Author Maria Konnikova on Thinking Like Sherlock Holmes

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Turns Out People Have Been Sharing Cat Photos For Over a Century

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Cotton Mill Worker in North Carolina, 1908

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Rick Steves: Don't Be Afraid to Splurge For Better Vacation Value

Rick Steves' name is about as closely associated to travel advice as Google Maps. The renowned European vacation expert (man, how do you get that job?) has long been an evangelist for budget-conscious travel and getting the best deals in major destination cities. That said, Steves explains in a recent Seattle Times article that being too frugal can be a detriment to your travel experience. He lists several key areas for which it's okay to splurge a little:

1. Hotel: In a city like Rome, it's almost always cheaper to stay on the periphery. But Steves says that you'll get more value if you pay for a room in the center of the city near the sights. He notes that often these old hotels are steeped in history and are sights in and of themselves.

2. Transportation: While riding on a city's public transportation system is a novel cultural experience, there are "time is money" instances when Steves recommends just taking a cab to your destination. You don't want to waste precious minutes of a short stay waiting for a bus.

3. Take a Tour: If you do some adequate research beforehand, a jaunt around town with a good local tour guide will be some of the best money you spend on your trip. There's no other way to get more out of seeing a city's basic sights unless you're a practical Magellan with the hotel map.

Steves offers other tips that you can get to on your own by reading his entire piece at The Seattle Times . One notable thing he does recommend is dishing out for one of those fancy Venetian gondola rides. There are some experiences, he says, that are so entwined with the cities you visit that you just can't afford to miss them.

Photo credit: GTS / Shutterstock

Forget Da Vinci, Try Solving the Piero della Francesca Code

Fans of Dan Brown (and Tom Hanks) hoped to get an education in the Italian Renaissance along with their beach reading (and movie-going) of The Da Vinci Code . But they and those who think that Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello are just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are missing out on a Renaissance master of art and mathematics just as captivating and mysterious as Da Vinci—Piero della Francesca.

In Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man , James R. Banker relies on newly discovered documents and years of study of the Renaissance to crack the “Piero Code.” You won’t run across the Knights Templar or unearth the Holy Grail in Banker’s biographical study, but you will come away with a real-life detective tale compellingly told and a greater understanding and appreciation of an artist whose art may look otherworldly but, as Banker suggests, grew directly from Piero’s hometown roots.

Piero grew up in Sansepolcro in the Tuscany region of Italy, only 4,500 people strong at his birth around 1412. Literally “Holy Sepulchre,” Sansepolcro took that name when two founders brought a stone there from the Holy Land’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which itself was built on the spot where Jesus Christ reportedly died, was buried, and rose from the dead. “How, then,” Banker asks, “did this young man from a provincial town 79 miles west from Florence and 169 miles from Rome and without an extensive formal education become, along with Leonardo da Vinci, both an outstanding geometrician and the most intellectual painter of the Quattrocento?”

Like Shakespeare’s origin from the sleepy hamlet of Stratford-upon-Avon, Piero’s origin story sounds impossible, at least until you look beneath the surface and accept the resources a determined aspiring artist could find in even the unlikeliest of places. “Piero’s education in the mixed merchant-artisan culture of Sansepolcro remained a vital element in his painting and writings until his death,” Banker argues, “influencing the language he used in his vernacular treatises, and evident in the deep respect that he retained throughout his life for the beautiful products from the hands of artisans, whether clothing, leather book bindings, gems, or veils.” Piero came from a long line of leather workers (and broke his father’s heart pursuing painting rather than joining the family business), so whenever you see a leather good in one of his paintings rendered with sensitivity and reverence, it’s a homecoming of sorts.

Banker struggles mightily with the shoddy surviving documentation of Piero’s life, which begins with the mystery of the year of his birth and continues throughout much of his life. We glimpse Piero’s whereabouts throughout his career secondhand through documented commissions, appearances as a witness in Sansepolcro legal papers, and other fragments of history that Banker meticulously brings together. Banker stays hot on Piero’s half-century-cold trail as the artist travels through Florence, Modena, Ferrara, Rome, and other cities in Italy and absorbs the influences of Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Donatello, and other contemporaries, plus the lessons of classical sculpture from newly discovered Ancient Roman artifacts. Banker calls the 1440’s Piero’s “lost decade” during which he painted little, but learned much. Banker pieces together the known dates of Piero’s movements, the artists he would have seen or met in those places at those times, and Piero’s paintings reflecting those influences to give us the best available picture of Piero’s progress as a provincial pilgrim through the heart of the big-city Renaissance.

