Category Archives: Philosophy
A key purpose of qualitative research
One key purpose of qualitative research is to help us recover philosophical problems in what seem at first glance to be technical problems.
The Ten Thousand Everythings
I am leaning toward calling my book The Ten Thousand Everythings.
I am going to return the term “chaos” to the fractal geometers, mythologists and the general public. Chaos is experienced disorder, with many possible metaphysical underpinnings.
My own underpinning for chaos, which is speculative and entirely unprovable, but nonetheless believable and useful, is what I’m calling Myriadex: the simultaneous presence of too many orders which must be filtered down to a manageable subset of systematic, harmonious or at least non-conflicting orders if we wish to experience them as order. Chaos in my view is not ten thousand things waiting to be ordered, it is ten-thousand everythings talking at once in innumerable languages about all things at once and creating intolerable cacophony. We just want reality to speak one truth at a time, so we can hear what the hell it is saying to us.
Protected: The truth next door
Distribution of what?
We tend to think most about what we think best, and this is why so many people love to think in terms of things that are easily quantified. The mind can wrap itself around such things pretty comfortably.
I think this is why when people think about economies, distribution is thought of in terms of material possessions. Material possessions is certainly important, but it is not the only thing at stake in an economy. Another important consideration of distribution that is rarely discussed is personal choice. Really, who would dispute the claim that power is one of the primary “goods” distributed by an economy?
If you look at things in terms of possessions, the problem of poverty appears relatively small. Most Americans are doing very well, even if some have much less than others.
But if you look at distribution in terms of personal choice — how much control people have over how they spend their time — this is where you see extreme imbalances. This is not a matter of quantities of leisure time. It has to do with meaning each person derives from activities, and the control a person has over the decision of which activities to perform. A person who spends 80 hours a week doing something he loves is far freer than a person who
This is the best reason why left-leaners should harp on economic equality: without it, freedom is a mere political theory, not a reality.
Designing philosophies
Philosophies, like everything, can be designed for usefulness, usability and desirability.
Propaganda is philosophy designed for popular adoption.
Brand is private-sector propaganda.
Universal respect
To disrespect the “mundane” obstacles that confront us in our attempts to meet our goals – to indignantly declare that some obstacles have no right to exist – to believe it is degrading to wrangle with them – such attitude are not only unhelpful practically for navigate these obstacles, they’re also unhelpful morally.
To believe one is too great to bother with lowly things is a sure route to manifest pettiness. (Perhaps the only surer route to pettiness is obedience to lowly things.)
Holding obstacles in high regard elevates us and assists our progress. We are not degraded by humble obstacles when they compel us to afford them the respect they deserve.
This is not a vision of humility. It is the opposite of that.
Politics
To wish away politics is to wish away others, and to wish away others is to wish away the world transcending one’s own horizon.
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A widespread cynical rejection of politics as essentially base and unworthy of respect is a symptom of collective solipsism.
Philosophical frenemies
In philosophy, finding a new frenemy is the best thing that can happen to you. As the significance and value of the ideas deepens and intensifies, so does the uncertainty of whether your own activation of these ideas will harmonize with the hopes of the author. This electric sense is what jolts me out of bed to read at ungodly hours of the morning.
Horizons
The horizon is what makes philosophy such a perpetually humiliating discipline. Schopenhauer said it most succinctly: “Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.” Nietzsche also spoke of the horizon myriad times in myriad ways, but always with fathomless irony: “One day we reach our goal — and now we point with pride to the long journeys we took to reach it. In truth we did not notice we were traveling. But we got so far because at each point we believed we were at home.”
