We're Not Doing the Things We're Built to Do

[Guardian]

I woke up at 4:30am to check the snow accumulation and closing announcements.  Despite my somnologist's best advice, I proceeded to check my feed.  In doing so, I found the following article, which resonated with me as one of the best I've read this year.  It also underscores the rapid progression of data sorting as a modern function, tailor fitting to me as a consumer of information.  I sent the article out to my team with the following remark, "If anyone wants a another lens into my theoretical framework as a CO, I would suggest you read this article when you have time."  ‘We’re not doing the thing we’re built to do’: Agnes Callard, the philosopher living life according to Socrates | Philosophy books | The Guardian  

I am also currently reading Sean Carroll's, Something Deeply Hidden.  Carroll brings up a thought provoking point, which is to say that roughly 45 years after Einstein's publication of his theory of general relativity in 1915 in the journal Annalen der Physik, physicists found themselves grappling with the EPR Paradox, seeking to explain how two electrons could simuteously interact with one another through a state of entanglement regardless of their positions, in violation of the principal of local realism, which establishes that physical bodies cannot communicate with one another faster than the speed of light.  Carroll cites that preoccupation with such questions in the 1960s were regarded within the larger scientific community as ignoble and trivial.  Fast forward to today when we know that the quantum technology that will predictably turn our entire understanding of the world upside down, revolutionizing everything from medicine to computers to the very condition of our existence, was fundamentally based on these questions, which a select few scientists devoted lifetimes to pondering and adding to the incompleteness of theory.  In the 1980s, when I was in secondary school, the occupational pursuits that were seen as guaranteeing one a life of stability and comfort, will soon be overcome and replaced by the products of the quantum science once considered by many a waste of time.  To quote Agnes Callard, “It is true that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there’s a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There’s an inquisitive mode of living, in which you’re living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.”

[Vern Edwards]

@Guardian

Thank you so much for your thoughtful and informative post. I read the article about Callard and then bought her book. And I have downloaded the article about her from The New Yorker, which, though I subscribe, I somehow missed.

I hope that when Wifcon is revived we will see more posts like yours. Not everything posted has to be about contracting, and advice about wider reading, which makes us all better contract managers, will be welcome.

If you are interested in philosophical thinking, try Edmund Burke's treatise, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and Beautiful (1769). In the worlds of Samuel Johnson, it tells of "old things in a new way". It is an example of someone asking himself questions about something ad then trying to answer them through reasoning. It's written in 18th Century English prose, which can be tough sledding at first, but is fine once you get used to it. I just had an experience of the sublime in Patagonia, where the mountains and glaciers are so dramatic they give rise to feelings of awe and fear, which is the difference between the beautiful and the sublime.

Vern

[Matthew Fleharty]

One of her quotes sums up how many problems occur in the acquisition community:

Quote

"What I try to do is show that our problems come from trying to manage what must be an essentially inquisitive activity, uninquisitively."

That reminded me of a speech I read that Vern gave at SMC about Contracting as an Intellectual Pursuit - when done right it is. When done wrong (i.e. uninquisitively through the all too prevalent copy-paste approach), we get problems.

Thanks for sharing the article Guardian.