By the end of these adventures, Piero arrives at what Banker defines as his “classical style of fully sculpted monumental figures with more gravitas than emotion in meticulously constructed perspectival space.” Aside from his wonderful detective work, Banker digs deep into Piero’s greatest hits to show how that “classical style” plays out in the work. Anyone familiar with the strangely otherworldly Flagellation of Christ knows how Piero uses, in Banker’s phrase, “incredibly deep perspective… rational in its organization of a complex set of spaces and shapes” to pull you into a theater of the imagination past the trio of men conversing at the surface of the work into its innermost depths where Christ is suffering the first stages of his passion and death. The late Brera Madonna stands as “a virtuoso example of Piero’s command of all his earlier techniques” such as using light to define figures and mathematical perspective to give the heavenly an earthly reality. “Despite the monumentalizing epic within which Piero’s figures act,” Banker asserts, “they are within the world of human possibility.” They may not have the drama of a Michelangelo figure, but they do display the gravitas of real people facing extraordinary events.

Aside from Piero’s technical skill and innovations, he approached his art and his subject with a perspective unique to the time. “For Piero, the Divine had to be on the plane of the human, the natural, and the historical,” Banker writes. When Piero painted the Madonna della Misericordia for the local Sansepolcro confraternity of laypeople dedicated to charity, he placed a group of everyday people physically under the protection of an oversized Madonna, who spreads her cloak around them. Later, Piero painted The Resurrection of Christ (detail shown above) in the Sansepolcro communal meeting house. “[T]he Resurrection served a civic function,” Banker says, “confronting the legislators whenever they considered what laws would promote the well-being of the townspeople of the Holy Sepulcher.” Piero paints Christ rising from the tomb triumphant and as judge and lawgiver of the people. Thus, The Resurrection of Christ combines “the eternal verities” of medieval art and the specific moments of Renaissance art to arrive at a powerfully poetic and pivotal moment in the history of art as well as history itself, as Italians learned to assume some democratic rule after centuries of warlords and chaos. The mystery of Christ’s assertive stare isn’t spiritually separated from life on Earth but rather a connection strung between faith in God and faith in humanity. Banker’s ability to connect to this connective quality of Piero’s art cracks the true Piero code and resurrects the artist in a way that no trove of documentation can.

This past summer Americans literally saw “Art Everywhere” as that campaign plastered fine art across the country with works such as George Tooker’s 1950 painting The Subway . Tooker idolized Piero della Francesca in his updating of the master’s deep perspective and sculpted figures for a modern audience. Sadly, Piero fell out of critical favor after his death until the early 20^th century, when the Cubists tried to incorporate the mathematical aspects of his art into their own. Allied bombing during World War II almost destroyed much of Piero’s art (and Sansepolcro itself) until British officer Tony Clarke halted fire after remembering a 1925 essay by Aldous Huxley mentioning that little town as the home of the greatest painting in the world, The Resurrection of Christ . James R. Banker’s Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man reminds us that, despite the centuries between us and Piero and the fact that we frequent subways more now than cathedrals, the human scale of his art—the ability to have his divine characters look us square in the eye as our eyes square up the mathematically intense realism of his worlds—never gets old. It might not be the Holy Grail, but the “Piero Code” is something we can all hold on to.

[Image:Piero della Francesca. The Resurrection of Christ (c. 1463), detail. Image source .]

[Many thanks to Oxford University Press for providing me with a review copy of James R. Banker’s Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man .]

The Value of Putting the "Human" Back in Human Resources

Liz Ryan, who does good work writing over at Forbes, ponders whether HR departments have lost their way and what it would take for them to regain their past value. Her blogging style is to provide anecdotes of her real-world experience to help prove her points. In her latest post, she details how she was somewhat unceremoniously shoehorned into an HR Manager position early in her career. At first hesitant, she realized that she was already good at what human resources should strive for:

"I saw immediately what the job of HR is: to take care of the team’s morale and to build Team Mojo. The job of HR is to keep the energy moving and to make an organization the best place to work that it can be."

Ryan is bewildered by how HR is often seen only as a compliance office. She argues that paper pushing and filling out spreadsheets doesn't fulfill the department's purpose:

"The real job of HR is down on the ground and out on the street with the team members. Our job is to listen and advise. Our job is to talk and act to make our organization an amazing, vibrant, human place to work...

If your organization is still treating HR like a compliance function, you’re missing the power that is available to you when you hire human beings to work on your team."

To Ryan, the contributions made by an effective and personnel-focused HR department are bountiful, even if they're also intangible. She references the value of her human resources team coping with the AIDS crisis in the mid-1980s and just how beneficial their work was for the company as a whole. If your HR department isn't hands-on, it's not really an HR department at all.

Read more at Forbes

Photo credit: Jirsak / Shutterstock

Bob Marley on Greatness

Bob Marley (1945-1981) was an internationally acclaimed Jamaican reggae musician, Rastafarian, and Pan-Africanist. Due to his success, first with The Wailers and then during his solo career, the Marley name has become nearly inseparable with reggae and the Rastafari religion. Marley, who remains a beloved symbol of peace and music, died of cancer in 1981 at the young age of 36.

“The greatness of a man is not in how much wealth he acquires, but in his integrity and his ability to affect those around him positively.”

