Humanity

I saw this bouncing around Facebook, and I would like to endorse the underlying philosophy:

For those of you still using text-based browsers (hey, remember Lynx?), here we have Buckminster Fuller making a point about work and responsibility in a high-tech society. Namely: maybe people don’t have to work. Maybe, if machines become really good at producing the basic necessities of life, rather than bemoaning a loss of jobs we should celebrate our liberation from the toil of labor.

As a practical matter, I recognize that this might be hopelessly utopian. It amounts to saying that we should have fairly high taxes, and redistribute most of the money as a minimal income to every person. Nothing wrong with working and earning additional money, but everyone would get their personal share no matter what, and in principle that might be enough to live on. Maybe John Rawls was pointing toward something like that, but the social will is nowhere near making it happen. I can even imagine a utilitarian argument against it, based on the supposition that letting people learn and loaf and enjoy themselves rather than working for a living would lead to less innovation and competition, which in turn would make the world a less enjoyable place. I’m not sure if that’s right, but it’s at least non-obvious that work should be gradually phased out.

But nevertheless the spirit is admirable, and that’s what I want to endorse. There’s nothing morally wrong with the idea that people should spend their time in non-productive pursuits rather than working to earn extra income. It’s not “socialism,” since we’re not changing the free market or the ownership of the means of production. It would just be nice to live in a world where people did challenging things because they wanted to, not because they were forced to in order to survive. Maybe someday.

The tragedy in Boston is one of those things about which there’s not much to really say, at least at this point, although a great deal actually will be said, as people work through their shock and outrage. I lived in the Boston area for eight years, and have many friends still there; someone I know crossed the finish line this year five minutes before the explosions went off. That’s my old neighborhood — the apartment I had in my postdoc days was just a couple of blocks away from Copley Square. One of the many wonderfully walkable and public spaces in Boston.

Admittedly, the Marathon and Patriot’s Day were mostly an excuse for me to stay home and get some work done; it was just too difficult to get across Boylston Street to work my way to MIT, and the subway was bound to be jam-packed. (In subsequent years I would find myself living right on the pathways of the Chicago Marathon and the LA Marathon; not sure what it is about my sense of real estate that keeps drawing me to marathon routes.) But I always admired the runners themselves, even as the compulsion that drew them on was completely alien to me.

A marathon is a wonderfully arbitrary goal, based fancifully on the legendary run of Pheidippides. Sure, there is competition at the top ranks, but the vast majority of participants in an event like Boston are only competing against themselves. Trying to prove that they have the discipline to do something difficult and pure.

It’s a perfect target, really, for the kind of madness and anger that must boil inside someone who wants to hurt people and disrupt their lives. Irrational hatred lashing out at something communal and uplifting.

In the first moments after the news hit, I was hoping desperately that it would turn out to be a real accident, a gas main or some such thing. Of course the timing and location made that implausible. With the lack of information we currently have, there’s little point in speculating about who could have done something this terrible, but it was clearly targeted to cause a great deal of pain. If the bombers have any programmatic goal more specific than merely angering people, they will undoubtedly fail.

We won’t ever be completely rid of things like this, at least not in the foreseeable future. Human life is large and messy and risky and unpredictable, and the biggest mistake we could make would be to overreact and curtail our freedom to have fun and share public events in the name of attaining perfect security. As horrible as this is, it was enormously heartening to see people rushing to help out, from first responders to ordinary people offering to lend a hand. That will also always be true; there are more good deeds in the world than bad. Life will go on, and we will continue to run and celebrate and love and discover the secrets of the universe. That’s what we do.

Has died at age 82. Perhaps to honor his memory we can resolve as a society to continue to do inspiring things.

Steve Hsu points us to an NYT op-ed by Walter Isaacson, in which he ponders the crucial question, “Was Steve Jobs smart?” Isaacson has written biographies of both Jobs and Albert Einstein, so he should know from smart.

One might think that the answer is an obvious “yes,” and Isaacson admits this. But then he tells this anecdote:

But I remember having dinner with him a few months ago around his kitchen table, as he did almost every evening with his wife and kids. Someone brought up one of those brainteasers involving a monkey’s having to carry a load of bananas across a desert, with a set of restrictions about how far and how many he could carry at one time, and you were supposed to figure out how long it would take. Mr. Jobs tossed out a few intuitive guesses but showed no interest in grappling with the problem rigorously.

And what are we to conclude from this?

So was Mr. Jobs smart? Not conventionally.

Arrrgh. I’m not sure what kind of conventionality is being invoked, but I don’t want any part of it.

We all know about Steve Jobs’s accomplishments. Built a major multinational corporation, created (or at least nurtured) several different devices that noticeably changed our everyday lives, became an icon for user-friendly and design-savvy technology. And he didn’t do it all just by getting lucky, or even by simple hard work. …

Many Kinds of Smart (A Continuing Series)Read More »

Jen McCreight blogs about giving a talk at a meeting of Mensa, the “international high-IQ society.” Worth reading in its own right, but I was struck by one anecdote in particular: the color-coded stickers that indicated huggability.

• Green = Hug me!
• Yellow = Ask me first
• Red = Don’t touch me

You read this correctly. A group of self-selected high-IQ people feels the need to have stickers on their name tags to let strangers know whether it’s okay to come up and hug them. As Jen put it: “I originally didn’t put any stickers on because I had no idea what they meant, but after being hugged out of nowhere by a complete stranger, my badge quickly looked like this:”

I don’t think the stickers are a bad idea; if they help people figure out appropriate ways to behave, it’s all good. But I can’t help but think that there are many other groups of people who would manage to negotiate this particular social minefield without the help of any stickers at all. There are many different ways to be “intelligent.”