Learning to Love Wisely

Rather, learning to love ignorance wisely.  Here are some thoughts that I found in Brain Pickings for November 25, 2012.  They stimulated my mind.

The cult of expertise – whose currency are static answers – obscures the very capacity for cultivating a thirst for ignorance:

There are a lot of facts to be known in order to be a professional anything – lawyer, doctor, engineer, accountant, teacher. But with science there is one important difference. The facts serve mainly to access the ignorance… Scientists don't concentrate on what they know, which is considerable but minuscule, but rather on what they don't know…. Science traffics in ignorance, cultivates it, and is driven by it. Mucking about in the unknown is an adventure; doing it for a living is something most scientists consider a privilege.

[…]

Working scientists don't get bogged down in the factual swamp because they don't care all that much for facts. It's not that they discount or ignore them, but rather that they don't see them as an end in themselves. They don't stop at the facts; they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out. Facts are selected, by a process that is a kind of controlled neglect, for the questions they create, for the ignorance they point to.

What emerges is an elegant definition of science:

Real science is a revision in progress, always. It proceeds in fits and starts of ignorance.

I believe th4se come from Stuart Firestein's book, Ignorance: How it Drives Science.   Let's think about this a moment.

First, note that Persuasive, intentional ignorance is rampant.  Politicians debunk global warming with only opinionated pseudo-science to fuel their rhetoric.  Conservatives of various stripes hate birth control without any thought of the impact unwanted and unplanned pregnancies have not only on the lives of the parents but on the world at large.  White supremacists hate blacks, Jews, Latinos and people of Asian descent.  Loving this kind of ignorance is unwise, to say the least. 

But loving what we do not know for the sake of searching out new knowledge, new possibilities, new opportunities could be wise.  I think this is a wise way to love ignorance, and true scientists make great lovers.  (Many with a scientific education are hacks, and have no love of ignorance at all.)

What do you think?  Leave a comment and share with the rest of us.

More Essential Skills in Windows 8

I didn't invent the wheel, and this link taught me what I needed to know:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2013608/five-important-windows-8-keyboard-shortcuts.html

LOCATE the Windows Key -- it's to the left of the space bar, and then over one left of the ALT key.  You will need it.

Then try the five shortcuts given in the PC World article.  And don't forget Alt + F4 to close down the computer or reboot it!  You can also right-click the lower left corner to get to a "Close" screen.

Leave your comment -- we'd all like to learn from you. 

Order, Please. Not

In my experience, most people do not like being told what to do. 

"Don't tell me. . .

• what to say
• what to do
• where to go
• when to do something
• I'll be punished if I don't . . . 
• who to vote for
• when to go to bed

and so forth. 

Yet, when all is said and done, most people want to be told what to think, what to say and how to say it, and how to vote. Most of us simply want to be told in a subtle way.

TV shows tell us how to dress, what phones to buy, how to relate to others, what to think, how to say snarky things, and what to avoid.  If it is couched in either comedy or drama, our eyes glaze over and we engage the "I submit" gear more often than not.

I think this offers another powerful reason to protect freedom of speech, to protect real diversity, and to protect as many individual freedoms as possible.  One TV station, one set of writers, one kind of music subtly telling us what to do and say and how to be would lead to even worse conformity than we have today.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know. 

We live "Here"

One of my "over the Internet, no, we have never met" mentors is Holly Lisle.  In her weekly email she wrote these words:
"We humans do not live in the world.  We live in whatever three square feet of space we're occupying at the moment, and in order to care about the things going on in the larger world, first the world has to reach into our three square feet of space and touch us."  … Holly Lisle, from Holly's Tip 9/14/2012

Of course, I cannot imagine exactly what she meant, so I do what we all do:  I am sharing what I think she means, or rather, what I her input to mean for me.

For most of us, our world may be too big.  By tweeting, texting, friending on Facebook, looking only at the big picture, reading of large, national disasters and so forth we actually insulate ourselves from life.  Nothing REAL actually touches us.

I have a person sort of in my life who is so busy building an electronic following that she fails miserably at her here and now relationships. She blocks uncomfortable, fragile, less-than-perfect people out of her consciousness in favor of artificial bytes of fake friends. 

Many of us do the same.  We fail to let the reality of our older neighbor who slows us down touch us.  We forget that babies have messy diapers and a temper to go along with them.  We ignore the neighbors who don't do things the way we like them done, and who fail to do their yard work according to our schedules.  These folks don't really exist for us.  Super-Barbie and Keen Ken in our imaginations take up all our time, and no matter how miserable we are we yearn for the company of the fakes we think of as the beautiful people. 

I think I may be a bit harsh when I write that, and think the above.  I think reality is messy, harsh at times, and full of undiscovered potential to help us get free of the wire ties that keep us in the plastic packaging of the toy store and start living in our "three square feet of space" and allow ourselves to be touched, even when the touch disturbs and even hurts us.

What do you think?  Leave a comment and let us know. 

Censorship

A person in my life censors.  She censors me, she censors others, she censors her children.  They have to run to her often to be sure they aren't saying, or about to say, anything on the proscribed list.  I find it awful.  Probably, God-awful!

Granted, too much running off at the mouth without any thought is a waste of good air and eardrum vibration, but it seems much better than censorship.  Topics that are 'off limits' are usually the ones that would be the most useful to consider.  Add to that, censorship generally doesn't work.

Try this:  Set your timer, maybe on the kitchen stove, or on your iPad, for 5 minutes.  Now, Do NOT think about the color red for the next five minutes.  Concentrate.  DO NOT THINK ABOUT THE COLOR RED!

Don't come back to this until your time has gone off after 5 minutes. 

Were you able to NOT THINK about the color RED for five minutes? 

Hence the first problem of censorship:  the harder you censor the more people want to, or must, think about what is being censored .  Oh, you can do the Chinese or Iranian thing and punish people horribly for violating censorship laws -- but once people know what is going on, their curiosity is piqued as well and more people want to know about what is being censored.  It may take awhile, but it happens.

One kind of censorship works, at least for awhile.  A person come to believe that she or he is not ready for certain kinds of reading, viewing or exploring.  She or he self-censors.  She or he gives the self time to grow and learn and ripen before exploring that particular subject.  I know people who self-censor in a particular area for their entire lives.  "Not for me," they say, and that's the end of it. 

What do you think about censorship?  What do you think about self-censorship?  Leave a comment and let us know.