Rounding up

25 January 12 by Henning Bertram

A few things that I have found enjoyable/objectionable/vaguely interesting:

Even if it is not happening right at this moment after all — worth pondering:

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy // SOPA/PIPA mashup: how much Hollywood money did your lawmaker take? // Chris Dodd to Obama: Hollywood will stop supporting you because you were soft on SOPA and PIPA

Seems like the real special interests to whom the Dems are in thrall are… well, big business. Not surprisingly.

In the offices of today:

SOLITUDE is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
But there’s a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist. They’re extroverted enough to exchange and advance ideas, but see themselves as independent and individualistic. They’re not joiners by nature. (Susan Cain)

And related to this:

Typically, participants leave a brainstorming session proud of their contribution. The whiteboard has been filled with free associations. At such moments, brainstorming can seem like an ideal mental technique, a feel-good way to boost productivity. But there is one overwhelming problem with brainstorming. It doesn’t work. (Jonah Lehrer)

Two things worth reading, too:

  • Caroline Fourest: A Feminist Against Multiculturalism — “For a believer in universalism the Kantian problem of how a world-wide ‘republic’ of right (as law) is compatible with the existence of separate political republics remains unresolved. This perhaps, remains the hardest issue of them all.”

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