Editing 2: What is The Portal (section)

=== Dreaming and Rotten Sense-making ===

''00:07:46''<br>
I think that in general, most of us have realized that these dreams have remained dreams for so long that we've consigned them to the world of children. Perhaps very dim people believe these things. What I'm interested in is trying to get the smartest, most dynamic, and most agentic people in our society once again talking to each other, and ignoring the people who are most focused on dampening all of our enthusiasm. Now perhaps, you think, 'Look, this doesn't sound very scientific. Shouldn't we be relying on the best systems we have? For example, isn't [[Peer Review|peer reviewed science]] the gold standard?'

''00:08:24''<br>
Well, I would say no. Peer review is a relatively recent invention, and I would even say an intrusion into the hard sciences. In 1953 when the double helix was elucidated by Watson and Crick, they submitted it to the journal Nature. But it was never a peer reviewed. Why? Because an editor's job was to figure out whether it was worthy of publication. And in fact, the editor at the time, if I recall correctly, said that anybody who saw this paper would be so influenced by it, that he couldn't take the risk sending it out for any kind of review.

''00:08:56''<br>
Well, if that's true, let's say peer review isn't really the centerpiece of our science. Is the scientific method the centerpiece of our science? Well, at some level, sure, it's like proof checking, but a lot of the work that we do in science has been incredibly imaginative. And you might even say it's been irresponsible until it comes into final form and can be reconciled with experiment.

''00:09:19''<br>
But instead, we've developed a culture in which, immediately upon proposing something, we are told that the sine qua non of science is that there be an agreement between theory and experiment. Well this is wholly untrue. In fact, if you go back to Paul Dirac's great Scientific American article in the early sixties, he says that it is much more important that a physical theory have mathematical beauty, and that we learn to trust a theory even when it doesn't agree with experiment, if it has a kind of intellectual coherence to it. But how often are people pointed to something like Dirac's 1963 paper? In fact, you could look to Jim Watson, who's told us that in order to make great advances, we have to be irresponsible.

''00:10:09''<br>
Now, this is a very odd feature of the world. Many of our top people do not seem to play by [[Distributed Idea Suppression Complex|the rules that have been set for everyone else]]. And the question is, if we are in a situation in which we have unleashed such incredible destructive power, as we did with the hydrogen bomb, and in potentially unlocking the cell, why is it that we are so incredibly timid about what it is that we might do next? We have all the destructive power that we need already at our fingertips. What we don't have is the ability to escape our fate. 

''00:10:41''<br>
In fact, what we need is to find The Portal, to find a way out, to find new economic vistas that will allow far larger numbers of people to participate without causing an ecological disaster. If you take all the people, let's say, in India, China, and Bangladesh, what have you, who are leading lives at a far lower economic level than we are, if you were to elevate them to our current level as we have in the United States, you would be causing an ecological disaster. Well clearly, we are not going to leave these people behind. We need them to be full participants in whatever beautiful future we're trying to create. And that future has to be ecologically sound because we don't have the ability to despoil the planet as we dream about universal human prosperity. So what are we going to do?

''00:11:28''<br>
Well, I think that the most irresponsible thing to do is to stop dreaming, to get our dreams to be so small that we're not embarrassed to share them in public. I think what we need to do is to start dreaming much more aggressively, dream much bigger, and start dreaming in public with each other–harmoniously if we can, or have our dreams fight each other–but at least start unlocking the potential of human imagination and not immediately grounding every new idea in some sort of race to see whether we can invalidate it, give it enough of a room to grow. You know, this is how we used to talk about protecting infant industries before we decided that free trade should always be the rule of the day and that we should have no barriers to protect new ideas in a nursery, where they might learn to thrive, before testing to see whether they can survive as adults.

''00:12:23''<br>
What we're going to do in this program is effectively to declare war. War on stasis. War on group think. War on everything that has enervated our society, and we're going to do it because we have the ability now to [[Slipping the DISC|compete with the networks]] that previously grew up to distribute whatever it was that was portrayed as sense-making.

''00:12:44''<br>
You can tell that there's something wrong with both CNN and Fox. If you're reading the New York times carefully, you can tell that the narrative arcs in the daily newspaper clearly have to have been thought out to cover many days and long before the facts are known. Somehow we are living in somebody else's reality.

''00:13:03''<br>
What we need to do is to return to our own future. Now, there is no question that we might make some serious mistakes. People may die, there may be very serious consequences of experimenting. But it's certain that if we stay here and we do not attempt to grow beyond the problems that we've previously created for ourselves in decades past, that the future is not going to be appealing or powerful enough to evade some of the fates that some people are seeing as being nearly inescapable.

''00:13:33''<br>
If we cannot create a larger pie, we're going to have to engage in a lot of zero-sum games. We're going to have to deal an incredible amount with some kind of social engineering project which, quite frankly, I don't see having any hope of succeeding. We're barely able to hold a conversation. Could we actually hold a constitutional convention if our new technology required that we rethink the boundaries of what constitutes search and seizure? Whether hate speech should be included with free speech in our foundational documents? Have we really gotten to a place in which we can only look back because we are afraid to look forward? The Portal is going to attempt to answer these questions.