Tools

While I was reading the book cover of the Sun, the genome and the Internet, the thought of tools caught my attention.

In this visionary look into the future, Freeman Dyson argues that technological changes fundamentally alter our ethical and social arrangements and that three rapidly advancing new technologies - solar energy, genetic engineering and world-wide communication - together have the potential to create a more equal distribution of the world's wealth.

Dyson begins by rejecting the idea that scientific revolutions are primarily concept driven. He shows rather that new tools are more often the sparks that ignite scientific discovery. Such tool-driven revolutions have profound social consequences - the invention of the telescope turning the Medieval world view upside down, the widespread use of household appliances in the 1950s replacing servants, to cite just two examples. In looking ahead, Dyson suggests that solar energy, genetics, and the Internet will have similarly transformative effects, with the potential to produce a more just and equitable society. Solar power could bring electricity to even the poorest, most remote areas of third world nations, allowing everyone access to the vast stores of information on the Internet and effectively ending the cultural isolation of the poorest countries. Similarly, breakthroughs in genetics may well enable us to give our children healthier lives and grow more efficient crops, thus restoring the economic and human vitality of village cultures devalued and dislocated by the global market.

Written with passionate conviction about the ethical uses of science, the Sun, the genome, and the Internet is both a brilliant reinterpretation of the scientific process and a challenge to use new technologies to close, rather than widen, the gap between rich and poor.

Source:

The Sun, the genome and the Internet

Freeman Dyson

Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780195139228

This leads me to connect to what Joo Hock blogs about tools.

Bucky used to say that if you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don't bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.

A more effective way to "change" thinking and behaviour is to develop a new tool for use which no one would quarrel with, which they can use. A new tool to work with re-forms the environment.

Source:

How to think like Buckminster Fuller

Joo Hock Quek

By connecting these two thoughts, I can explain to people what are examples of tools that can change behaviour and thinking.

Buckminster Fuller guide

Good Magazine have published a 6 page guide on Buckminster Fuller. I recommend it as a good introduction to his achievements.

Bucky Intellect Triangle

I attended the mind of Buckminster Fuller's talk at Bucky Group last Saturday. The talk is conducted by Bucky Group member - Titus Yong. He shares what he seen at the Buckminster Fuller's exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He also talks about what he thinks about how Buckminster Fuller thinks. I recall what he says and express it in a diagram.

Intuitive Future Wisdom

I like to introduce my idea of intuitive future wisdom.

Intuitive future wisdom is a kind of feeling that a person that one don’t understand now will give one wisdom if one makes efforts to learn from him or her.

The funny part is how can one feels that one can learn from him or her when one don’t even understand them. I don’t have an answer yet. Let’s make this an enquiry and find it out together. My current guess is the greatness of their work.

I had this feeling about 8 years ago when I was introduce to the works of Buckminster Fuller by a friend of mine - Joo Hock. Thanks Joo Hock. I still don’t understand almost all his works except his personal efforts in learning. I am still trying to learn from him.

One person that is alive that makes me feel the intuitive future wisdom feeling is Kevin Kelly. I feel I can learn a lot from him but I don’t seem to understand his ideas now.

The usefulness of this idea for me is that I use it to understand why I am willing to keep learning from someone that I might not understand after 8 years. When I come across a person to learn from, I ask myself, do I have the intuitive future wisdom feeling? If yes, I will invest the efforts to learn from him or her.

Who have made you feel the intuitive future wisdom feeling?

Whole Earth Catalog legacy

One of the things I observe on remarkable people like Buckminster Fuller ( Bucky ) is that they influence people with their ideas. Their ideas can through time lag become artifacts ( products ), services or improved versions of the ideas.

Bucky have inspired Stewart Brand to create the Whole Earth Catalog ( WEC ). It is a catalog of learning resources for an individual to take his own initiate to do his own learning. I recently watched a video ( 1hr 46 mins ) on the legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog.

