This document discusses the need for change and reform in how society and institutions are structured. It argues that most people are stressed and not engaged by current systems like schools. Technology is discussed as both potentially helpful if used to give people more choice and autonomy over their lives, but also potentially harmful if it replaces human connection and limits options. The document advocates for experimenting with new models that give all people more freedom and flexibility to pursue what interests them, with the goal of restoring balance and addressing issues related to health, the environment, and more.
5. most people
people are stressed.
most can’t wait till 3/5pm and/or the weekend.
we’ve got to change up how we’re spending our days.
people aren’t hungry.
for ie: school math.
we’ve got to question all assumed agendas.
people crave choice.
curiosity drives choice.
we’ve got to let go of our control issues and listen.
ie: if i offer you spinach or a rock, and am happy you picked spinach, that’s control, not choice.
people crave choice everyday.
following/facilitating whimsy gets us to a natural/sustaining/thriving energy.
we’ve got to find the bravery to change our minds. everyday.
all people matter.
The center of the problem is that none of them knew the center of the problem. - Taleb
we need a nonnarrative (deep/simple/open enough) for 100% of humanity.
because not all people can dance… none of us are free.
None of us are free if one of us is chained. - Solomon Burke
perhaps networked individualism ness. an authenticity/attachment dance.
redefineschool.com/story-board/
6.
7. not themselves
Most people are other people. – Wilde
and our systems/institutions/assumptions perpetuate that.
we encourage each other to be someone else.
every day.
we have to wake up from that game.
This entire heritage of thinking, grounded in the sentence “An agent does not move except out of intention for
an end,” is where the most pervasive human error lies, compounded by two or more centuries of the illusion of
unconditional scientific understanding. This error is also the most fragilizing one.
...you will never get to know yourself - your real preferences - unless you face options and choices.
- Taleb, Antifragile
7 billion souls on fire is what we need.
not 1 mindset/trend/hero/plan.
we need to let go of control.
it’s killing us.
we can see it destroying us from the outside.
but the damage is on an exponential trek..
from the inside.
8. ie from the medical field via Taleb, Antifragile:
..medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as
many people as car accidents in the United States. It is generally accepted that harm from doctors—
not including risks from hospital germs—accounts for more deaths than any single cancer.
Pharma plays the game of concealed and distributed iatrogenics, and it has been growing. It is easy
to assess iatrogenics when the surgeon amputates the wrong leg or operates on the wrong kidney,
or when the patient dies of a drug reaction. But ..
..when you medicate a child for an imagined or invented psychiatric
disease, say, ADHD or depression, instead of letting him out of the cage,
the long-term harm is largely unaccounted for.
..we need to avoid being blind to the natural antifragility of systems, their ability to take care of
themselves, and fight our tendency to harm and fragilize them by not giving them a chance to do so.
Governments are wasting billions of dollars on attempting to predict events that are produced by
interdependent systems and are therefore not statistically understandable at the individual level.
.. not just money wasted but the construction of a false confidence based on an erroneous focus.
9. the situation (of imbalance) is man made.
this is good news.
it means the cure/restoration..
is something we can undo.
10.
11. perhaps tech
Technology (from Greek τέχνη, techne, "art, skill, cunning of hand"; and -λογία, -logia) is the collection
of tools, including machinery, modifications, arrangements and procedures used by humans.
- wikipedia
technology is/was supposed to help us along.. free us up.
perhaps we’ve just forgotten how to prune.
.. a questioning of technology became necessary and urgent for Heidegger because modern technology
brought with it a new way of ordering the world, which he saw as contaminating man’s authentic sense
of being, .. (he) understands the question concerning technology as essentially linked to the question of
being.
-Paul Nadal
perhaps it’s time to prune.
perhaps some of the tech we no longer need (ie: money, credentialing, political
system, school, war, … ) are getting in the way.
by becoming the way.
[can’t see the forest for the trees ness. run a muck ness.]
12. .. it is downright irrational if one holds on to an old technology that is not naturalistic
at all yet visibly harmful, or when the switch to a new technology (like the wheel on the
suitcase) is obviously free of possible side effects that did not exist with the previous
one. And resisting removal is downright incompetent and criminal (as I keep saying,
removal of something non-natural does not carry long-term side effects; it is typically
iatrogenics-free)
- Taleb, Antifragile
perhaps it’s time to model another way.