Mouffe on hegemony
This passage from Mouffe’s Agonistics is a beautiful and useful thought-jewel:
…We argued that two key concepts – ‘antagonism’ and ‘hegemony’ – are necessary to grasp the nature of the political. Both pointed to the importance of acknowledging the dimension of radical negativity that manifests itself in the ever-present possibility of antagonism. This dimension, we proposed, impedes the full totalization of society and forecloses the possibility of a society beyond division and power. This, in turn, requires coming to terms with the lack of a final ground and the undecidability that pervades every order. In our vocabulary, this means recognizing the ‘hegemonic’ nature of every kind of social order and envisaging society as the product of a series of practices whose aim is to establish order in a context of contingency. We call ‘hegemonic practices’ the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed. According to this approach, every order is the temporary and precarious articulation of contingent practices. Things could always be otherwise and every order is predicated on the exclusion of other possibilities. Any order is always the expression of a particular configuration of power relations. What is at a given moment accepted as the ‘natural’ order, jointly with the common sense that accompanies it, is the result of sedimented hegemonic practices. It is never the manifestation of a deeper objectivity that is exterior to the practices that brought it into being. Every order is therefore susceptible to being challenged by counter-hegemonic practices that attempt to disarticulate it in an effort to install another form of hegemony.
Miller/Latour: What religion does
I need to make friends with some fellow-nerds whose heads combust when they read stuff like this:
Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation.
The principle of irreduction guarantees resistant availability and bans any slick metaphysics. Absent the singular transcendence of a traditional God, grace isn’t dissolved but distributed. An object-oriented grace is fomented by a restless multitude of cross-fertilizing transcendences, resistances, and availabilities. Here, grace is the double-bind of resistant availability that both gives objects to themselves and gives them away to others. Or, better, grace is what gives objects to themselves by giving them away to others. There is no grace if the resistant is not also available and there is no grace if the available is not also resistant. Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude’s resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of grace.
On this account, sin is a refusal of grace. It is a refusal of this double-bind. It is a desire to go away, to be done once and for all with the necessity of negotiation, to be finally free from the imposing demands of others. Sin denies both the graciousness of resistance and the graciousness of availability. It can see neither work nor suffering as the gifts that jointly constitute the object that it is. Sin does not want to be dependent on a grace it cannot control and it does not want to be impinged on by a grace it did not request. Sin wants the given to be something other than given.
The business of religion is “to disappoint, first, to disappoint” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, “to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the incompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional. Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by a black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, “incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Great effort is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable. “Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”).
Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away.
The trick, as Latour puts it, is “to paint the disappointment of the visible without simply painting another world of the invisible” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Something obscure does need to be revealed, but the obscurity in question is not the kind proper to what is distant, resistant, or transcendent. Rather, religion aims for a revelation of the obvious as otherwise than we’d assumed. In religion, “what is hidden is not a message beneath the first one, an esoteric message, but a tone, an injunction for you, the viewer, to redirect your attention and to turn it away from the dead and back to the living” (Latour, “Thou Shalt Not Freeze-Frame”). Life and redemption depend on this revelation of a novel tone.
(This passage is from Adam Miller’s Speculative Grace. Highly recommended, if you are one of those rare freaks who actually digs theology.)
Office politics is real politics
Where a person chooses to work, and how that person relates with others in the workplace shows that person’s deepest political preferences (as opposed to superficial party loyalties).
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The pragmatic meaning of “respect” litmus test: Some people believe respect means to treat all people as equals (or at least political equals), while others think it means to acknowledge organizational rank (which means accepting inequality), while yet others have personal criteria for earning respect through displays of this or that virtue (industriousness, honesty, intelligence, ingenuity).
It is easy to see how perceptions of “disrespect” can occur across conflicting definition of respect… One person attempts to treat another person as an equal, and this is perceived by the other as insubordinate presumption of an inferior…
Workplace clashes of this kind is the true site of ideological difference (between what Boltanski and Thévenot called “polities“). The appeals that are heard or not heard, the decisions that are praised or condemned, the preferences that are honored or ignored in the daily world of work is the very political substance of a person’s life. “Office politics” is not a metaphor — it is where politics touch down, are lived out as the reality of choice or compulsion.
Compared to the reality of work politics, national politics as reported by Fox News or MSNBC is abstraction. Newscasting might as well be sportscasting. Parties are rival teams playing in distant coliseums. We may have bets placed on one team or another, but mostly it’s just symbol play.
