“…A FINAL RESTING PLACE FOR THOSE WHO HERE GAVE THEIR LIVES THAT THAT NATION MIGHT LIVE”

November 11, 2007.

DINNER WITH THE NEW MAPMAKER

Last night, I enjoyed a delicious meal at Fogo de Chao in the company of Dr. Barnett, his very bright and spirited daughter, Emily, fellow Chicago Boyz blogger Lexington Green and his gracious wife…umm…”Mrs. Green“. As Brazilian cuisine is basically a salad followed by about seven pounds of meat, we may all still be in the process of digestion even as I write this post (Special thanks to Sean ” Jack Bauer” Meade and Mrs. Zenpundit for facilitating the communication logistics of this get-together).

This was my first occasion meeting Tom and he was pretty much as I had expected him to be, except taller. An interesting aspect of the discussion was that if you have seen Dr. Barnett’s televised brief, that represents a modulated pacing, of his sometimes rapid-fire conversational delivery, highly energized by ideas and their prospective implementation. The discussion was wide-ranging and intriguing, though some elements of it have been or will be posted on Tom’s blog as they related to his recent Central Asian tour with Admiral Fallon, chief of CENTCOM, but good books, politics, Japanese anime, various public intellectuals and writing all came up as topics of conversation.

The food was excellent, as was the company. I’d like to thank Dr. Barnett for taking the time out of a very busy travel schedule with Emily for a social engagement with the Greens and myself, as well as for dinner. The generous gesture is much appreciated. It was also a pleasure to see Lex and his wife again. Hopefully, we can all sit down again sometime in the future.

RECOMMENDED READING

An eclectic grouping today. Feel badly that I have not posted much lately but I’ve been working on some short pieces for other venues, a couple of large projects at work and (today) getting my application papers together for a doctoral program ( hopefully, a joint degree if two departments will sign off. We’ll see. I’ve learned to suspect the breezy assertions of university bureaucrats). Without further ado.

Top Billing! The Man Who is Thursday -“The Creative and the Critical, or Taste and Genius“

This link was left by an anonymous commenter. It’s good fodder for discussion and probably deserves a post of it’s own in response, by me or Dan of tdaxp. Like me, Dan’s pretty busy these days so, we’ll see if anyone gets to it. LOL! In any event, worth your time to read.

Robert Satloff in WaPo – “How to Win The War Of Ideas“

One thought that arises reading Satloff, is that we need to distinguish the degree to which non-Salafist or secular Muslims are intimidated by takfiri death threats; to scenarios where they lack the resources to speak out effectively; and finally, the extent to which we are simply unaware of the intra-Muslim dialogue because it is entirely off of our radar.

Pundita -“Speaking your truth vs fighting the ideas of others“

Pundita critiques Satloff and argues that we are not very well suited to try an orchestrate other society’s political debates over the fine points of Islamic theology and that investing deeply in promoting democratic or liberal governance, something we understand, is a wiser investment of scarce resources.

Thomas P.M. Barnett – “Barnett: Build better fairy dust, suffer fewer bad actors“

Rule-sets and transparency go hand in hand with connectivity and intersectional convergence. Tom jumps on the The Medici Effect bandwagon. I’m waiting for him to read Wikinomics and see the congruency of the two books.

Swedish Meatballs Confidential – “Sinuous Sunday – The Sharp End of Altruism” and “CATCH-ALL – Suck it Up – All of It“

The first is interesting. The second is important.

Opposed System Design – “Game Theorizing with Bueno de Mesquita“

“Another study evaluating Bueno de Mesquita’s real-time forecasts of 21 policy decisions in the European community concluded that “the probability that the predicted outcome was what indeed occurred was an astounding 97 percent.”

Hmmm …. amazing ….but predicated on the existence of a particular cultural-epistemological basis of rationality ? Will this work with assessing mountain tribesmen in New Guinea or Vietnamese Politburo members ?

That’s it!

ADD TO SCHOLARSHIP, TAKE TDAXP’S SURVEY

On Creativity and Blogging. You don’t need to have a blog to take the survey so be a good egg and help him out.

OPEN-SOURCE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

One of the more significant developments in terms of creativity in the past decade has been the advance of open-source platforms that permit asynchronous but real-time, mass collaboration to occur. A phenomena that has been the subject of recent books like Frans Johansson’s The Medici Effect and Wikinomics:How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams; or, become a functioning business model as with Ross Mayfield’s Socialtext; or, a metaphor for the evolution of a new dynamic of warfare, as in John Robb’s book, Brave New War. And nearly everyone with an ISP is familiar with Wikipedia and most have at least heard of Linux.

The open source concept is a very useful one because it has efficiency, in both the evolutionary and economic senses, adapting faster than closed, hierarchical, competitors and at lower transactional cost ( the price for these advantages is diminished control and focus). As with scale-free networks, it was the advent of the internet and the web that brought the potential of mass collaboration to the attention of economists and social scientists. But did mass collaboration on the cognitive level (the physical level is as old Stonehenge or the pyramids) only start with the information revolution ?

Probably not.

If we look back far enough in the history of great civilizations, you will find semi-mythological figures like Homer or Confucius to whom great, even foundational, works of cultural creativity are attributed. Intellects of a heroic scale who were philosophers and kings, lawgivers, prophets or poets and who produced works of timeless genius. Except that they may either not have existed or their works represent efforts of refinement by many generations of anonymous disciples ( eventually, scholars) who interpreted, polished, redacted and expanded on the teachings of the revered master.

This too was mass collaboration, over a much longer time scale and of a much more opaque character than Wikipedia. Scriptural works went through a similar process, whether it was the scribes of King James, or a medieval Ulemna favoring some teachings of the Hadith over others, or Jewish sages translating the Torah into Greek, despite occasional claims of divine inerrancy, most religious texts were shaped by a succession of human hands.

What the Web has done is to vastly accelerate and democratize the process of mass collaboration and render it more transparent than ever before.