Charlie Rose’s interview with Orhan Pamuk from 2007 but enjoyable nevertheless:
Saying What You Know When Everyone Else Is Laughing At You
Thinking Outside The Box Mind Map by creativeinspiration
I didn’t know who Peter Schiff was and I don’t particularly like predictions when it comes to economy but I found the following video very valuable. Peter Schiff predicts correctly almost every single issue in the current financial crisis from 2006 and everyone else around him is laughing at him.
I am not emphasising the economic prediction here. I’d like to underline the fact that it’s really difficult to say out loud what you know or what you think you know when it doesn’t make sense to any one else. Nobody believes (wants to believe) what this guy is saying true and everybody is strongly opposing to him.
Think about similar cases in your life. How many times do you hear someone saying something so different from the conventional wisdom or something that does make no sense to you at all? What do you think in such a case? Do you think “This guys is a nutjob”? May be he is right. May be he knows something that you don’t know and may be what he is saying does not make sense to you because your brain cannot bend like that just yet.
I think this is how we are wired. When we hear something new and unconventional we mentally look around and try to find a confirmation that it may be true. We try to make sense out of it. When it doesn’t immediately make any sense, we usually think the new information is not correct. The degree to which we oppose to the new piece of information is proportional to how unconventional and diverge it’s from the norm. I think this is where open mindedness comes in.
A lot of us are claiming to have an “open mind”, but do we really? A lot of us are claiming that we can think “outside the box”, but can we really?
Watch the video below and think about how you react to new information in your lives:
(via Signal and Noise)
Book Meme
I Just saw the book meme at Kemal’s blog and found it interesting enough to join in. The book that was closest to me was The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
The Keynesian revolution against laissez-faire was costing the corporate sector dearly.
If you’d like to join here are the rules:
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open it to page 56. Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
- Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.
Election Night Parody: Voting Machines Elects Own President
Thanks to Rex Hammock I discovered this hillarious piece from the Onion where “Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President“:
Gnome-Do: A Launcher Like Quicksilver
Today I found out about a great Gnome application while reading Russell Beattie. The application is called Gnome-Do and it works like the famed OS X launcher called Quicksilver. I have never used a Mac or Quicksilver but what I had seen before seemed like a very useful application.
Gnome-Do works very well as well. It has the default keyboard short cut super (windows key)+spacebar and has a lot of features. Although it is a mono application, it works pretty well and I think it is a keeper.
Below is a video that shows it in action. Check out the Download page for the repositories.
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