Since my youth, one of the greatest pleasures I know is listening to The Long Note in Gary Moore’s Parisienne Walkways.

(In this video at 2:35.)

There is a time to be smart. And there is a time to be stupid.

When laying out the blueprint for a new project, it might be smarter to be stupid by choice.

Stupid people have some real advantages over smart people (and more so over people who are aware or even proud of their mental skills). One big advantage is: Stupid people have no imagination.

Imagination in fact can be a bad, harmful thing: Imagination helps you fill in the blanks in a bad concept. Therefore, “smart”, imaginative people think up brilliant concepts like Derivative Mortgage-Backed Securities.

Stupid people on the other hand “only” come up with simple ideas like buying Moroccan sitting cushions for 5 dollars, selling them for 15, and “living of the 10 percent”.

Of course there are ideas and concepts that are complex in nature and still work. I would suggest that these ideas belong to either of four categories:

1. Concepts that have evolved over time, like e.g. modern computer chips.
2. Grand ideas, that could be broken down into smaller, simpler concepts, like e.g. a complex mathematical proof.
3. Ideas that are nothing but a lucky guess.
4. Strokes of genius, e.g. the iPod.

Concepts of type #3 (lucky guess) are a myth. Even if there were successful concepts that were nothing but a lucky guess, you don’t want to invest your time and money in a project hoping that it is a lucky guess.

Concepts of type #4 (stroke of genius), are, at closer look, a combination of #1 (evolution) and #2 (reducible to understandable parts). The fascinating thing about many so called “strokes of genius” is that – after the fact – it is easy to see how the master connected the dots and came up with the solution. Actually, it is a common sign of brilliant ideas that at closer look they are surprisingly simple in nature.

In a nutshell: Be creative and smart when coming up with ideas. Be stupid by choice and imagination-depraved when evaluating them and judging their feasibility.

“What if…?”

If studying philosophy taught me anything, it is to ask questions beginning with “what if”. (tags: thought_experiment, counterfactual_assumption)

So I ask: What if websites talked to websites–and nobody were there to listen?

“Websites talking to websites” isn’t that absurd an assumption. They talk all the time. View any website that embeds a Google Map and you see the result of that particular website (resp. that website’s server) communicating with the Google Map programming interface.

Idea for art project/ installation: Big glass box (as opposed to “black box”) with two or more computers connected by ethernet cable or wireless. They are communication and calculation data together, but nothing is display, on the screen or elsewhere.

We know that robots can start fights and fight wars. But could we imagine the computers in the installation to be having an argument while we notice exactly nothing?

(And wouldn’t that be similar to the situation some [human] neighbours live in?)

(The text was initially inspired by this photo story.)

My professor has dedicated a considerable part of his academic work to epistemology and its neighboring disciplines. As you might know, epistemology is the philosophical debate on the subject of knowledge.

While most sciences ask something along the lines of “what do we know about x” and “how can we maximize our knowledge of x”, philosophical epistemology asks questions like: “what is knowledge in the first place?”, or: “What distinguishes well-justified from ill-justified assumptions?”

While to some this may seem like academic squabble, I would like to make a point that these questions are today more important than ever.

Whatever people do, they today have more powerful tools to do it than they ever had. Bankers can move wealth across the globe within seconds and by hitting a key. Kid soldiers can wipe out villages within 60 seconds of machine gun fire. And so on.

Yet the epistemic tools, the ways we acquire the knowledge that we base our decisions upon, are tools developed for deciding on how to hunt down a mammoth.

We are strong. We are fast. Yet we are clueless. We are even clueless about how to get a clue.

We should work on that. The world would be a better place if we did.