-Bob Marley

Quote source: Bob Marley Official Website

Photo credit: Eddie Mallin / Wikicommons

Below, Bob's son and DSN expert Ziggy Marley discusses the music industry, as part of his series of DSN interviews:

Study: Cities Speak A Different Language Than Their Small-Town Neighbors

Whatever your native language, you've probably noticed that city people speak it differently than do country folk. But so what? It's also true that Chicagoans speak a bit differently than do Baltimoreans, and the French of Marseilles is not that of Paris. When it comes to differences in accent, grammar and vocabulary, you might expect that region, culture, social class and gender would count for more than the size of your town. So the people of, say, Caracas, should sound more like their fellow Venezuelans than like people in Miami. But according to this paper, you would be wrong. "The Spanish language," its authors write, "is split into two superdialects"—a city dialect in which Caracas and Miami have a lot in common, versus a dialect of rural regions and small towns.

As novel as the finding is the method that Bruno Gonçalves and David Sánchez used to distinguish the dialects: They analyzed every tweet made in Spanish over two years for which geolocation data was also available (they don't say which years). Breaking down these 50 million tweets according to different words used for "computer," "car," and other key concepts revealed the boundaries of the two dialects.

The researchers used Spanish because it is widely spoken and widely spread across several continents. Spanish also has plenty of Twitter users (unlike Chinese) to supply evidence. And written Spanish is logical—the letters you see represent the sounds you'd hear. On the other hand, in English (as noted here) the same letter combo can represent five different sounds ("Though I cough through the day, this rough bough comforts me"). Conversely, different sounds can be rendered by the same letters ("Archer, I bow to your bow, and I will lead you to the mines of lead"). That sort of thing, which has incensed sensible people for centuries, messes up textual analysis.

The researchers divided up the Spanish-tweeting world into cells of approximately 25 square kilometers each, and noted in each cell the majority-endorsed words for 131 key things. That gave them a map distinguishing, for example, places where the word for "computer" was "computadora" from those where the word is "computador" or "ordenador." They then applied their algorithms to identify cells that are closely related to each other. In this way, they discovered "a profound correlation" between one widespread dialect and areas of high population density. In other words, one of their super dialects was spoken mostly in cities—even cities as widely scattered about the globe as Buenos Aires, San Diego and San Juan. The other cluster is spoken outside major urban centers. "This suggests a natural lexical bipartition of Spanish into two superdialects," they write. "Superdialect α is utilized by speakers in main American and Spanish cities and corresponds to an international variety with a strongly urban component while superdialect β is comprised mostly of rural areas and small towns."

Why cities? Because people who move to cities want to communicate with one another (and, I am guessing, want to sound as if they didn't just step off the boat from Nowheresville). For the sake of efficiency and identity, then, city-dwellers are inclined to drop the more idiosyncratic parts of their speech. They come to talk like their fellow city-dwellers, not Mom and Pop back home. "This leveling process," write Gonçalves and Sánchez, is present throughout the Spanish-speaking cities, where it "is reinforced by the rapid increase of worldwide social ties and the powerful influence of mass media precisely located in important metropolitan areas (Madrid, Mexico City, Miami)."

That Twitter can be used to find heretofore unrecognized dialects surprised me (who knew 140-character utterances could be so revealing?) but Gonçalves and Sánchez believe it's likely to be a rich Big-Data source of insights into language. In fact, they think, the abundance of tweets worldwide, combined with GPS data, could soon permit linguists to track language differences in real time, as they arise and evolve among different regions.

I was tempted to call their paper a "Big Data" approach to language analysis. But the term is almost a misnomer. They made a new finding not because their data was abundant but because it was different. Instead of having to go out and interview (often male, often rural) people to ask about their language use, the researchers had an immense river of language use ready and waiting for them. This is the new kind of data all of us are generating every day, in tweets, Facebook likes, YouTube clicks and so on. Where once we had to be asked about a topic, and think about our answers, we now reveal ourselves without thinking. This may not be great for our notions of personal autonomy, but it is going to be a great source of insight into human behavior for a long time to come.

Illustration: Geographical distribution of the dominant word for the concepts Computer (left) and Car (right), from the paper.

Follow me on Twitter: @davidberreby

Doris Kearns Goodwin on The Bully Pulpit

Historian and best-selling author Doris Kearns Goodwin discusses the Theodore Roosevelt's bully pulpit in her DSN interview:

"It’s still a tool that a president has to use, especially when things are so paralyzed in Washington. The only way you’re gonna get those characters to move is public pressure to say we’ve had enough, we have to move forward on some of these issues."

One thing to remember is that Roosevelt's word "bully" isn't the same as how we define it today. Instead, it was T.R.'s word for "awesome" or "splendid" or "great." The bully pulpit was his idea of the presidency as a terrific platform for engaging and educating a deadlocked Congress.