What I found interesting in the video:

1. The impact of the WEC is that it created a culture of learning through making.
   
2. The WEC change Kevin Kelly's life as he realize that he did not need to go to collage after reading the catalog.
   
3. Stewart Brand was inspired by Bucky to create WEC as a tool to enable people to create change.
   

What did you found interesting in the video?

Generalize, don't specialize

Why should we generalize instead of specialize?

Sense from:

Operating manual for Spaceship Earth

Buckminster Fuller

Page 40 - 41

Arkana

ISBN: 0140194517

A type of bird which lived on a special variety of micro-marine life. Flying around, these birds gradually discovered that there were certain places in which that particular marine life tended to pocket-in the marshes along certain ocean shores of certain lands. So, instead of flying aimlessly for chance finding of that marine life they went to where it was concentrated in bayside marshes.

After a while, the water began to recede in the marshes, because the Earth’s polar ice cap was beginning to increase. Only the birds with very long beaks could reach deeply enough in the marsh holes to get at the marine life. The unfed, short-billed birds died off. This left only the long-beakers. When the birds’ inborn drive to reproduce occurred there were only other long-beakers surviving with whom to breed. This concentrated their long-beak genes.

So, with continually receding waters and generation to generation inbreeding, longer and longer beaked birds were produced. The waters kept receding, and the beaks of successive generations of the birds grew bigger and bigger. The long-beakers seemed to be prospering when all at once there was a great fire in the marshes. It was discovered that because their beaks had become so heavy these birds could no longer fly. They could not escape the flames by flying out of the marsh. Waddling on their legs they were too slow to escape, and so they perished.

This is typical of the way in which extinction occurs through over-specialization.

Initiative

Each year Buckminster Fuller receives and answers many hundreds of unsolicited letters from youth anxious to know what the little individual can do. One such letter from a young man named Michael – who is ten years old – asks whether I am a “doer or a thinker.” Although I never “tell” anyone what to do, I feel it quite relevant at this point to quote my letter to him explaining what I have been trying to do in the years since my adoption of my 1927 - inaugurated self-disciplinary resolves. The letter, dated February 16, 1970, reads:

Dear Michael

Thank you very much for your recent letter concerning “thinkers and doers.”

The things to do are the things that need doing that you see need to be done and that no one else seems need to be done. Then you will conceive your own way of doing that which needs to be done that no one else has told you to do or how to do it. This will bring out the real you that often get buried inside a character that has acquired a superficial array of behaviours induced or imposed by others on the individual.

Try making experiments of anything you conceive and are intensely interested in. Don’t be disappointed if something doesn’t work. That is what you want to know – the truth about everything and the truth about combinations of things. Some combinations have such logic and integrity that they can work coherently despite non-working elements embraced by their systems.

Whenever you come to a word with which you are not familiar, find it in the dictionary and write a sentence which uses that new word. Words are tools and once you have learned how to use a tool you will never forget it. Just looking for the meaning of the word is not enough. If your vocabulary is comprehensive, you can comprehend both fine and large patterns of experience.

You have what is most important in life – initiative. Because of it, you wrote to me. I am answering to the best of my capability. You will find the world responding to your earnest initiative.

Sincerely yours,

Buckminster Fuller

Source:

Critical Path

Buckminster Fuller

Page xxxviii

St. Martin's Press

ISBN: 0312174888

Buckminster Fuller leadership principles

Buckminster Fuller leadership principles

1. Think comprehensively.
   
2. Anticipate the future.
   
3. Respect gestation rates.
   
4. Envision the best possible future.
   
5. Be a trim tab - an individual who can initiate big changes.
   
6. Take individual initiative.
   
7. Ask the obvious and naïve questions.
   
8. Do more with less.
   
9. Seek to reform the environment, not man.
   
10. Solve problems through action.
    

Source:

The anticipatory leader

Medard Gabel & Jim Walker

Futurist 2006 Sep