Big Questions

Do search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities?

Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Umoja Noble

If you had to choose, would you rather live in a world without technology, or a world without religion? — Origin by Brown

• Could one genetic scientist who is a Christian work side-by-side in a lab with a genetic scientist who is an atheist? (Lanier)

Do people have a right to be forgotten on Google and Social Media in general?

• artificial intelligence: DeepMind
• follow the money: Google Acquisition Tracker
• news: Google News
• race to the moon: Lunar Prize
• the view inside: How Google Works Schmidt
• 3D motion & depth sensing: Project Tango
• topic curation: Knowledge Graph

What ethical questions arise by the reviving of a pig brain, and eventually, a human brain?

• adolescence: The Teenage Brain Jensen
• brain+machine: Beyond Boundaries Nicolelis
• consciousness: The Quest for Consciousness Koch
• online: IQ test
• what your head is really up to: Idiot Brain Burnett

Human nature doesn’t change much, but science does, and is it accelerating beyond our control?

• citizen science: citizenscience
• confirmation bias: the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what one already believes.
• engaging the public: World Science Festival
• innovation: Science is the Great Giver Gates
• passionate realist: Science in the Soul
• What We Believe but Cannot Prove Brockman

Big Picture

Big Picture / Knowledge Creation

The search engine is no longer a model for human knowledge, it is human knowledge. So, who (or what) is at the controls?

Dyson

Logic

• common sense
• Benjamin Franklin
• Introduction to Logic Copi

Mathematics

Science

Humanities

• Beginner’s Guide to the Humanities Bishop
• enterprise: palantirtech
• executive education: Apple University
• native intelligence (institutional memory)
• questions & answers:
  • bepl
  • quora
• survey & assessment: questionmark

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Philosophy

Write it on your heart
that every day is the best day in the year.
He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day
who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety.

Finish every day and be done with it.
You have done what you could.
Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in.
Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day;
begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit
to be cumbered with your old nonsense.

This new day is too dear,
with its hopes and invitations,
to waste a moment on the yesterdays.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

  
How the Force Can Fix the World: Lessons on Life, Liberty, and Happiness from a Galaxy Far, Far Away by Stephen Kent
Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson

• History of Philosophy
• The Nature and Divisions of Philosophy
• Philosophical Schools and Doctrines
  • Major philosophical schools in the West
  • Theories of being and existence
    • What’s the secret to life?
    • inherent goodness of people and nature
      • transcendentalist: The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Theories of thought, knowledge, faculties of mind
  • Theories of conduct
    • balance: Balancing Towards Peace (sp)
    • hope & optimism: research
    • moral relativism: Barrett’s moral relativism is cause for rejection from the bench
    • simplicity:
      • Walden and Civil Disobedience by Thoreau
      • antidote to chaos: 12 Rules for Life Peterson
    • Truth and Trust

Preservation of Knowledge

Censorship is the child of fear, and the father of ignorance.

Laurie Halse Anderson

• artifacts: shipwrecks
• crowd:
  • front page of the internet: Reddit
  • naming: Boaty McBoatface
  • singing together: Choir! Choir! Choir!
  • science: galaxyzoo
• Education
• images:
  • Image Permanence Institute
  • Photo Ark
• libraries
  • advocacy: EveryLibrary, Little Free Libraries
  • ancient capital of knowledge: The Great Library of Alexandria
  • censorship:
    • A Birthday Cake for George Washington
    • Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom
  • data-driven: Panorama Library Analytics
  • Vonnegut Library
• museums and galleries:
  • aviation: museumofflight
  • Christianity: Museum of the Bible
  • cowboys: National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum
  • design: design-museum
  • digitized: Smithsonian
  • emerging artists: Miguel Abreu Gallery
  • general:
    • International Museum Day
    • British Museum
    • Tate.org
  • homo sapiens: Neanderthal Museum
  • immigrants: Tenement Museum
  • largest dinosaur exhibit: Sue T-Rex
  • medicines: Pharmacy Museum
  • science: Museum of Science and Industry
  • spys:
    • International Spy Museum
    • KGB Spy Museum
  • surrealism: The Dali Museum
• online
  • search: Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Umoja Noble
  • web pages: Wayback Machine

Ideas, Creativity, Design

What We Believe but Cannot Prove: Today’s Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty by John Brockman

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