Watch the full interview here:

Sam Harris on Transcendent Exprerience

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Making New Friends at the Great Barrier Reef

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

You Can Train Your Brain to Make Better Impulse Decisions

In a world of hot and cold decision-making, things have really heated up in the past decade.

As Steven Cotler and Jamie Wheal explain at Forbes, hot cognition is a term used to describe the making of snap, impulse decisions without aid of a longer assessment period. Hot cognition involves an emotional factor in the face of high risk and pressure. Cold cognition, on the other hand, involves making calculated, pragmatic, and emotionless decisions.

Cotler and Wheal make an important note about the faults of hot cognition, which they say is now invoked much more prevalently than in years past:

"But here’s the thing—because hot cognition is automatic, it is often subject to bias and thus prone to error. We’ve been making more and more of these errors lately and they’ve been sending shockwaves through our society and economy."

Social media in general has rushed the decision times for entities facing difficult decisions -- just look at how sloppily certain NFL entities have performed lately with regard to player suspensions. Luckily, you don't have to be resigned to making dumb moves in the spur of the moment. That's because hot cognition can be trained through "risk rehearsals." For adventurous types, extreme and action sports such as snowboarding, surfing, and skydiving will pump the necessary adrenaline needed for decision test runs. For those a little more risk-averse, it's been found that the hot cognition can improve for players of video games such as first-person shooters that reward a heightened ability for impulse decisions.

The key is in placing yourself in tense situations and being cognizant of how you react. Sharpen these skills under test conditions and you'll be better off for it when the real crunch time begins.

For more on hot and cold cognition, keep reading at Forbes

Photo credit: ra2studio / Shutterstock

Shifting Marital Trends and the Economics of Living Alone

If you were an American adult in 1970, there was a relatively small 30% chance that you were unmarried. Today, that percentage is just over 50%. Such a huge statistical shift has major ramifications in the realm of economics. A nation that operates under the pretense of mass singlehood looks a lot different than one built around married couples. It also features advantages and risks that can have a major effect on an social well-being, according to Allison Schrager of Businessweek

For example, unmarried people tend to have fewer tethers in their lives, which makes them more flexible workers. They may also be more likely to take on the risks of starting a new business if they're not responsible for feeding additional mouths. While those sound like good effects, there's also a long list of singles boom downsides. Unmarried workers tend have only one source of income, therefore elevating the importance that they not lose their job even if they hate it. Also, singles' abilities to maintain a conservative budget and save their money hurts local economies that depend on them spending.

For more, read on at Businessweek

Photo credit: nito / Shutterstock

Before Saying "Yes," Check a Job For Red Flags Before and During the Interview

Here's a common situation: a job interviewee ignores common warning signs from the interview and elects to take the position despite apprehensions. Fast-forward any real unit of time and that person complains every single day that his or her boss, job, or office is displeasing and unsatisfactory.

Avoiding scenarios like this is the purpose of a recent blog post at Forbes by career expert Lisa Quast. In it, she places a particular emphasis on how to pick up on red flags from your job interview. For example, you can reasonably assume that the office you're interviewing at might be kind of dysfunctional if the hiring manager is completely devoid of any degree of professional passion. Are you not being asked difficult questions? Are the goals of the department -- and the company as a whole -- poorly explained? The worst situation is if the troublesome or uninspired person interviewing you is also the person who will supervise you once hired. The job interview is your first glimpse of their leadership in action. If they fail to deliver, don't expect things to get better later on.

It's important to gauge your interviewer's sense of self-awareness and whether they seem to be respected by their co-workers and peers. Perform some basic reconnaissance as long as you're visiting a new office. Try to get a grasp for atmosphere and chemistry. If the workers seem miserable, expect to one day be miserable too. If gloom is what employees convey in front of visitors, you can imagine that more neutral situations would be like.

There's no shame in turning down a job if you have doubts about the office or your potential boss. Of course, that may not come as an option if you're desperate for work, but in either situation, your initial impressions of the workplace will tell a lot about what you can expect as a future employee. Just be sure to reasonably assess risks and benefits so that you'll not regret the decision later.

Read more at Forbes

Photo credit: CREATISTA / Shutterstock

Neil deGrasse Tyson on Getting Kids Interested in Science

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Singularity University's Vivek Wadhwa on Women in the Tech Sector

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Are Corporations Monsters -- or Dragons That Can Be Trained?

A company is a modern-day Frankenstein’s monster. Legally it’s an “artificial person” and like the pitchfork and torch-bearing mob the corporation is also protested by violent crowds. Accused of countless atrocities the corporation is seen as vampiric in how it feeds on our time and energy, releasing us at retirement as dried out husks of our former selves.

Our response to the “monster” says more about us than the monster itself. The true monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was not the creature but the fearful and violent mob. Monstrous acts are ultimately the act of real people. Blaming an entity that only exists as a government registration is as crazy as blaming ghosts.

