Daniel Lubetzky

Marco Berrebi (Face2Face) emailed me an insight I thought was worth sharing:

PS : the more I think about the Middle-East conflict, the more I think about the theory of Gauss (mathematician of the early 19^th century) saying that equations with several variables evolving within a wide range of possible values cannot be solved until we limit the range of the possible values. This would mean that until it becomes widely accepted that peace will happen within a space limited by Clinton Parameters / Arab Peace Plan / Geneva Initiative / Ayalon-Nusseibeh negotiation, nothing can happen. Just mathematics …

It is true that complexity makes it harder to narrow down choices. That only gets worse when you add the Mideast bargaining mentality that most Israeli and Palestinian politicians have, and the pandering to each side that has made people assume they can get peace without making compromises. 

Tom Friedman wrote a provocative article about how we have been living our lives and running our economy at the expense of the next generations – and how the environment and the planet will not bail us out.

Peter Thum, the co-founder of Ethos Water (later sold to Starbucks) and I had a conversation a couple weeks along these lines – about how successful new business models will strive to ensure retail, food, entertainment gifts and consumption are sustainable.

The advent of the internet and related electronic worlds and virtual worlds could theoretically provide some clues here – except for the sobering fact that a lot of these seemingly cost-free worlds and avatars actually cost a ton in terms of energy/electricity, storage, etc.  Whoever decodes this will make a huge contribution…

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Have you ever wondered why some kids can be so mean, bullying others with cruel insensitive actions? A brain scan study hints that "bullies" actually derive pleasure from seeing someone else get hurt.

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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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A new social psychology study asserts watching meanness and aggression on TV rubs off on viewers. If true, we are in for something.

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From germination of sperm & ovary, to a living being with thought & conscience…

From one cell to diverse organs.

From living organs to self.

When & how does baby acquire thought?

And self-awareness?

And soul?

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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Here is a great blog piece on the psychology of magic – how Magicians manipulate the mind in ways that psychologists can borrow/learn from.

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My earlier posting is an example of how the internet provides consumers the unprecedented power to react to bad service without much effort, with a good release.  If properly harnessed, this information should modulate abusive corporate behavior and strengthen consumers.

Another great article on on mind, magic, and con men’s marketing.

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