure there seems to be a fuzzy correlation between gratitude and a generally happy outlook on life. Many of you may know someone like that. Or conversely, perhaps you're acquainted with a hard-headed "realist" who has no time for such huff-puffery.

Still, can the practice of gratitude actually lead to happiness? Dave Munger reports.

Wayne

I want to be foolish like this

Writing about the death of MIT computer science professor, Joseph Weizenbaum, Harvard crank Nicholas Carr and Discover columnist Jaron Lanier use Eliza's tale to assay against errors of the computational kind.

Let me explain.

In the 1960's Weizenbaum created a program called Eliza that would rephrase statements as questions and pose them to test subjects in what became an infamous test of computer-human interaction. Some individuals came to believe that the computer program was a human and lessons drawn from the episodes found their way into Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, which Carr references in his post, Eliza's World:

Perhaps we are beginning to understand that the abstract systems — the games computer people can generate in their infinite freedom from the constraints that delimit the dreams of workers in the real world — may fail catastrophically when their rules are applied in earnest. We must also learn that the same danger is inherent in other magical systems that are equally detached from authentic human experience, and particularly in those sciences that insist they can capture the whole man in their abstract skeletal frameworks [emphasis supplied].

It's easy now to poke fun at the subjects who came to believe that Eliza was human. But the larger lesson that I take - and the one suggested by Carr - is that reason and logic are only part of the human experience.

That is particularly true when it comes to thinking because it is belief - and theatrically, the suspension of disbelief - that makes us human. Belief combined with experience holds out possible worlds for our examination; it is on the superstructure of belief that we can absorb wisdom, practice empathy, strive for justice and extend mercy where none may be merited.

As cheaply amusing as it might be in hindsight, what Eliza demonstrated was not that we can foolishly ascribe feelings to objects, but that it is the suspension of the facts that makes foolishness - as well as soul-stirring grace - possible. The rules be damned.

An interactive Web-based version of Eliza is here.

Wayne

Wild Cards and Black Swans: How to get the future right and the past wrong

The Long Now Foundation held a couple of public lectures recently on how we get the future right and the past wrong.

LIFT blogger and digital archaeologist Nicolas Nova points out Paul Saffo's January Long Now presentation on being a better futurist.

What makes forecasting hard, according to Saffo, isn't predicting the outcome, but accurately mapping the edges of what might happen. Since change is linear - we can't take one event and extrapolate into the future - what might happen must sometimes be imagined. Saffo:

Science fiction is brilliant at this, and often predictive, because it plants idea bombs in teenagers which they make real 15 years later.

The Long Now Foundation links to a helpful Harvard Business Review piece authored by Saffo that describes "six rules for effective forecasting." An executive summary of that article is here.

Financial analyst Nassim Taleb, who will be at the IdeaFestival in September, followed Saffo in February and discussed "retrocasting" - essentially, how we get the future wrong by misjudging the past. "Black Swans", those history making events that sail into the present, Taleb explained, are often "wrongly retro-predicted. We pretend we know why the big event happened, and so entrench our inability to deal with the next world-changing improbable event." I liked this thought:

We compute probability from the success of the survivors instead of paying attention to what didn't happen, but might have.

There are two places whence random things occur, according to Taleb. They are "Mediocristan," which is a realm of random events dominated by the average, and "Extremistan," where spectacular successes and the long tail dominate. Taleb:

You can say there will be a few monsters and lots of midgets and the world will be changed by the monsters, and that’s all you can say.

According to the blog entry for the event, Benoit Mandelbrot convinced Taleb that energy powers Mediocristan, while the main dynamic of Extremistan involves the uncertainty of information. Anything social, anything that involves the brilliance and bane of language, anything you might read on IFblog, hails from Extremistan.

Audio, video and blog entries from the Saffo and Taleb Long Now seminars may be found here.

Thanks Nicolas for the pointer!

Wayne

Nassim Taleb, Paul Saffo

Dith Pran

Dith Pran the Cambodian-born journalist whose life under the Khmer Rouge-led Cambodian revolution in the 1970's became the subject of the award-winning film "The Killing Fields," has died in New Jersey.

I had the honor to meet and talk with Dith when he was a presenter at the 2004 IdeaFestival. He was an amazing individual. His inspiring story of survival and courage was clearly one of the most moving and meaningful talks in the history of the Festival. His relentless search for the truth under the most horrendous circumstances was - and I don't use this word often anymore - heroic. My life is richer for having briefly known him.

Kris

"Humanitarian Technology Review"

Bruno Giussani has posted an article about a new journal with an intriguing title: The Humanitarian Technology Review. A project of InSTEDD, the journalist effort is based on the idea that many of the worst results from disease and disaster can be traced to an inadequate understanding of events between specialties.

Bruno cites the early reporting of West Nile Virus among large mammals in veterinary journals; that information might have helpful to medical doctors had the information been made available to them. He also lists this impressive list of fields the journal will cover:

early disease detection, predictive modeling and simulation, mobile communications, transportation, water and sanitation, green tech, climate change impacts, machine translation, vaccines, crisis management, food security, resilience and recovery, energy, chronic disease, microbiology, just to mention a few.

The goal of InSTEDD, according to Bruno, is to provide "the earliest possible warning of all bad things."

Wayne