The idea of the monstrous corporation is ubiquitous in culture. The modern day villain is often the desperate CEO with a secret agent. Luckily we have a long history of epic tales about how to deal with monsters and it’s not a story about conquest. Rather these stories show us the folly in dealing with monsters as something to be eradicated.

The corporation is a monster in the same sense that the creatures in Pokemon are monsters. They are used by people for different purposes but ultimately they are trained creatures. They can be trained poorly or they can be trained well. As creatures the idea they are evil only reflects the destructive and fearful person who holds such an idea (can you imagine a character in Pokemon claiming that all Pokemon must be killed? That would clearly be a villain).

The correct response to the corporate “monster” is taught well in How to Tame Your Dragon. It is not the destruction of the monster that proves your worth but your ability to engage the corporation, work with it, and ultimately create mutually beneficial relationships. The era of “corporation as evil” is over (AKA the 90’s) and a younger generation is growing up happy to live in a world of peaceful coexistence with corporations. They are no longer monsters that must be destroyed but creatures that must be cared for.

Image credit Shutterstock/Melkor3D

The Sad Difference Between "José" and "Joe" on a Job Application

Anyone who purports that race isn't an issue in modern America should look into the story of José Zamora of Hollywood, California. José is the subject of a video posted this week (embedded below) by Buzzfeed Yellow. His testimony about job hunting reveals a disappointing truth about discriminatory hiring practices:

After a long, unfruitful, job search, José decided to see what dropping the "s" from his name would do for his career prospects:

"The Monday I decided to go from José to Joe, seven days later [on] the next Monday, that's when all the responses started coming."

He explains that the very same employers who had ignored him when he was José were now jumping at the opportunity to hire "Joe." He had the exact same résumé as before, save for the first name.

Multiple studies have been conducted to prove how what José went through isn't just an anomaly. A 2002 University of Chicago study showed that white-sounding names like Emily Walsh or Brendan Baker were 50% more likely to get responses from prospective employers than black-sounding names like Lakisha Washington or Jamal Jones. Such discrimination is illegal yet is incredibly hard to prove.

If you're a hiring manager, be sure to always be cognizant of your subconscious biases. Have you ever caught yourself discriminating against certain types of applicants?

Job searchers, have you ever had an experience similar to José's?

Let us know in the comments.

Watch the Video on Buzzfeed Yellow's YouTube Channel

Photo credit: alphaspirit / Shutterstock

Abba Eban on the Lessons of History

Abba Eban (1915-2002) was an Israeli diplomat, scholar, and statesman. He was famous for, among many other things, his expert command of ten different languages. His insight and ability as an orator helped propel him to the rank of Vice President of the UN General Assembly in 1952.

"History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives" ~Abba Eban, 1970

Take some time to watch the below interview between Eban and Mike Wallace, from a time when journalists did.... well.... journalism. Regardless of your opinion on the subject matter, you can't deny Eban's eloquent mastery of words and speech.

They don't make 'em like that anymore.

Playing Video Games Is Going To Really Complicate Your Taxes

In March of this year the IRS decided that Bitcoin (and all virtual currency) is property. Bloomberg points out that, “Purchasing a $2 cup of coffee with Bitcoins bought for $1 would trigger $1 in capital gains for the coffee drinker and $2 of gross income for the coffee shop.”

And like stocks, this means you should hold your Bitcoin to get a better tax rate: “Bitcoins held for more than a year and then sold would face the lower tax rates applicable to capital gains -- a maximum of 23.8 percent compared with the 43.4 percent top rate on property sold within a year of purchase.”

In Section 3. Scope of the IRS Notice 2014-21.pdf it states that, “the use of convertible virtual currency to pay for goods or services in a real-world economy transaction, has tax consequences that may result in a tax liability.” The convertible aspect refers to the virtual currency that has an equivalent value for real currency. The notice the IRS put out is specifically dealing with these kinds of “convertible” virtual currencies and not something like an in-game currency which has no equivalent value.

In Video Game Land we have Free To Play (F2P) games that allow you to buy virtual currencies. But these are not convertible because you can never get real money back. If you buy a thousand gold coins for $39.99, spend it on a new flaming sword and then turn that into a million coins by slaying a dragon, you’re only rich in Video Game Land.

Unless of course games like VoidSpace become common. VoidSpace is an in-progress space-themed simulation game that will use the crypto currency Dogecoin in the game. Meaning the “gold” of the game will actually have a real world value. Meaning that if you do very well playing the game you are going to have an incredibly complicated tax filing. ;)

Innovating at Scale Requires Vision and Discipline

Every new company reaches a point where the straws have been grasped and a next major step appears imminent. It's a time when the early stages of innovating (and talking about innovating) seems to take a back seat to scaling. The company gets bigger. It doubles-down on its products. It plays with the hand its got.

But as Frank Addante explains over at Wired, a smart company knows that there's no reason why growth can't coincide with further innovation. We've talked about this subject before. You don't want to end up like Blackberry, a company that failed to be dynamic in an industry that moves as fast as a Bitcoin transfer.