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Every company is a polis. Beneath the surface of missions and core value (and other such internal-communicationy bullshit), every business has a set of values or rival sets of values, which have been operationalized as work practices, and which are regulated through local political norms. These operationalized values determine the character of the businesses offerings and its self-presentation in the market.
Anomalogues, cont.
Science : engineering :: philosophy : design
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Like science, philosophy seeks truth, which means finding intelligible patterns in reality as we live it.
Like religion, philosophy is guided by intellectual aesthetics. If we are truthful with ourselves, we do not love truth on the strength of its truthfulness. We have a taste for certain problems, questions, resolutions and facts, rooted in nature, nurture and circumstance. When we see truth in a way congenial to our tastes, life is more alive to us.
Not that everyone has taste. Some have bad taste, and even more have weak taste. Philistinism extends to taste in truth.
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Some useful objects in our lives do not resonate with our tastes, and nobody expects them to. Such objects are hidden from our experience or we simply pay no attention to them. These objects can be engineered without any reference to human sensibilities, according to the facts uncovered by science.
Other useful objects in our lives do matter to us, and we want them to resonate with our tastes. These objects are designed, as well as engineered. The truth that guides the design of the objects must take account of science but will also include and understanding of the user’s sensibilities. Such an understanding is a philosophical truth: a fusion of truth and taste.
In my view (especially after reading Leviathan and the Air-Pump) scientific truths are engineered, where philosophical truths are actually designed.
Here’s the question that interests me right now: how would one do user-centered design of a philosophy? In my opinion, this is what brand strategy wants to become: a philosophy of an organization which enables it to function according to a particular intellectual and artistic taste. When the functional and aesthetic are treated as two separate realms, the aesthetic takes on a Sunday-religious character — an occasional emotional/moral edification added to workaday functional genericism. But when the aesthetic and functional form an organic whole that permeates everything an organization does.
But standing behind (or above or beneath) a designed philosophy is another philosophy which holds to an ontology and epistemology that permits a philosophy to be designed by giving reality and truth latitude for choice. And this meta-philosophy is Pragmatism.
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I need to study Kuhn’s work on theory choice in science. Everyone who has looked into the matter closely has found that there is an element of taste even in scientific practice. Here’s the theory choice considerations Kuhn identified:
Accurate – empirically adequate with experimentation and observation.
Consistent – internally consistent, but also externally consistent with other theories.
Broad Scope – a theory’s consequences should extend beyond that which it was initially designed to explain.
Simple – the simplest explanation, principally similar to Occam’s Razor.
Fruitful – a theory should disclose new phenomena or new relationships among phenomena.
The pace of interpretation
Here is Nietzsche’s advice to readers who want to interpret the fuller meaning of his work:
“It is a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word which has nothing but delicate, cautious work to do and achieves nothing if it does not achieve it lento. But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today, by precisely this means does it entice and enchant us the most, in the midst of an age of ‘work’, that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to ‘get everything done’ at once, including every old or new book: — this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers…”
This is actually good advice for any hermeneutic activity, whether it is understanding a written work, a person, a situation… If you misunderstand your job as gathering lots and lots of facts as hastily as possible to assemble into some sort of representation of the sum of the writer/person/situation’s scattered opinions, you’ll end up with something quite different than if you take the time to reflect, form hypotheses, test them, and interact understandingly with whatever it is you are interpreting.
Outline
Introduction
- What philosophy is
- What designers do: empathy (as opposed to art which is sympathetic) creation of useful, usable and desirable things
- Practical use of philosophy for design
- Truth as reality interface (a useful, usable and desirable philosophy.)
- Anatomy of this book: ontology, epistemology, ethic.
Ontology
- Ontology = inquiring into being = asking “in what sense is this real?”
- Being encompasses more than physical entities
- Many kinds of being exist: objects, time, perspectives, imagination
- Designer’s ontology: the more ways one sees in what sense entities can exist the more space a designer has to work
- Order bounded by chaos
- Chaos is superabundance of orders
- Order filters chaos
- Practical consequence of chaos: surprise
- Knowing chaos means openness to surprise: nonsense might be not-yet-seeing-the-sense
- Perpetual possibility of “otherwise”, esp. when otherwise seems impossible
- Horizon and the otherwise — horizon always feels complete and excludes the otherwise
- Pluralism: coexistence of ontologies united in possibilities of otherwise — possibilities which can (and ought) to be sought and actualized (“fusion of horizons”)
- An ontological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of being (metaphysical manifold)
Epistemology
- Epistemology = inquiring into knowledge = asking “how do we know?”
