Contemplation in a Top-Ten World

Top Ten Things That Intellectuals Do

10. have some projects that require persistence and sustained effort
9. reify and abstract; dissolve and create categories
8. metaphorize; re-imagine ordinary things in extraordinary ways
7. do something new every day; be surprised
6. socialize; argue, joke and have fun with people
5. teach; learning and teaching are projections of each other
4. travel
3. listen
2. write

And the number one thing that intellectuals do is:

1. READ

In case you need a quiet word with me,

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which is identical to my indexed MIT Server public KeyId  503987BF

This is how to have a presidential debate

Tired of questions that sandbag and incite rather than hit the crucial policy issues?
Tired of presenters chasing their own ratings rather than the social contract?

Play Political Pursuit instead

Begin with a large pool of potential questions solicited from the public at large. Of these, 300 or so questions are selected, chosen for breadth, relevancy and popularity by an independent non-partisan group or groups such as the League of Women Voters.

These final selected pool questions are published at least two weeks before the debate so that both the public and the candidates may prepare as well as they wish before the evening of the debate.

The debate itself is conducted in a straightforward manner:

Each candidate has one minute to introduce themselves and to frame their candidacy.

Each candidate then selects from an urn of 300 balls a question number, which they have one minute to address or to rebut the previous answer of another candidate, or to respond in any other way they wish. The listeners and pundits of course may refer to their notes regarding this indexed question asked by a presenter to the candidate whose turn it is to be in the spotlight.

After the minute, the next candidate selects a new random question and so on.

The debate ends after a predetermined number of full rounds giving each candidate the same opportunity to speak.

Finally, each candidate has one minute to sum up and recapitulate their position.



This format has the advantages of being fair to each candidate, giving each the same amount of time to speak. It has the advantage of including those questions deemed most relevant to the public and gives obscure or heretofore unknown issues the possibility of being asked, not just what the presenters think is important in the current news cycle.

No candidate will be hit with a presenter's argumentative, biased, or unexpected question. And, since they will not be sandbagged with a previously unknown or argumentative question, candidates will not have to prepare a set of side-stepping general "answers" that basically ignore the question at hand. The public will know that the candidate had time to prepare and will judge accordingly.

Each candidate may prepare cribs as much or as little from the potential pool, which has the admirable side-effect of being a kind of test-prep for the candidate and their staff for the Presidency and is the ultimate focus group for issues important to the electorate.

This benefit accrues to the public as well as they see the breadth and quality of the pool that will in itself constitute a short course of our democratic republic. Pundits can also pre-fact check.


Overall, publishing the pool ahead of time will raise the level of political discourse in our entire country among all its citizens.

Most importantly, anyone--including non-citizens or minors--may submit a potential pool question with the final pool selected by a non-partisan group from among those submitted by the public. The group does not need to select banal, irrelevant, non-civil, repetitive, unnecessarily technical, or even, well, boring questions to be among the final debate pool.

The excitement of a lottery but without the faux drama of the presenters fomenting discord--while no more "debate" than the entertainment reality show that is palmed off now, it will be a meet-and-greet, but with real meat. Political Pursuit.

Popular internet news sources as curated by the New York Times on October 1, 2015

Derived and transformed from http://nyti.ms/1KNTKSX

http://al.com
http://bbc.com
http://bleacherreport.com
http://bostonglobe.com
http://boston.com
http://businessinsider.com
http://buzzfeed.com
http://cbsnews.com
http://chicagotribune.com
http://chron.com
http://cnet.com
http://cnn.com
http://dailymail.co.uk
http://dallasnews.com
http://elitedaily.com
http://engadget.com
http://examiner.com
http://foxnews.com
http://freep.com
http://gawker.com
http://huffingtonpost.com
http://independent.co.uk
http://latimes.com
http://mashable.com
http://mic.com
http://mirror.co.uk
http://mlive.com
http://msn.com
http://nbcnews.com
http://news.yahoo.com
http://nj.com
http://npr.org
http://nydailynews.com
http://nypost.com
http://nytimes.com
http://salon.com
http://sfgate.com
http://slate.com
http://techcrunch.com
http://telegraph.co.uk
http://theatlantic.com
http://theblaze.com
http://thedailybeast.com
http://theguardian.com
http://time.com
http://upworthy.com
http://usatoday.com
http://usnews.com
http://vice.com
http://vox.com
http://washingtonpost.com

But who will speak for the iPhones? Siri, I guess.

In response to prompt

Stop Googling. Let’s Talk.

By SHERRY TURKLE 

SEPT. 26, 2015

New York Times 

 

Grady Ward

New York City 

Professor Turkle--not hyperbolically--says "...but psychologically potent [Internet] devices that change not just what we do but who we are."

The power of instantly using a smart device to pin down the arrant fact at the time is is needed rather than l'esprit d'escalier has not only is making us better educated and socially coherent but an entirely new variety of sapiens, an augmented variety of human vastly more powerful in an information age than those without the technology at hand.

But "sapiens" means wisdom, which is more than a wreath of facts and is also the mulling and thoughtful simmering that Ms. Turkle is commending.

