Recording from Limicon 2024: What Is Wise Innovation? Discussion & Mixer
(only pulled notes from chat and first 20 minutes - seeking volunteer to help with remainder!)
- Why are you here?
- People here called to do work that is not traditional, but is the most important work in the organization, and isn’t valued. How to make it valued? sacred spaces for holy work to be done, where field is held and tended to, so what’s needed in these times can come through?
- I was drawn to this session because I think innovation is an expression of power (collective or held by a few) in the world, one that has the potential to make or break our ability to build a world where sentient life can flourish - depending on whether it's fundamentally aligned with what's deeply meaningful to us and conducive to our flourishing ('us' being quite loose here)
- Our society sets high standards for nearly every profession, from doctors, lawyers and clergy to plumbers and barbers. Notably missing are those working with the most powerful technologies and social experiments.
- Shared sense and definition of what we’re really talking about?
- Working Definition #1: Integration of multiple perspectives to take good (optimal and ethical) decisions in a context of uncertainty
- Working Definition #2: wisdom as “the competence in, intention to, and application of, critical life experiences to facilitate the optimal development of self and others”
- The Designers Accord and other similar codes of ethics are out there. idk how much traction they have https://www.designersaccord.org/
- Forrest Landry says wisdom is the integration and synthesis of knowledge (perceiving) and understanding (expressing). Wisdom is an integration which enables one to make better choices - which are more natural, ethical, durable, and practical.
- Tom Atlee: “Wisdom means seeing beyond immediate appearances and acting with greater life-affirming understanding. It includes balance, mystery, and tolerance for ambiguity and change. This expanded perspective of wisdom fosters wisdom, humility, compassion and humor.
- Wisdom is knowing what’s important
- The wisdom of the conservative impulse and the wisdom of the progressive impulse
- Wisdom ignores hype
- wisdom ignores foolish hype (which is conviction and coherence without congruence (per Bonnitta Roy’s model of integrity))
- Left brained thinking is fear of being a fool, the right brain embraces the fool
- Peter Limberg's favourite approach of "via negative" - roughly phrased, "don't move towards a model of wisdom that may capture you, rather move away from foolishness”
- What comes to mind in what Oscar said is something about awareness of one's situatedness (helps in relation to what's new, to what one [thinks one] knows etc)
- Shabbat: zooming out from goal achieving and connecting with something bigger
- This afternoon I was talking with Jessica Groopman (CA, USA based) who is developing theories and practices of regenerative tech. She layers things as Intention and Principles, Design and Applications, and Impacts and relationships... and what is created, enabled, or not…
- Imagining an LLM that holistically identifies risks of a given innovation, and a coach who supports the relational knowing?
- re: relational domain, I just opened Tyson Yunkaporta’s new book Right Story, Wrong Story https://www.amazon.com/Right-Story-Wrong-Adventures-Indigenous/dp/1922790435
- For me the wise elders of tech are my favorite philosophers of tech: Langdon Winner, Marshall McLuhan, Lewis Mumford…
- Albert Borgmann, Tony Fry
- Buckminster Fuller
- Ted Kaczynski, Stephen Jenkinson
- For me the notion of elders, and their absence, brings up notions of "embodied care for multiple generations" and "no other natural way except stepping into responsibility”
- it seems like Silicon Valley has done a killer job exported it’s culture. Not sure if e.g. India or Israel have expressed their innovation ecosystems any less individually. But I’d love to do a more formal survey of what’s happening cross culturally, and more importantly what’s possible when we remember the deep traditions 🙂
- “To change a system, look for where the door hinge swings in both directions”
- Similarly, bell hooks said “the popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.”
- +1 to vision fasts. The one I did in Shasta last summer struck me as the transformational experience I'd feel comfortable recommended to a mass audience, in its cultural universaln-ess, accessibility, and groundedness.