- Knowing is filtering (determining relevance) and relating
- Knowing is both explicit and tacit
- An epistemological framework: a simple way to conceive multiplicity of knowing (venn – name?)
- Tacit know-how: skilled wordless interaction with concrete realities
- Tacit morality: sensing value
- Perspective and pluralism
- Pluralism vs reductionism
- Perspective and inspiration: the upside of pluralism
- Knowing is social: “How do we know?” more than “How do I know?”
- Self as a society
- Knowledge shows realities: aletheia
- Synesis: seeing realities as together with others together
- Positivity and negativity: facts and questions
- Knowing a subject vs knowing an object
- Participatory knowing versus objective knowing
- Hermeneutic holism: knowing wholes and parts
- Social hermeneutics
- Social creativity
- A methodological framework: a simple way to approach social creativity (the outspiral)
Ethics
- An ethics sustains an ethos (lifeworld)
- Designer’s ethos: Maximum diversity within unity, mediated by things
- Designer’s ethic: Commit to learning from others in order to design to them and provide them a place in the world
- Designers outfit an ethos with things that support it — not preserve or conserve, but allow it to live and develop like a living thing
- Enworldment: creating myriad ways to exist in the world with things and people
- Virtue ethics
- Virtue of receptivity: otherwise awareness
- Learning a subject requires unlearning — unlearning is the hard part.
- Learning involves letting go of what one already knows in order to know better
- Unlearning is an anxious activity: immersing in perplexity
- Virtue of sacrifice: willingness to suffer to understand another person
- No method to emerge from perplexity
- No way to predict the outcome
- Virtue of fortitude: acceptance of the pain of learning
- Inspiration as expansion of horizon: sudden acquisition of new way to see
- Inspiration brought about by learning from others, suffering anxiety, accepting perplexity, emerging with new perspective
- Virtue of reason: the obligation to demonstrate, persuade
- Virtue of constancy
- Virtue of honor – agreements
Thought scraps
- Empathy vs sympathy
- The way philosophy is read… hermeneutically: not step-by-step explanation
- Blindness vs darkness
A Designer’s Philosophy
I am starting work on a book called A Designer’s Philosophy.
The book will outline a comprehensive philosophy suitable for a designer. To some extent it will include a philosophy of design, but that will not be its primary focus. One of the central, deliberately accepted assumptions of the work is the principle of pluralism, which is why it is “a” philosophy for one particular way of approaching life. This book will offer a set of conceptual tools to help a certain kind of person self-orient, understand, articulate and act in the world in a cohesive, consistent and meaningful way: a sort of user-interface for the environing, pregnant chaos we know as reality.
It will be based very heavily on American Pragmatism, phenomenology and philosophical hermeneutics (fused in the tradition of Richard J. Bernstein), synthesized with several like-minded but diversely-focused parallel practical traditions including current UX practice, Soft Systems, Design Thinking and Actor-Network theory. I will also steal freely from late Wittgenstein, various Existentialists, philosophers/historians/scholars of science and even some not-very-reputable theologians.
But this will not be a scholarly book. I will do my best to include no quotations or footnotes, or anything that complicates the dead-simple but elusive concepts this book exists to convey. It will be a comprehensive, organic vision and whatever introduces a seam or calls attention to a grafting scar, such as a nod to the discoverer of this idea or that, will be cut, smoothed and disguised to the best of my ability.
In other words, this book will be a great theft. I will acknowledge the thinkers to whom I owe an intellectual debt in one little easily-skipped blurb introducing a bibliography. Essentially, I am going to steal a great number of insights and make them my own, then provide a list of the households I hit as a cursory acknowledgement of indebtedness. But in fact, it will be an act of thieves’ honor: “I’ve hit these homes and made off with all the loot I could carry in my own arms. I think I grabbed the best stuff, but it might be profitable to hit it again.”