Reflection guided by facts. I am looking forward to the reconciliation.

Eve is the hero of Genesis

In the Biblical story of Genesis, Eve is often portrayed as the villain who caused the fall of humankind through her act of eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. However, a closer examination of the story reveals that Eve is actually the true hero of the story.

First of all, Eve's curiosity and desire for knowledge are traits that are typically associated with heroism. While Adam passively accepted the conditions of the Garden of Eden, Eve actively sought to expand her understanding and break free from the limitations imposed upon her. This act of intellectual courage and independence was the first step towards human progress and growth.

Additionally, Eve's actions in the Garden of Eden also showed her bravery and selflessness. By eating the forbidden fruit, Eve knew that she would face consequences, but she made the decision to do so anyway in order to share knowledge and experience with Adam. This act of selflessness and her willingness to take risks for the greater good are hallmarks of heroism.

And despite not being one of her kind created in God’s image, she accepted the diverse advice of the serpent. The hero accepts the truth wherever found.

Finally, Eve's actions and rejection of prejudice in the Garden of Eden set the stage for the development of human civilization. Through her curiosity and desire for knowledge, Eve helped to bring about the intellectual and spiritual awakening of humankind, leading to the creation of art, science, and philosophy. Without her act of bravery and selflessness, human history would have taken a different path.

In conclusion, the story of Genesis should be reinterpreted as a celebration of Eve's heroism, rather than a condemnation of her supposed villainy. Her courage, selflessness, and thirst for knowledge make her the true hero of the story and a symbol of human potential.

— Grady Ward revisedFebruary 11, 2023 (the antepenultimate Eve of St. Valentine’s Day)

Casual neuroscience chat in media res...

Dale Favier: Nope. There is no unified command in the brain. It's a circus in there. And the less aware of that you are, the more the clowns run the show. I hate it when people say, "fix your relationship with yourself," as if there was just one. Fix which relationship between which two selves? And with what? Duct tape and WD-40?

John JMesserly Maybe not leaves but billions of cockleburs, not aligned along a plane, but interpenetrating with a mass of interlocking dendtrite threads, elongated recently due to mutations in genes, and able to make unusually broad connections between seemingly unrelated cocklebur images.

Grady Ward Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, 1988. The notion that intelligence emerges from the complexity of simple components. Closely related to Cellular Automata and Complexity by Stephen Wolfram, 1994.

John JMesserly Minsky's metaphor was nice for a few pages but he got a bit long winded. I much prefer the relation to precepts in an individual's "Kosmos" that Whitman provided some images for. Some are uncannily prescient of the insights of modern neuroscience. For example, it would probably be a fruitful seminar to take the mind body exploration of Songs of Myself part 24 and juxtapose it with what Antonio Damasio explores in his introduction to neuroscience found in "Self comes to Mind" [...]

Grady Ward Well, a mash up of Walt's Milky multitudes and António's Somaticisms would be heady compost for a coordinated study. We would need a dedicated 3-d printer to replace the mental gears stripped in the turning of the axons: I sing the body Actinomycetes!
But being simple, a Gimpel among the skeptical, I would rather work bottom up rather than top down, to generalize from demonstrable cases rather than search the decay products of a poetic critical mass.

I remember one of my Los Altos roommates back in 1979 named Bill Gosper when we lived together with Richard Weyerauch. Bill was a brilliant and original mathematician who enjoyed applying the lisp and new Xerox machines to his rational subjects as continued fractions, fractals, and cellular automata, which had been far too tedious to research deeply by chalk and blackboard. Among many other things, he invented a notational way of computing Conway's Game of life future generations called hashlife, which was its own way of leap-frogging the intermediate calculations of simulation formations analogous to Newton's integral calculus shortcut of adding up all those infinite slices under a curve.

Fast forward to 2010.
First Self-Replicating Creature Spawned In Conway's Game of Life (summary of NewScientist article) http://boingboing.net/2010/06/18/first-self-replicati.html in which Andrew Wade discovered the 'Gemini' self-replicating pattern: basically, the double-helix for Conway's game. The importance of this discovery should not be underestimated. I would rate it a more important discovery than assembling individuals molecules to create a new life-form. And, yes, Wade used Bill's hashlife platform.

What it means essentially is that a large enough assemblage of simply-ruled elements can fundamentally leap its complexity frame and become alive. No limbic system needed, no hormonal amendments required. More importantly, there is no reason to believe that everything we associate with life will not follow from this profound discovery as to the surpassing emergence of complex life-forms from categorically simpler stuff.

Yes, we are still ants trying to make sense of a page of Vitruvius by walking over the page. We are still at the stage of trying to distinguish a pixel of type from a pixel of illustration. And no one claims that our human emotional structure doesn't shape and even define aspects and interaction of our cognition as per Damasio. But not all life and not all cognition and not all blades of grass.

Within a reasonable time I don't doubt that what we call mind, cognition, intelligence, and, yes, love, empathy and the contradiction within the multitudes will be modeled as surely as the power set of the simple countable aleph-null is the uncountable aleph-one.