13. about a problem deep enough to get to the root/soul of all of us.
(two needs.)
via a mechanism simple enough to be accessible/usable by all of us.
(talk to self. map in heart.)
within a system open enough to set/keep all of us free.
(entire/eclectic city.)
14. perhaps technology can offer us a placebo-like temporary fix
getting us back to us.
perhaps it can ground the chaos as we offer 7 billion people
unlimited options/choices.
perhaps tech can listen to each of us, our curiosities
without an agenda/judgment.
giving each one of us access to spaces/chambers of permission,
with nothing to prove.
and then using that self talk as data to facilitate connections.
shortening the lag time between intention & action.
15. from Taleb, Antifragile:
This kind of sum I’ve called in my vernacular “f*** you money”—a sum large enough to get most,
if not all, of the advantages of wealth (the most important one being independence and the
ability to only occupy your mind with matters that interest you) but not its side effects,..
a people experiment - modeling this what-if-money-were-no-object luxury in
order to decrease lag time:
The history of medicine is littered with the strange sequence of discovery of a cure followed, much
later, by the implementation—as if the two were completely separate ventures, the second harder,
much harder, than the first. Just taking something to market requires struggling against a
collection of naysayers, administrators, empty suits, formalists, mountains of details that invite
you to drown, and one’s own discouraged mood on occasion. In other words, to identify the option
(again, there is this option blindness). This is where all you need is the wisdom to realize what
you have on your hands.
16. [implementating a people experiment as a means to say - good bye money.. as
we let people occupy their minds with what matters to them.. what we
already have/are.]
..the simpler and more obvious the discovery, the less equipped we are to figure it out by
complicated methods. The key is that the significant can only be revealed through practice.
..both governments and universities have done very, very little for innovation and discovery,
precisely because, in addition to their blinding rationalism, they look for the complicated, the
lurid, the newsworthy, the narrated, the scientistic, and the grandiose, rarely for the wheel on
the suitcase.
.. this ability to use the option given to us by antifragility is not guaranteed: things can be
looking at us for a long time. We saw the gap between the wheel and its use. Medical
researchers call such lag the “translational gap,” the time difference between formal discovery
and first implementation, which, if anything, owing to excessive noise and academic interests,
has been shown by Contopoulos-Ioannidis and her peers to be lengthening in modern times.
- Taleb
17. perhaps this is our answer to health issues, environmental issues, privacy issues,
property issues, money issues, war issues, ..
this luxury-ness of 7 billion people being usefully preoccupied.
every day.
18. it’s not that tech is a cure all.
we are the cure all.
tech might just give us a jumpstart.. back to listening.
to us.
it’s a simple message.
listen to the rhythm.
every day. - Chance the Rapper & Arthur
Nonlinear relationships can vary; perhaps the best way to describe them is to say that they
cannot be expressed verbally in a way that does justice to them. - Taleb
The problem with communication is the assumption that it’s been accomplished. - GB Shaw
19.
20.
21. restore balance
you don’t really have to be quiet to see that we are out of balance.
the person.
the city.
the world.
although even just a bit of silence sharpens reality dramatically.
perhaps if we were to take a brief pause to listen.
in order to see more clearly.
that would be enough.
to wake us up.
24. more from Taleb’s Antifragile:
What makes life simple is that the robust and antifragile don’t have to have as accurate a
comprehension of the world as the fragile—and they do not need forecasting.
Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile
to them is not.
The rational flâneur is someone who, unlike a tourist, makes a decision at every step to
revise his schedule, so he can imbibe things based on new information, ..
The flâneur is not a prisoner of a plan. Tourism, actual or figurative, is imbued with the
teleological illusion; it assumes completeness of vision and gets one locked into a hard-to-revise
program, while the flâneur continuously—and, what is crucial, rationally—modifies
his targets as he acquires information.
Optionality will take us many places, but at the core, an option is what makes you
antifragile and allows you to benefit from the positive side of uncertainty.
.. intelligence makes you discount antifragility and ignore the power of optionality.
25. To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
- Emerson