My goal is to make this book as visual, as simple and as compact as possible. If I can distill it into a pamphlet of 16 pages of diagrams that will be perfect, because that makes letterpress a viable option.
The philosophy will divide into three parts (not including introduction and conclusion):
- Ontology: “What is being?”
- Epistemology: “How do I know truth?”
- Ethics: “How should I live?”
The book will be 100% free of techniques, case studies, scientific corroboration and any other content that might give it the slightest chance of success. This book will be beautiful, and meant to be fetishized (and fetishized with the purest conscience, because the book will show why fetishes are necessary and valuable). My view is that while philosophy can be understood as a form of pre-science indispensable to scientific progress, it can also be understood as a form of art, and at its best is an inseparable synthesis of prescience and art, a beautiful and inspiring surveying and mapping of a field of possibility upon which methodical disciplines can travel, settle and flourish.
Because it is unlikely to sell and because I want complete control over its physical form, I’m anticipating self-publishing it in a very small run.
Delimit, interpret, formulate
All our efforts in the existential analytic serve the one aim of finding a possibility of answering the question of the meaning of Being in general. To work out this question, we need to delimit that very phenomenon in which something like Being becomes accessible — the phenomenon of the understanding of Being. But this phenomenon is one that belongs to Dasein’s state of Being. Only after this entity has been Interpreted in a way which is sufficiently primordial, can we have a conception of the understanding of Being, which is included in its very state of Being; only on this basis can we formulate the question of the Being which is understood in this understanding, and the question of what such understanding ‘presupposes’.
It seems to me that this might constitute a general framework for approaching any kind of soft-systems quandary and converting it into an explicit question or problem.
- Delimit the phenomenon in question, so its being becomes accessible.
- Interpret the phenomenon primordially, in order to attain a conception of phenomenon (a way of “taking it together” as a whole).
- Formulate the question of the Being which is understood in this understanding, and the question of what such understanding ‘presupposes’.
Then you answer the question. In my world the question is a design problem posed as compactly as possible in a brief, the answer is a design, and the truth standard is whether the design works as intended.
Want creativity for real?
If you want creativity here’s what you really need:
- The right approach.
Business approaches things in a way that’s good for many things, but generally not good for creativity. For one thing, everything’s decided in meetings, through explicit communication by words, numbers and images. Explicit communication will not produce creativity. For another, business loves step-by-step processes. When you say creative process, your average business person will think you’ve got some assembly line string of techniques by which a creation is built up bit by bit. Trying to do things this way guarantees sterility. Creativity requires a lot of pre-verbal (or even permanently non-verbal) intuitive leaps which though testable are not provable, and these leaps cannot be constructed, extracted, extruded or in any way fabricated, but only prepared for, stimulated, coaxed, encouraged — all highly un-macho approaches, which will drive the average exec nuts waiting, and will tempt him reach for the nearest convenient analytical tool to cut through the bullshit and dig out the golden egg. - The right expectations.
Let’s get this straight up front: Creativity is harrowing. It is non-linear, unpredictable, risky, and in practice often feels like shit. If your organization cannot handle this reality, you’ll have to compete with something other than meaningful differentiation — probably organizational effectiveness. That’s okay. A lot of companies find success that way. And like everyone, you’ll probably talk all about your revolutionary innovations and nobody’ll believe you, and you’ll do just fine. You’ll never be anything like Apple, Nike, Starbucks, Virgin, etc., etc., though. - The right team.
It is taboo to say this, but it is totally true, and you know it. Most people are not creative. Not only are they uncreative, but they’re creativity poison, because they cannot stand the feeling of being exposed to creative processes and do everything in their power to make that feeling go away (because of all the unpleasant characteristics, listed in the point above). Putting the wrong people on a creative team will make creativity impossible. I don’t know why executives who pride themselves on their cold-eyed realism and their ability to make hard calls and all that go all mushy sentimental on this point, but it would profit them to get realer, meaner and tougher on this point and staff the kitchen with people who can take the heat. But no. Everyone’s packed right in, and people are running around sweating and bitching about getting singed on the burner, and that the raw eggs and the baking soda don’t taste like cake. It’s damn hard to get anything cooked. - The right inputs.