Addante, the CEO of The Rubicon Project, suggests a strong and continuous financial commitment to innovation, even if you have to trick yourself into doing it:

"A solution for this is to setup a separate “savings account” for innovation. Keep your checking and savings accounts separate. In theory, there is really no reason why you shouldn’t be able to manage both in one account, right? But, the reason we create separate checking and savings accounts is because it forces discipline."

Keeping the separate savings account clean needs to be a major priority, Addante explains. It also takes a keen vision to know when and how to spend the money. The important thing is that it's there and it's earmarked for innovation -- the thing that will keep your company alive year after year after year.

Read more of Addante's article at Wired.

Photo credit: Chones / Shutterstock

For Greater Happiness, Limit Social Media Time, Studies Suggest

An impressively large study out of Italy confirms what many American researchers have found here at home: too much time spent on social media correlates negatively with wellbeing and happiness. And while American studies have often been limited to self-selected populations of college undergraduates, the Italian research, conducted alongside the country's National Institute of Statistics, gathered data from 24,000 Italian households corresponding to 50,000 individuals.

"[The survey] found for example that...if you tend to trust people and have lots of face-to-face interactions, you will probably assess your well-being more highly. But of course interactions on online social networks are not face-to-face and this may impact the trust you have in people online. It is this loss of trust that can then affect subjective well-being rather than the online interaction itself."

Particularly troubling to researchers was the amount of discrimination and hate speech commonly found in places where people go to express themselves and gauge the opinion of others. The team concluded that better moderation of social networks could greatly improve user experience and positively affect self-assesment of their wellbeing. This is the first time that use of social networks was addressed in such a large and nationally representative study.

I previously wrote about the role of social media in creating an echo chamber for inflexible ideology instead of diversifying the marketplace of ideas--an effect exacerbated by search algorithms that return results based partially on your past browsing history.

Ultimately the power is in our hands says University of Chicago neuroscientist John Cacioppo. In his DSN interview he explains how we can use technology to create meaningful social interaction:

Read more at MIT Technology Review

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Why Your Devices Shouldn't Do the Work of Being You

In my post last week I linked to some work by Evan Selinger, a philosopher at the Rochester Institute of Technology who has been thinking hard about the ways seemingly convenient and harmless technologies affect their users. I Skyped Selinger the other day and we spoke about the impact that current and soon-to-be gadgets are having on people's personal autonomy. What follows is an edited version of that conversation. This is the first in an occasional series of interviews with thinkers doing important work in and around the subject of autonomy and the changes it is undergoing.

DB: Apple's upcoming iOS will have a predictive text feature that goes beyond spell check. It will analyze your emails and texts and use that to make guesses about what you're going to write next. In other words, it will suggest words and sentences for your texts and emails. That sounds convenient and harmless. Yet you're alarmed by it. Why?

ES: I'm horrified by this, to be honest with you. What worries me about this is that this will seem like a cool feature to most users. So that rather than needing to fill out my thoughts to you, I'll say something good enough, that was recommended. And to put in the energy and effort to override a good-enough [phrase], you have to overcome a certain amount of inertia. It will require extra effort to do that. And so I think there's going to be a natural temptation to rely on that tool rather than override it. The more we don't autonomously struggle with language, grapple to find the right word, muscle through to bend language poetically, the less we're able to really treat conversation as an intentional act. As something that really expresses what we're trying to say. And as goes the iPhone so goes the rest of the world, right? The LA Times when they redesigned their online version, each piece begins with three tweetable summaries. And they do it [above the article, so you can tweet without even reading it and deciding what you think matters in it]. Are successful tweeters going to use this? Probably not. But the fact that this is becoming more embedded in the architecture, that’s what concerns me. I believe we’re starting to find more and more cases where what we want to communicate to people will be automated. There are more opportunities to automate that.

DB: But the end result of these apps is very likely going to be same as it would have been if a human had done the work herself. That's why predictive text works, because it can make a good guess about what you're going to say. So why not offload the work to an app?

ES: Except predicting you is predicting a predictable you. Which is itself subtracting from your autonomy. And it’s encouraging you to be predictable, to be a facsimile of yourself. So it's prediction and a nudge at the same moment. It’s not just a guessing game—"here’s what I think you would say." It’s providing you the option to [go with the prediction]. And imposing a cost of energy to override.

DB: But if the prediction is good, because the analysis is really astute, what's the harm?

ES: I guess the slogan answer here would be something like "effort is the currency of care." And by effort I mean a deliberate focussed presence. When we abdicate that, we inject less care into a relationship. That's what I think automation does. And that's what I think some of these people leave out of the equation.

DB: But no one is imposing these apps on people. If you don't want to use predictive text to write your email, you can turn it off. If that video of JIBO the family robot reading to the kid creeps you out, just don't buy one. What's the problem?

