Seminars About Long-term Thinking
The Long Now Foundation's monthly Seminars About Long-term Thinking were started in 02003 to build a compelling body of ideas about long-term thinking; to help nudge civilization toward our goal of making long-term thinking automatic and common instead of difficult and rare.
Episodes
Podcast: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: Jennifer Pahlka: Fixing Government: Bottom Up and Outside In
Code for America was founded in 02009 by Jennifer Pahlka "to make government work better for the people and by the people in the 21st century."
The organization started a movement to modernize government for a digital age which has now spread from cities to counties to states, and now, most visibly, to the federal government, where Jennifer served at the White House as US Deputy Chief Technology Officer. There she helped start the United States Digital Service, known as "Obama's stealth startup."
Now that thousands of people from "metaphysical Silicon Valley" are working for and with government, what have we learned? Can government actually be fixed to serve citizens better—especially the neediest? Why does change in government happen so slowly?
Before founding Code for America, Jennifer Pahlka co-created the Web 2.0 and Gov. 2.0 conferences, building on her prior experience organizing computer game developer conferences. She continues to serve as executive director of Code for America, which is based in San Francisco.
Podcast: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: Walter Mischel: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control
Can you pass the marshmallow test? You're a little kid. A marshmallow is placed on the table in front of you. You're told you can eat it any time, but if you wait a little while, you'll be given two marshmallows to eat. [more inside]
Podcast: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: Philip Tetlock: Superforecasting
The pundits we all listen to are no better at predictions than a "dart-throwing chimp," and they are routinely surpassed by normal news-attentive citizens. So Philip Tetlock reported in his 02005 book, Expert Political Judgement—and in a January 02007 SALT talk.
It now turns out there are some people who are spectacularly good at forecasting, and their skills can be learned. Tetlock discovered them in the course of building winning teams for a tournament of geopolitical forecasting run by IARPA—Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity. His brilliant new book, SUPERFORECASTING: The Art and Science of Prediction, spells out the methodology the superforecasters developed. Like Daniel Kahneman's THINKING, FAST AND SLOW, the book changes how we think about thinking.
Podcast: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: James Fallows: Civilization's Infrastructure
Infrastructure decisions—and failures to decide—affect everything about a society for centuries. That long shadow, James Fallows points out, is what makes the decisions so difficult, because "We must choose among options whose consequences we can't fully anticipate." What we do know is that infrastructure projects are hugely disruptive and expensive in the short term, and neglecting to deal with infrastructure is even more disruptive and expensive in the long term. What would a healthy civilization do?