The Balkan Yankee

Following up on my previous post, I have some more quotes and references:

We are the very privileged owners of a brief spark of consciousness…this ability to become aware that other people have minds just like your own, and feeling that are just as important as your own and this gift of empathy seems to me to be the building block of our moral system.
–Ian McEwan; speaking to Richard Dawkins in The Root of all evil? Part 2

Isn’t this an eloquent way to describe it? To me this is much more powerful and beautiful to recognize ourselves as being inherently gifted with empathy, rather than saying we are motivated to do good out of fear of god’s reappraisal, or out of selfish anticipation of a reward.

Is it morals that come from god or moral corruption that comes from god? Think about the motivations for 9/11… clearly a group of individuals committing an evil and immoral act under the distorted pretense of religious, god given authority. I’ll this post with this quote:

With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
Steven Weinberg, Physicist, quoted in The New York Times, April 20, 1999

Philosopher

Originally uploaded by Wan Hung Lo
This topic has been on my mind a lot lately, especially as it seems to be key to religious people’s hatred of atheism; that is that without god defining for us what is right and wrong, society would degenerate into wanton rape and murder. This argument just seems silly to me at face value, but I’ve been exploring lots of different arguments, and here are some interesting quotes, and various references I’ve come across.

I’m not a student of Philosophy, but I’m a voracious consumer of information. I’m not really drawing conclusions, just sharing ideas and comments on them. Anyway, here is the first part:

Plato’s Euthyphro argument against morality as a thing defined by god is summed up in this passage:

“Where there is holiness (god) there must also be justice (morals), and where justice (morals) is present, holiness (god) may be absent.”

If god were to say murder is right we would still understand that murder is wrong, and therefore god would be wrong. It is explained here in greater detail, and also Thomas Aquinas’ counter argument that “God’s perfect nature explains morality”. Plato’s argument is also explained by Colin McGinn in Jonathan Miller’s “The Atheism Tapes”.

So, Plato says god CANNOT define morals and Aquinas argues that god CAN define morals, but not that god MUST define morals as far as I understand it. I haven’t read Aquinas myself, so if anyone can educate me otherwise regarding his argument for including god in the foundation of morals, please do.

Foltin,
originally uploaded by Gjorgji Ristoski.

I saw Foltin play in Sozopol on Saturday night and I’m going to see them again at the Sofia Jazz Club tonight. They’re recorded tracks are a beautiful mix of contemporary jazz with traditional Macedonian sounds. The lyrical theme to their most recent album seems to be something to do with Woody Allen, and Nabokov’s classic novel Lolita.

Their live show is an incredibly pumped up dance party that surges like a gypsy wedding. We danced our asses off until they finished their 3rd encore and the owner of the club basically kicked them off the stage. The vibe was much like that of a Gogol Bordello show (Ukranian Gypsy punk out of NYC) with a little Tom Waits thrown into it!

If you’re in Sofia tonight or tomorrow, you should definitely check them out; I’ll be there.

While I was on vacation with my sister I got an email from Frans Johansson, author of The Medicci Effect in regarding the quote taken from his book originally posted by Marc Andresson, and discussed on this blog as well as various others. You can read his response here where he clears up the context in which the quote was taken, and confirms his support for well structured brainstorming.

In my last post I expressed my distaste for brainstorming which put some people on the defensive, particularly those like Patricia who make a living selling the concept of “collective intelligence”, but unfortunately I didn’t take the opportunity to form a supportive argument. So, it was this quote from Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect which started the discussion, and I think it’s an interesting one. I wont get the chance to read the book until I can pick it up in The States or the UK, so I’m not sure how to respond to Patricia’s claim that he is actually in support of brainstorming. That would mean Marc Andreessen took a quote completely out of context distorting his ideas to support his opinion, which I’m pretty skeptical about. Either way, I’m willing to keep an open mind about it, but here are some of my problems with brainstorming:

First of all, I’ll agree that brainstorming isn’t usless. It’s just useless most of the time, which I’ll also agree has mostly to do with the fact that brainstorming sessions are often poorly administered. That still doesn’t mean that a well administered brainstorming session will out perform focused individuals tackling individual problems. It just means they wont be beaten as miserably. I think the one thing we can rely on well administered brainstorming creating is the “feeling” of having accomplished something when what is really created a great team building experience. You have given them an incentive to reinforce and feel good about the decisions the group makes. The power of people’s own influence over one another create a situation where the group can unconsciously sacrifices quality of ideas for a high group morale.

I’m not attacking collaboration, or teamwork and I definitely don’t believe that innovation happens in a bubble, because that is clearly not true. Modern human achievement owes much to our ability to exchange information and ideas quickly and easily. Jared Diamond explains the development of advanced Eurasian civilization in contrast to early American, and Australian aboriginal civilizations in no small part by their ability to travel, exchange, and communicate ideas easily across a geographic latitude.

Today, the internet and the flattening world that Thomas Friedman describes are making this exchange and communication possible at a level unresricted by gepgraphy. This is hugely exciting to me and I think we’re clearly benefiting from the innovation created by this increased ability to work together.

So what’s the bottom line? I’m not gonna say nobody should be using brainstorming. Maybe some people are really more creative working in a group. I definitely don’t think it is a reliable method for everyone. I think Patricia has plenty of work to do in getting teams to work better together, because there always the need for us to communicate and work better with each other in the work place. I just don’t think we need to be telling ourselves that brainstorming is going to be improving our ideas from their conception. That is the illusion.