ES: Once it’s available, it's hard to have the willpower to override something. Especially when we think it's convenient and harmless [because our model is] spell checkers and calculators. [But with those] we outsource cognitive tasks, not intimate ones. Relationships are different.

DB: Still, it's hard to imagine why people would want more friction in their lives than they have to have. What principle could they use to sort out techs that help from techs that harm?

ES: ES: [The philosopher] Albert Borgmann distinguishes between the "device paradigm" and "focal practices." The device paradigm turns things into commodities—into things that are ubiquitous, easy and require no effort or understanding. I get in my car, drive off, I have no idea how it works. I live in this environment that gives me everything I want while it requires very little of me. Little by way of skill, by way of understanding. And that is supposed to be the good life. His point is that we've been so disburdened of effort through the device paradigm, we're incentivized to put less effort into our lives.

And we're told this is the apex, this is eudaemonia.

Borgmann thinks it is completely the other way around. That we only find real meaning in our lives in these instances where we're focused and attentive and building up skill. In a focal practice there isn't a separation of means from ends. These are activities where the journey is as important as the destination. It calls forth skill in a way that we feel a sense of accomplishment when we do it. And it gives us a memorable sense of experience. It gives us a vivid sense of experience. It gives us a connected sense of experience. He says, for example, that rather than running with headphones you should run while paying attention to your body and your posture and your breathing and you're taking in the environment.

DB: But the selling point for tech is supposed to exactly this: By automating these repetitive aspects of life (the text you send all the time, the work of thinking about dinner and getting it assembled) you have more time for focal experiences.

ES: So what we want to do when we're not burdened by crap is care about stuff. [Trouble is] this is the thing that precisely prevents us from being able to care about stuff. The ads say "we'll automate this task and you go spend time caring" but we're building the infrastructure so you can't.

DB: So what can people do to protect their autonomy—their ability to be their engaged and unpredictable selves?

ES: The best that we can do is become more [alert] to the values that are embedded in these systems. And ask what kinds of people we become if we become dependent on them. If we become habituated to them, if our relationships become more mediated by them. What makes this so complicated is that there are no bad actors. No one is out there trying to degrade the quality of our lives. It's that their agendas are small but collectively these small agendas can have a profound impact on who we are.

Follow me on Twitter: @davidberreby

Is Haruki Murakami the Thelonius Monk of Fiction?

From 1974 through 1981, Haruki Murakami ran a jazz club in Tokyo, Japan, and wondered what direction his life would run. After long soul searching, his life ran in the direction of becoming a novelist. He hasn’t stopped running since, producing 13 novels that not only have won international awards, but also have been translated into over 50 languages, thus making him the most well-known Japanese novelist in the world. His latest novel to be translated into English, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage , adds to his oeuvre one more tale of dreamy, surreal, puzzling, yet oddly beautiful human existence. Despite his success, Murakami (shown above) still faces criticism for his writing style, which some see as overly simple and occasionally downright ugly—criticisms once aimed at the Murakami beloved bebop jazz, the style employed by the enigmatic, brilliant pianist Thelonious Monk. Is Haruki Murakami the Thelonius Monk of fiction?

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage ’s title character, like so many of Murakami’s characters going all the way back to his first great novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , can’t shake the past, specifically a traumatic moment from the past he’s tried to forget. In Tsukuru’s case, that hinge in his personal history happens when his four closest friends in the world—two young women and two young men with whom he’d formed a pentagram of perfect communion during their high school years—suddenly call him to tell him that they no longer wish to have him in their lives with no explanation. After a brief, near-suicidal period, Tsukuru regains his equilibrium but never finds a new relationship of the same depth or intimacy. Sixteen years pass before a woman enters his life and challenges him to confront his old friends and solve the mystery of the breakup so that they might consider a life together free of his emotional baggage. Tsukuru sets out on a pilgrimage to find his former friends and to find inner peace with the person he’d become after his abandonment.

For those who’ve read Murakami’s previous novels, all his familiar tropes appear: snippets of classical, jazz, and even pop music that trigger powerful memories and emotions; elaborate descriptions of even the simplest activities such as a bachelor’s dinner or a cup of coffee; passages of explicit sexual content that range from sad to blissful; surprising moments of violence that spike through the placidity of all around it; dreams so intensely visceral they blur the line between the real and unreal. For those who haven’t read Murakami before, he can often be an acquired taste, but often an addictive one, as proven by his fiercely loyal fan base in Japan (which bought over 1 million copies of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in the first week after publication) and around the world.

