Being Right Keeps You In Place, Being

The Problem Is, There Are Definitely Some Genuinely Lame Things On Television, And There's More At The Bottom Of The Barrel, Because The Barrel In A Sense Has Gotten Bigger.

Who Is Giving The Orders To Ants? No One. They Are Self-organizing. Each Of Our Immune Systems Get Smarter Over The Years As Its Biochemical Parts Share Information, And It Responds With Individualized Defenses, But It Isn't Conscious And It Has No Memory. The Host Of That Party Didn't Decree That Everyone Would Gather In The Kitchen, But It Happened Anyway. Emergence Means We Sometimes Act In Concert For Better Or Worse.

I Suspect Millions Of People From My Generation Probably Have Comparable Stories To Tell: If Not Of Sports Simulations Then Of Dungeons & Dragons, Or The Geopolitical Strategy Of Games Like Diplomacy, A Kind Of Chess Superimposed Onto Actual History.

Legendary Innovators Like Franklin, Snow, And Darwin All Possess Some Common Intellectual Qualities—a Certain Quickness Of Mind, Unbounded Curiosity—but They Also Share One Other Defining Attribute. They Have A Lot Of Hobbies.

It May Not Be Possible To 'win The Future,' In President Obama's Words, But If We're Going To Encourage More Innovation, It's Not Enough For Us To Just Dig In And Work Harder. We Also Need To Encourage Surprise And Serendipity. We Need To Play Each Other's Instruments.