2010 March - The Emergent Fool

Symbolic Representation is the Key to Ma...

Posted by plektix in Evolution on 03 28th, 2010 | View Comments

I’m briefly coming up from the sea of thesis preparation (two weeks until defense!) to share this truly remarkable quote I just read: Consider the following: in the evolutionary course there have been a few great junctures, times of major evolutionary advance. Their hallmark is the emergence of vast,...

Project Runway...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Autocatalysis, Crowdsourcing, Investing, Social Capital on 03 27th, 2010 | View Comments

I meet a lot of social entrepreneurs who are just starting out and have the following dilemma. They are full of energy and creativity, but they don’t have a single tangible project or venture yet that they feel they can commit to. What they need is the time and freedom to explore the possibilities,...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Economics, Education, Epidemiology, Happiness, Health, Interventions, Invisible Etiology, Nutrition, Obesity, TED on 03 26th, 2010 | View Comments

Remember Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize Wish? Well tonight is the prime time season premiere of his Food Revolution show on ABC. The Huffington Post called Undercover Boss the most subversive show in America, and I can’t disagree. But in terms of importance to the future of America (and by...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Adjacent Possible, Management, Social Capital, Social Entrepreneurship on 03 12th, 2010 | View Comments

Are you struggling to pay for your food/home/whatever, or do you know someone who is? If you can convince someone you are a superstar, there’s a way out. But if you are having trouble making that case, then maybe you’d consider becoming a Social Capital Uncontractor. What’s that, you...

The Innovation Summit...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Education on 03 12th, 2010 | View Comments

My new favorite worldchanger is the Spirit of Innovation Awards. In short, high school students from around the country solve real-world problems and compete for awards and opportunities (like access to venture capital and mentorship). Here’s an example: I am working with founder Nancy Conrad...

Troubling Statistics...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Adjacent Possible, Interconnectedness, Science 2.0 on 03 12th, 2010 | View Comments

In his eloquent article, Breaking the Galilean Spell (worth reading in its entirety), Stuart Kauffman has given me the words to finally be able to articulate the uneasiness I feel about statistical reasoning in an increasingly interconnected world: …[Can] we make probability statements about the...

The Adjacent Possible...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Asymmetry, Autocatalysis, Causality, Cognition, Cooperation, Creativity, Interconnectedness, Non-linearity, Scarcity / Abundance, Science 2.0, Self-Fullfilling Prophecy, Visualization on 03 11th, 2010 | View Comments

Stuart Kauffman has a concept called the Adjacent Possible which I find incredibly useful in understanding the world. Simply put, if you think of the space of possibilities from the present moment forward and just concentrate on those that are achievable today — adjacent to the present moment...

Overcoming Bias...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Science 2.0 on 03 10th, 2010 | View Comments

The title of this post is ironic. What is science/truth/knowledge if not picking one story over another, in other words, the creation of bias? Hopefully the bias we create is useful and allows us to predict and create a future that is better (in some agreed upon sense) than the past. To get to...

Posted by Alex in Health, Incentives, Innovation, Science on 03 8th, 2010 | View Comments

“Less expensive, lower-quality innovations abound in every economic sector—except medicine” This is by far the most constructive article on healthcare, because it clearly identifies the fundamental issue in healthcare – our internal conflict. Here are the excerpts, but read the whole...

Science 2.0...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Cognition, Creativity, Dualism, Epistemology, Invisible Etiology, Language, Science, Science 2.0 on 03 7th, 2010 | View Comments

I liken cognition to a hill-climbing search on the landscape of theories/models/maps that explain/predict reality. It’s easy to get stuck on peaks of local maximality. Injecting randomness creates a sort of Boltzmann machine of the mind and increases my chances of finding higher peaks. But I have...

Posted by Alex in Innovation, Interconnectedness, Singularity, Uncategorized on 03 4th, 2010 | View Comments

A way to browse the web using pattern recognition and abstraction as opposed to links. Is this how understanding and self reflection emerge in the first place?? Why not speed that up too! (via DataMining) TED Feb 2010 – Live Labs Pivot demo and the world beyond facebook: One way to put it, is to...

$100,000 Reward: Y Prize...

Posted by Rafe Furst in Alternative Institutions, Crowdsourcing, Incentives, Innovation, Investing, Social Entrepreneurship on 03 3rd, 2010 | View Comments

Inspired by the X Prize, Y Combinator’s “Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund” and Kickstarter, I am offering a $100K prize in three parts: $10K for Crowdsourced X Prizes Platform Allows anyone to offer a cash prize for achieving a goal they want achieved Allows anyone to pledge...

Gene-culture Co-evolution...

Posted by plektix in Culture, Evolution, Genetics on 03 2nd, 2010 | View Comments

A while ago, I wrote on the hypothesis that humans have essentially stopped evolving genetically, because of our cultural emphasis on keeping all humans alive, no matter how disadvantaged. The New York Times reports today on the opposite idea: that human culture may actually intensify the selective...