Re: [ba-unrev-talk] The Good Work Project
Thanks for the suggestion, Eugene. In fact, I have the book and it is a
candidate for review. This volume covers work in two areas: genetics and
journalism. (01)
On the subject of reviews, I got into a bind, the kind of bind we may draw
lessons from, so let me detail the issue a little. (02)
I feel that at this point it would be useful to take a fresh look at what we
are trying to augment. In this connection I recently sketched a diagram which
I'll attach again. The scale is still coarse, but it does give an indication
what points to attend to for achieving augmentation. The diagram led me to try
to give priority to material on the functioning of the brain. I chose John
McCrone's book "Going Inside." The following URL gives chapter summaries: (03)
http://www.btinternet.com/~neuronaut/webtwo_chapter_summary.html (04)
An immediate problem, of course, is reviewer competence. A second problem is
how to establish and extract those items of information most likely to be of
value to the augmentation effort. (05)
A third problem is the fact that recent years appear to have caused some major
changes away from what had become conventional wisdom, such as the Turing
paradigm (brain and computer, just different info processing systems, but
principles the same). Revision of Darwinism to include consequences of chaos
theory is another subject. These kind of things raise the question, how
up-to-date is this 1999 book? It also suggest a need for new (educational)
publishing paradigms in which an OHS could be a major factor: experts working
together to keep topic up to snuff so that those using aspects of a topic
(non-experts now!) can quickly modify their thinking where needed. (06)
Looking at the book I somehow tried to make some quick-and-dirty comparisons
with Pinker's "How the Mind Works." Pinker is most respectable in the field,
but his book is two years older. My first, but probably too hasty an
impression: toss away Pinker. (07)
All in all, we need an OHS, or something that can fill the gap in the
meantime. Then, of course, Fleabyte has to become somehow respectable enough
for knowledgeable people to participate in it maintenance - and in the process
become a decent publication devoted to augmentation.. (08)
It's a toughie! (09)
Seems that I have been drifting from the subject, Eugene, but, then again,
isn't it about puttong one's heart in journalism? (010)
Henry (011)
Eugene Eric Kim wrote: (012)
> One of Howard Gardner's current projects is the Good Work Project:
>
> http://www.goodworkproject.org/
>
> An excerpt from the site:
>
> Since 1995, three teams of investigators, under the direction of Howard
> Gardner, of Harvard University (Project Zero ), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
> of Claremont Graduate University, and William Damon of Stanford
> University, have been researching the ways in which leading
> professionals in a variety of domains carry out good work. "Good work"
> is used in a dual sense: 1) work that is deemed to be of high quality
> and 2) work that is socially responsible.
>
> The three published a book on their research, which I think would be a
> perfect candidate for review on Fleabyte.
>
> -Eugene
>
> --
> +=== Eugene Eric Kim ===== eekim@eekim.com ===== http://www.eekim.com/ ===+
> | "Writer's block is a fancy term made up by whiners so they |
> +===== can have an excuse to drink alcohol." --Steve Martin ===========+ (013)