The “colorless” quality suggested by the title comes from the colorful names of Tsukuru’s former friends, whose Japanese names mean red, blue, black, and white. Only Tsukuru (whose name means “to build”) lacks color, something he internalizes psychologically to the point that it drains the color from his entire life, rendering him devoid of emotions and passions of any strength, at least until Sara splashes onto the scene. Before Sara, the only part of Tsukuru’s life approximating passion is his life-long attraction to train stations, which he eventually learns to build, thus fulfilling the meaning of his colorless name. “Unceasing crowds of people arrived out of nowhere, automatically formed lines, boarded the trains in order, and were carried off somewhere,” Murakami writes of Tsukuru’s reverie at one station. “Tsukuru was moved by how many people actually existed in the world… It was surely a miracle, he thought.” In response to the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway that killed 13 people and injured over 1,000—the most horrific domestic terrorist attack in modern Japanese history—Murakami wrote the nonfiction work Underground , yet clearly the wonder of the Tokyo transit system, both its tremendous efficiency as well as its tragic vulnerability, lingers in Murakami’s mind and resurfaces in this novel. Murakami weaves these two metaphors of color and movement throughout the novel in an understated but omnipresent manner.

Murakami’s detractors, however, see his handling of language as one muddle of ideas with little form and less facility with language—the curse of someone who turned to writing at a late age, or at least that’s the narrative they use. The New York Times’ Jennifer Szalaiaug recently addressed the question of whether Murakami’s a bad writer or merely the victim of bad translations. “When reviewing Murakami’s new novel for The Atlantic,” Szalaiaug points out, “Nathaniel Rich puzzled over why ‘no great writer writes as many bad sentences as Murakami does,’ enumerating a litany of sins that include ‘awkward construction,’ ‘cliché addiction,’ ‘lazy repetition’ and dialogue that ‘is often robotic, if charmingly so.’” Philip Gabriel, the translator of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and past Murkami novels, has won awards for his translations of Japanese authors. When Gabriel translates Nobel Prize-winning Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe, for example, no complaints are raised. Also, Murakami knows English well enough to translate and publish works from English into Japanese, so he’d surely know if the English translation of his work reflected poorly on the original Japanese.

I don’t think the Murakami style in English results from something lost in translation or an accurate translation of a paradoxically “bad” good writer. I believe Murakami in English (and most likely in the original Japanese, too) sounds the way he does for a specific purpose and to convey a specific mood. (In his Atlantic review, Rich almost grudgingly suspects the same thing.) When a mysterious jazz pianist appears in in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and begins to play Thelonious Monk’s signature piece, “’Round Midnight,” the connection between Murakami and Monk became clearer. Murakami listed Monk among his favorites in his essay collection Portrait in Jazz and specifically cited Monk’s “Jackie-ing.” (You can hear the whole playlist from that essay collection here.) Instead of “’Round Midnight” or “Jackie-ing,” however, the Monk song that came to mind in the context of Murakami was “Misterioso.” Playing around with his reputation for mysteriousness personally and musically, Monk begins “Misterioso” with an almost childish tune played with a beginner’s awkwardness, disarming the listener before the full attack of dissonance and percussive chords fall upon your ears and open your eyes to the sophistication and rough beauty of that simplicity and awkwardness. Just as you learn that “colorless” Tsukuru is anything but, Murakami and Monk both contain colors and shades of meaning in a variety of complex moods that standard issue virtuosity often can’t.

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language,” one character tells Tsukuru as he juggles multiple languages during his multinational pilgrimage. I won’t be giving away the ending of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in saying that there’s really no ending, just as most other Murakami novels slip away like the dreams he loves to write about. For Murakami, telling the story and engaging in the process of the story is the point, like the endlessly riffing of a great jazz musician on a theme. Murakami’s novels found an audience more quickly than Monk’s music did in its day, but we may not yet have heard every trick and message this great author has to offer.

When Is Using Uber Cheaper than Owning a Car?

As companies like Uber and Lyft turn the cars of ordinary drivers into taxi cabs, at what point does using their service become cheaper than owning a car? That's a difficult question, and it varies depending on location because of varying gas prices, taxi fare, insurance rates, and parking fees. Los Angeles resident Kyle Hill, however, has crunched the numbers for his personal vehicle and provides you with a formula you could use to find the truth about your yearly driving expenses. For Hill, the estimated yearly cost of owning a vehicle came to $12,744 while the cost of taking UberX rides (the company's least expensive option) he estimated at $18,115.

In general, the cost of car-sharing services has yet to out-price operating a vehicle yourself. Still, the rates are often cheaper than a taxi cab and this has caused a German court to issue an injunction against UberX across the entire country. The cheaper rates, the court argues, are a result of unfair practices such as forgoing the insurance and licensing fees required of taxi cab companies as well as freelance drivers.

The market is changing, to be sure. So at what point would you abandon your vehicle? It is purely a dollars and cents decision or would the prospect of having a personal driver encourage you to spend a little more? In his DSN interview, INSEAD professor of technology Karan Girotra explains what is meant by business modeling innovation (BMI), which Uber has used to great success:

Read more at TechCrunch

Photo credit: Shutterstock

English Artist Brightens the Sidewalk By Painting Stuck Chewing Gum

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.