Daniel Lubetzky

From an article in the New York Times quoting George Dyson:

Somehow the genius quants — the best and brightest geeks Wall Street firms could buy — fed $1 trillion in subprime mortgage debt into their supercomputers, added some derivatives, massaged the arrangements with computer algorithms and — poof! — created $62 trillion in imaginary wealth.

And:

“The unlimited replication of information is generally a public good,” George Dyson writes. “The problem starts, as the current crisis demonstrates, when unregulated replication is applied to money itself. Highly complex computer-generated financial instruments (known as derivatives) are being produced, not from natural factors of production or other goods, but purely from other financial instruments.”

Also fascinating from the same article:

Here’s a frightening party trick that I learned from the futurist Ray Kurzweil. Read this excerpt and then I’ll tell you who wrote it:

But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. … Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

Brace yourself. It comes from the Unabomber’s manifesto.

Yes, Theodore Kaczinski was a homicidal psychopath and a paranoid kook, but he was also a bloodhound when it came to scenting all of the horrors technology holds in store for us. Hence his mission to kill technologists before machines commenced what he believed would be their inevitable reign of terror.

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You only learn who has been swimming naked when the tide goes out – and what we are witnessing at some of our largest financial
institutions is an ugly sight."

- Warren Buffett

Sent from my iPhone – pardon typos

From an email I got from my sister:

Spirituality is a direct measure of how much joy we experience in our lives…It is not how much we pray, meditate, prostrate ourselves; it is in direct connection to how much joy we give to others that surround us, and how much joy we experience ourselves."

- Guru Baghavan

I have no idea who this Guru is, but I liked the sentiment, expounded on by my sister Ileana in her email:

I really believe that. The people that I consider the most spiritual also are the ones who had the greatest capacity to laugh, to joke, to love others, to make someone’s day better even if they were perfect strangers.

This sentiment is at the core of our work with KIND ambassadors and the KINDED campaign.

I just learned from Daniel Sachs about this think tank – the Glasshouse Forum – to encourage serious thinking towards a more enlightened version of capitalism, one that reflects on the dangers of rampant consumerism (same which we can now witness more clearly with the current financial crisis, not to mention related environmental consequences from consumerism) and related problems like short-term financial objectives and behavior, as well as the impact of globalization on the middle class.

A couple of provocative thoughts about the studies they are setting out on:

…the fact that capitalism is a necessary basis for a free society does not mean that it is a sufficient basis.

…There are tendencies within capitalism itself which cause it to saw off the branch on which it itself is sitting. (ie, the reduction of the Middle class and its buying power)

Capitalism has constantly to stimulate our desires and encourage us to want to satisfy them immediately. This stimulates an infantile character, whose attitude to life can be summed up in three words: I. Everything. Immediately.

[Under unfettered capitalism], Is it our duty to consume more and more in order to keep the economy going, even if we then as households live above our means? While we are focusing on the bubbles in the financial markets – sub-prime, asset-backed securities and others – the largest bubble in terms of long-term impact is the consumption bubble. At some point, the Western world will come into a period of considerably lower consumption levels. This is a structural change that will obviously have a dramatic impact on retail and consumer goods companies as well as on advertising, media and ultimately on our standard of living. Can we cope with such a development?

Has the time come for not-Only-for-Profit models like PeaceWorks to become the rule rather than the exception not just in business but in our economic structures and frameworks?

From a lunch meeting with my friend Frederic Brenner, the photographer, philosopher and social anthropologist, he shared this powerful quote:

Nous sommes tous de lopins et d une texture si informe et diverse, que chaque pièce, chaque moment fait son jeu. Et se trouve autant de différence de nous a nous mêmes que de nous a autruy.

Michel de Montaigne. Essais

Rough translation: we each have within ourselves so much diversity and texture, so many pieces with their own role to play, that the differences we house within ourselves are greater than those between us and other people.

Frederic, who nobody will accuse of being shy, quiet or boring, just completed a 10-day meditation during which he could not speak or write – no interaction or expression with others, for 10 full days, each day with 11 hours of meditation.  Imagine.

Another insight I enjoyed him sharing was about how the three great monotheistic religions have defined much of our world and ourselves into Dualities – Mind vs. Spirit, You vs. The Other – separating in strict binary constructs things that are often far harder to separate in real life.  In the world we live in, he feels we need to better recognize the ambivalence, paradox, and complexity within each of us, within our narratives, and our traditions.

This is not just arm-chair philosophy. It has very practical applications in the work of co-existence, from OneVoice to fostering Universal Values, and simple Kindness to each other.  If we are trained to recognize ourselves in the other, if we are trained to recognize the other within us, we are far more likely to disavow absolutist visions and work harder towards achieving shared human values.

with respect to acting in the face of danger,
courage is a mean between
the excess of rashness and the deficiency of cowardice;

with respect to the enjoyment of pleasures,
temperance is a mean between
the excess of intemperance and the deficiency of insensibility;

with respect to spending money,
generosity is a mean between
the excess of wastefulness and the deficiency of stinginess;

with respect to relations with strangers,
being friendly is a mean between
the excess of being ingratiating and the deficiency of being surly;

and

with respect to self-esteem,
magnanimity is a mean between
the excess of vanity and the deficiency of pusillanimity.

- Aristotle

http://www.philosophypages.com/hy/2s.htm

Consider our beloved young people… They walk in rows of three, each on a cellphone, not even talking to the people next to her.

I keep thinking of my happiest moments of youth, walking along… coming home from [s]chool. I could smell the leaves burning in the late fall, think the long thoughts that young people are supposed to have, and dream of my adult life, when I would have the love of a great woman and a Corvette. Those were moments of power.

Now, there is no thought or reverie. There is nothing but gossip and making plans to shop or watch television. The cellphone and the P.D.A. have basically replaced thought.

From Ben Stein, Everybody’s Business, New York Times

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The only thing better than lyrics from Coldplay’s songs are their actual songs.  Chris Martin’s vocals melt and reassemble the soul at once.  Here are the lyrics from FIX YOU – but if you haven’t heard the song, you should.

When You Try your best but you don’t succeed
When you get what you want but not what you need
When you feel so tired but you can’t sleep
Stuck in reverse.

When the tears come streaming down your face
When you lose something you can’t replace
When you love someone but it goes to waste
Could it be worse?

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

And high up above or down below
When you’re too in love to let it go
But if you never try you’ll never know
“Just what your worth”

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you

Tears stream, down your face
When you lose something you cannot replace
Tears stream down your face
And I..

Tears stream, down your face
I promise you I will learn from my mistakes
Tears stream down your face
And I..

Lights will guide you home
And ignite your bones
And I will try to fix you.

COLDPLAY

FIX YOU

A few weeks back I attended a play hosted by Stanford Law School, a one-man-show by Lawrence Fishburne about Thurgood Marshall.  At the end, retiring Justice Marshall quotes a poem from his classmate Langston Hughes:

Oh, let America be America again

The land that never has been yet —

And yet must be — the land where

every man is free.

The land that’s mine

— the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —

Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Oh yes,

I say it plain,

America never was America to me.

And yet, I swear this oath —

America will be!

The full poem is here.

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"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

- Alan Kay