YashLabs

“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” – Richard Feynman

I was preparing a post about the people and projects using technology for a social cause in Montreal for the Montreal Tech League blog. Along the way, I made three wishes at Gifter.org, the brainchild of Austin Hill and Ben Yoskovitz:

I wish that we understand nature, the earth and its environment in space so that we may continue to evolve within safe communities

Understanding nature as it is on Earth, and as it is in space has always been the goal of scientists. Science has brought a lot of value in our world. The scientific method is one which works, no doubt about that. I have been trained as a scientist, so the scientific mindset is important to me.

However, scientists are often guilty of three things which makes science crawl when it could progress in leaps:

- Established reluctance to adopting new theories. See Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Too much time passes before a critical mass of adoption is reached and a paradigm shift occurs.

- Not enough systems thinking. Knowledge is sometimes stored into “drawers”. This is good for analysis and transfer, but not so good for creating new ideas and insight (synthesis).

- Spending way too much time focusing on the wrong thing and not seeing the big picture. Warring against religious people is a waste of Richard Dawkins‘ time, in my opinion. It doesn’t do a lot of good for either him or religious people or for the world.

I’ll expound of these in a forthcoming post but in the meantime, what I believe is that we’re still young scientifically and technologically and we’ve been studying different fragments of nature, but we lack an overview – the big picture. We don’t think enough of integrating possible catalyclisms within our scientific worldview.

Something big and destructive like True Polar Wander, and rising sea levels because of Global Warming could stop our beautiful accelerated cultural, technological and social evolution dead in our tracks when we’ve reached this far.

I wish that more people watch “An Inconvenient Truth” with Al Gore, and that we find a way to understand and prevent cataclysmic events like those resulting from Global Warming

Now if more people would take a moment and watch this movie, and also do some systems thinking, there is a chance that we become aware of the fragility of our current state, despite our astounding progress up to now.

There is a flimsy possibility that somebody as influential and intelligent as Richard Dawkins would spend more of his time trying to solve some of our challenges in science with his expertise and insights in neo-Darwinian evolution rather than spend time touring the media circuit trying to argue that religious people are deluded.

All these delays and waste of time and energies could be diminished and better spent, because nature doesn’t wait for us, and nature cannot be fooled as Richard Feynman said.

If we understand the big picture and find a way to secure the environment (external to our immediate vicinity, and the Earth’s environment in space), then we might win ourselves peaceful times so that we can continue to evolve safely.

I wish to work with smart people doing great things in Montreal, Canada, the USA and everywhere in the World

As I was thinking of how the recruitment process goes and how it’s contrary to popular belief, mainly from reading Richard Bolles, it becomes clear to me that we, as individuals, probably are not also communicating what we really want in our resumes which all too often are too technical (at least for my field it can only be this way).

So ideally, this is what I’d really like – I’d like to work with smart and positive people. I’d like to do great, exciting things with a potential to change the world for the better. I’d like to be able to do this in Montreal, in Canada, the USA or the rest of the world, because smart, positive people doing exciting things are everywhere, aren’t they?

So the proper question I should have asked myself is “Where are the smart, positive people doing exciting things with the potential to change the world for the better in Montreal?”

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Now, this post has three different “Richards” in the explanations of my three wishes. This is totally coïncidental. Or as I say all the time, there is no coïncidence. I always write the truth but this sentence is false.

For more about Gifter.org, read the Milllion dollar post.

Roberto Rocha of The Gazette wrote about using the Web for social change on the TechnoCité blog. Thanks for the mention, Roberto.