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Our democracy can work only if voters know how the world works, so they are able to make intelligent policy choices and are less apt to fall prey to demagogues, ideological zealots, or conspiracy buffs who may be confusing
“Turning the “dumb mob” into the ”smart mob” is one of the key challenges of good governance in the age of social media. Bringing deliberative processes to cyberspace, augmenting the ability of ad hoc groups to gather information, analyze it, organize proposals and arguments, model outcomes, compare alternative approaches, and negotiate hybrid “positive sum” solutions –- all of these together might help forge the smart mob (millions of them) out of the dumb mobs that we’ve known until now.”
― Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East
― Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East
“Here’s my trick: I replace “What if I can’t?” with “What if I don’t?” and I get the push that I need to jump and see what happens. What if I don’t face this fear? How will I feel? Will I be satisfied? I needed to reframe problems as an opportunities to do something great. My family is full of”
― Reframe: Shift the Way You Think, Work, and Innovate
― Reframe: Shift the Way You Think, Work, and Innovate
“Myths are like the beams in a house: not exposed to outside view, they are the structure which holds the house together so people can live in it.”
― The Cry for Myth
― The Cry for Myth
“we had to unlearn a great deal of what we thought we knew about how war—and the world—worked. We had to tear down familiar organizational structures and rebuild them along completely different lines, swapping our sturdy architecture for organic fluidity, because it was the only way to confront a rising tide of complex threats. Specifically, we restructured our force from the ground up on principles of extremely transparent information sharing (what we call “shared consciousness”) and decentralized decision-making authority (“empowered execution”). We dissolved the barriers—the walls of our silos and the floors of our hierarchies—that had once made us efficient. We looked at the behaviors of our smallest units and found ways to extend them to an organization of thousands, spread across three continents. We became what we called “a team of teams”: a large command that captured at scale the traits of agility normally limited to small teams.”
― Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
― Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World
“In 1862, the Scottish mathematician James Clerk Maxwell developed a set of fundamental equations that unified electricity and magnetism. On his deathbed, he coughed up a strange sort of confession, declaring that “something within him” discovered the famous equations, not he. He admitted he had no idea how ideas actually came to him—they simply came to him. William Blake related a similar experience, reporting of his long narrative poem Milton: “I have written this poem from immediate dictation twelve or sometimes twenty lines at a time without premeditation and even against my will.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe claimed to have written his novella The Sorrows of Young Werther with practically no conscious input, as though he were holding a pen that moved on its own.”
― Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
― Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain
Johnseelybrown’s 2025 Year in Books
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