Many designers secretly or openly detest research. And they should. Because all most research does is tie a designer’s hands by telling them all the cool stuff they want to do won’t fly. It closes down possibilities. But if you were to give designers something that opens up possibilities by inspiring them to conceive totally new approaches they’d eat it right up, because that is what designers live for. The type of research finding that opens up possibilities is an insight. Few marketing/insights departments know how to provide insight, even though they believe that providing customer “insights” is their core competency. When they say “insights” what they mean is facts — information about customers — their stats, behaviors, needs, wants, attitudes, and what have you. Insights are not essentially factual, and they are often not even expressible in language at all. The best source of insights is actually exposure to concrete people, environments and situations, and the best expression of those insights are often not words, graphs, or even cool diagrams, or anything else you might expect to find in a report, but rather ideas on what might work for those people in those environments and situations. But when this happens there’s always some process prig lying in wait ready to tell them they’re “getting ahead of themselves” and that their ideas are premature. They’re wrong. These premature ideas are the expression of having an insight. Don’t get attached to the ideas, but do keep them, because they are raw insight ore that can be melted down, refined and articulated — or simply “gotten”. - The right conditions.
Creativity is not only ugly and temperamental, it is also needy and fragile. It needs protection, but protection of a kind that seems counter-intuitive. To protect creativity, you have to restrain yourself from protecting the participants from the painful effects. If a creative team is not struggling in the dark, suffering from intense anxiety, infighting, bickering, hating it, with no end in sight until the end is suddenly in sight, they’re not doing anything that will blow anyone’s mind. Let them suffer. But don’t add more pain. Don’t interrupt them with the chickenshit that you think is urgently important. Think of the creative team’s hell as a pressurized tank. Your interruption will puncture it and let out all the pressure and deflate what’s trying to happen. As if this weren’t already too much, there’s one more indulgence you should lavish on your ugly-ass creative process: provide decent space with room to draw, sit, stand, fight, walk comfortably, all with minimal outside stimuli. A rule of thumb: keep creative suffering pure of mundane contaminants. - The right tests.
The usual tests of validity of ideas in business cannot do justice to creative ideas: 1) demanding analytical justification for why something will work, and 2) submitting it to the semi-informed opinions of people sitting around in a conference room. This procedure is 95% certain to kill off ideas that would work and support crappy ideas that should never have seen the light of day. The only legitimate way to test a creative idea is to prototype it and put it in front of real live human beings. After a prototype test is done and the idea survives it or its suckiness is exposed… then arguments for and against that idea and how it tested can be made. - The right support
Creative ideas need support before, in the form of these all these items in this list. But also, you need people to make the ideas happen. To execute. Such people are called “executives”. If you throw responsibility on creatives to make execution happen, ideas will always be proved impractical, because execution is a talent of its own. That’s because creative vision and genius for execution are two entirely different talents that do not always coincide in the same personality. One of the great things about business is that we get to combine our talents in ways that cancel out our weaknesses and allow us to accomplish things that would otherwise be impossible. A smarter division of labor based on more realistic psychology, that permits creatives to conceive visionary ideas and executives to execute and actualize them would produce far more brilliant results.
The power to not care
Freedom is the power to refuse to care about what you do not care about.
Very few people have this freedom. Few can even admit they lack it, because admitting it means conscious hypocrisy, which is much trickier to sustain and manage than self-delusion, a.k.a. sincerity. So most people go the sincere self-delusional route.
Refusing to care about what you do not care about releases energy for caring about what you do care about, which begins with feeling value, that is, knowing what you care about. Hypocrisy and self-delusion consume your energy and make it much harder to feel value, much less to act resolutely in accordance with what you value.
In unfreedom, valuing and caring is something whipped-up or faked but mostly longed for blindly, without even a concrete object of longing.