As the times accelerate and we face ever more kaleidoscopic careers, a crucial meta-skill is the ability to learn new skills extremely rapidly, extremely well. That practice has no better exemplar and proponent than Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid-Fat Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman. Not surprisingly, he has made himself adept at compelling presentations, this one prepared especially for the Long Now audience.
Tagged with “long now”
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Accelerated Learning in Accelerated Times
Tagged with tim ferriss long now
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Matt Ridley: Deep Optimism
Everything’s going to Hell in a handbasket! Or is it?
Not according to Matt Ridley. Ridley takes a long-term view of humanity’s past to project a deeply optimistic view of our future. This program was recorded in collaboration with the Long Now Foundation, on March 22, 2011.
This program contains visual aids. A complete video version is available at: http://fora.tv/2011/03/22/Matt_Ridley_Deep_Optimism
Via trade and other cultural activities, "ideas have sex," and that drives human history in the direction of inconstant but accumulative improvement over time. The criers of havoc keep being proved wrong. A fundamental optimism about human affairs is deeply rational and can be reliably conjured with.
Trained at Oxford as a zoologist and an editor at The Economist for eight years, Matt Ridley’s newest book is The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves. His earlier works include Francis Crick; Nature via Nurture; Genome; and The Origins of Virtue.
Matt Ridley’s books have sold over 800,000 copies, been translated into 27 languages and been short-listed for six literary prizes. In 2004 he won the National Academies Book Award from the US National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine for Nature via Nurture.
He is married to the neuroscientist Professor Anya Hurlbert. They have two children and live at Blagdon near Newcastle upon Tyne.
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Lera Boroditsky: How Language Shapes Thought — The Long Now
Languages are Parallel Universes
"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.
Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/26/how-language-shapes-thought/
Tagged with language linguistics cognitive science long now
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Stewart Brand , Jane McGonigal “Long Conversation 19 of 19”
This is one conversation out of the 19 that took place as part of the Long Conversation.
Long Conversation, an epic relay of one-to-one conversations among some of the Bay Area’s most interesting minds, took place over 6 hours in San Francisco on Saturday October 16, 02010.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02010/oct/16/long-conversation-19-19/