Invitations and Becomings

Chris Bertram has a lovely post over at Crooked Timber on having a second-order desire not to have your first-order desires satisfied all the time.

So, for example, I always want my football team to win, but if they were to win all the time it would be rather boring and I would lose interest in football. It is a condition for me to live the life of a happy football fan that they win, but not too much.

Ah, Chris. We can tell so much about ourselves by the kinds of examples we use! You see, the first thing that popped into my head was: "Yes, that's the difference between porn and burlesque."

Browsing through some bits and pieces, I came across this quote from Mark Choate's book Professional Wikis

"Being propositioned by some young twenty-something about brain-dumping your wisdom into a wiki after having every utterance scrutinized by your superiors for your entire career is like suddenly being told by your wife of twenty years that she thinks you should loosen up a little and get a girlfriend."

It made me laugh - it still does - but the more I think about it, the less I'm satisfied with just laughing. Because there's something serious in there. After all, is it so obvious that we should all loosen up a little, be a little more promiscuous with our knowledge, or cognitive surplus or whatever?

Is philosophy's relation to politics changing? Two recent online posts have me wondering... The first is a review on NDPR of Allen Wood's book Kantian Ethics, which blurs the line by infusing a scholarly philosophical publication with political invective. The second is a musing in the Daily Kos that 'purity trolls' in the lead-up to this year's US election are in fact a contemporary manifestation of Hegel's notion of a 'beautiful soul'.

Henson's press release (which he released through the gallery holding the now-infamous exhibition of his work) sums up beautifully the point I tried to make in my post the other day. This is the extract reported in the SMH yesterday:

As I suggested in my previous post, it's easy to treat email and wikis as competitor technologies, especially if you're a wiki evangelist, but this is isn't the best option. The real challenge is to capture knowledge that is being shared successfully through email, i.e. when you wouldn't want to get rid of the email list, but want to capture the knowledge. In light of the interesting responses I got on LinkedIn and here, I now think there are two parts to this.

Tonight the AMA is demanding plays or films involving smoking be refused government funding. The story makes a nice complement to the Bill Henson controversy, but that's only because this is the kind of moral incursion into the arts that should be vigorously resisted.

The AMA's argument is simply bankrupt. The AMA argues that, since smoking is a "blight on society", it should not be depicted anywhere on stage and screen, or at least not when that depiction is tax-payer funded.

One by-product of a recent debate about email's compatibility or incompatibility with wikis is that we can begin to understand not only weaknesses as a medium of collaboration, but also its strengths.

This is the first of what will be a series of posts on the well-known book by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

Coase's Law:

"A firm will tend to expand until the costs of organizing an extra transaction within the firm become equal to the costs of carrying out the same transaction in the open market. As long as it is cheaper to perform a transaction inside your firm, keep it there. But if it is cheaper to go to the marketplace, do not try to do it internally." (56)

Those of you who have mortgages will understand how important this little number is. The Available Balance tells you how much extra cash you have saved in your mortgage account, i.e. how much you could access if you needed it. It becomes really important if you're trying to get through the last couple of months of maternity leave on one income.

Clay Sharky has posted a great talk over at his website "Gin, Television and Social Surplus". The social surplus he's talking about is a cognitive surplus, and Sharky reckons we've been squandering ours on TV the way the first generation of the industrial revolution squandered their productive surplus on gin. The good news is, we're waking up, and finding new ways of putting it to work for our collective benefit. Wikipedia is just the tip of the iceberg. Sharky argues that the thinking time spent in the US each weekend watching ads (about 100 million hours) is equivalent to building just one Wikipedia. Imagine what we could do with the other 200 billion hours (and that's still just counting the US)!