Will Your Original Idea Work? No One Knows Now

Image of Nassim Nicholas Taleb at IdeaFestival 2008: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

For every Turkey, Thanksgiving is a Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb

What can the past teach us? When it comes to innovation, less than you might think.

Writing on his excellent blog, Farnam Street, Shane Parrish uses observations by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in Taleb's book "Anti-fragile" to make a point about the shortcomings of planning.

Our documented history can blind us. All we know is what we have been able to record.

We think because we have sophisticated data collecting techniques that we can capture all the data necessary to make decisions.

Discussing the use of worse-case scenarios by banking institutions to harden themselves against future crises, Taleb, Parrish writes, helpfully points out that those "worst cases" were simply the worst crisis at the time.

The relationship to innovation and creativity should be obvious. Your entrepreneurial idea for a product or service, your scientific hypothesis, your creative interpretation of current events as an interactive artist may be well and truly nuts.

But as with all true originals, no one can tell you that now. The future is fundamentally unknowable.

Taleb, incidentally, spoke at IdeaFestival 2008, just as world markets were crashing. The timing was coincidental.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Hide and Seek

Some rights reserved by stimpsonjake

We've all been there. Embarrassed by the revealed secret, suddenly bored at a dinner party, taken aback by an argument that had been a pleasant exchange only moments before, we sometimes wish we could just disappear.

What if we could?

As reported in "What Does it Feel Like to Be Invisible?" research using an "elaborate psychological trick" has made invisibility possible, at least in our heads. Researchers have succeeded in turning off the body through misdirection, leaving the mind to fill in the blanks.

Faced with contradictory information—the feel of the bristles against their torsos clashing with the sight of a brush touching nothing—many people experienced the uncanny sensation that their body had become transparent. This spell proved powerful. When those who succumbed to it watched a knife being thrust through the empty space, their skin reacted. Its electrical conductance jumped, which the researchers interpreted as a stress reaction to this threat against the invisible self. Volunteers who saw a knife but did not experience the invisibility illusion had a much smaller reaction.

Our minds are always providing missing information, of course. Magicians depend on it. And at the IdeaFestival, "Invisible Gorilla" author Daniel Simons and Teller - he talked! - demonstrated how just how malleable our minds and attention can be.

Nature reports that researcher Arvid Guterstam, the cognitive neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden behind the project, wants to further test the effects of invisibility by putting his willing subjects in moral dilemmas.

Given the advance of meta-material technology, the lessons learned may prove valuable.

Wayne

"You" Are Speech?

See more details at www.speechlesssdoc.com

Besides being a tool for communication, this story at Nautilus makes an important point about what speech does.

A new documentary film called "Speechless" documents how three people stricken with Aphoria have coped with this intimate disorder, which renders its victims unable to process language effectively, generally as a result of stroke.

Tinna Geula Phillips, one of the subjects of the film, could speak six languages prior to her stroke in 1997. Nautilus:

But one of the most profound effects was losing the ability to speak with herself. Her inner monologue disappeared for several months, leaving her unable to process her own thoughts in what is considered a psychologically 'normal' way. The ability to converse with one’s self, known as 'self-talk,' or 'inner speech,' is essential for conceptualizing our emotions, processing our memories, and for predicting the future. It is inherently associated with our sense of self.

Whether internal or external, speech compiles and makes sense of the datum provided by our eyes and ears and hands and nose. Given this executive role, I'm surprised I had never thought of individual identity being tied to it, particularly given my interest in philosophy of mind, which is briefly mentioned in the Nautilus piece, and that my faith tradition makes clear that "I" am what regularly comes out of my mouth.

Watch the film trailer if you get the chance.

Please remember that our Early Bird rate for IdeaFestival 2015 festival passes is good only through April 30 - eight days from now. On May 1 the price for a pass will increase, so get yours today!

Wayne

To Land a Seven-Story Building on an Ocean Barge, Just Read the Instructions

Uploaded by SpaceX on 2015-04-15.

Imagine if you had to build a new car every time you went somewhere. That expensive method has been standard operating procedure in the orbital launch industry for sixty years.

SpaceX is trying to change that. Contracted by NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station, the private company has been testing autonomous return technology in the last year and a half in order to eventually save its flight vehicles.

It works something like this: after the first stage has burned out and the Dragon capsule has been dispatched to chase down the ISS, the first stage coasts briefly on its own momentum to a peak altitude of roughly 87 miles before flipping end-over-end and relighting the motors to begin a controlled return to Earth.

The company has been testing this technology on successive resupply flights since late 2013, first by successfully relighting the main engines, then by achieving a controlled descent to a soft water landing and, finally, on the last two flights, by trying to land upright on an ocean barge.

The SpaceX video above shows the final moments of the seven-story tall Falcon 9 first stage as it tried Wednesday to land on "Just Read the Instructions."

The eventual goal is to autonomously return every rocket stage, including the capsule, Dragon, to Kennedy Space Center in Florida for refitting and re-flight. Should the SpaceX succeed, the cost to its customers for orbital access will be exponentially lowered.

The ISS, by the way, successfully grappled Dragon this morning and will soon begin offloading the capsule's contents, which include crew supplies, science experiments and a number of small satellites called "cubesats" that will be launched in very low orbits from the space station itself. In two or three weeks, Dragon will be loaded with refuse and completed science experiments before parachuting to the Pacific ocean.

Wayne

Stay Curious. "Non-Routine Cognitive" Jobs on the Rise

Image: Some rights reserved by roger4336

Why stay curious? "Non-routine cognitive" jobs are on the rise, according to research published in the Wall Street Journal and linked today in a tweet by former IdeaFestival speaker, Tony Wagner.

In recessions of the 1960s and 1970s, routine jobs would fall during the recession but quickly snap back. But after the recession in 1990, something changed. Routine jobs fell and, as a share of the population, never recovered. In the recessions in 2001 and in 2007-09 they fell even further. The snapback never occurred, suggesting that many firms began coping with recessions by scrapping tasks that could be automated or more easily outsourced....

But they are not among the labor market’s pessimists who fear that robots will render humans obsolete. Their work shows the economy has continued to generate jobs, but with a focus on nonroutine work, especially cognitive. Since the late 1980s, such occupations have added more than 22 million workers.

"Is your job routine? If so, it's probably disappearing."

Wayne