64 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. I think basically imagination is a lot of work

      for - adjacency - self construction - judgment as simplification - imagination is hard work

      adjacency - between - self construction - judgment as simplification - imagination as hard work - adjacency statement - We construct the self of others because we are lazy. - It takes hard work to construct a complex picture of another human being. - It's easier to just pass simple judgment and create a label for the other.

  2. Jan 2024
    1. ( 1) The rearranging of the file, as I have already said, isone way. One simply dumps out heretofore disconnectedfolders, mixing up their contents, and then re-sorts themmany times. How often and how extensively one does thiswill of course vary with different problems and the devel-opment of their solutions. But in general the mechanics ofit are as simple as that.

      The first part of "sociological imagination" for Mills is what I term combinatorial creativity. In his instance, at varying intervals he dumps out disconnected ideas, files and resorts them to find interesting potential solutions.

  3. Nov 2023
    1. The humanities are intrinsically creative andinnovative. They are about originality and invention, notdiscovery. This is precisely Eco’s testimony; even more thana technical manual, this book is an invitation to ingenuity, atribute to imagination.

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  4. Jun 2023
    1. The command to schools—the invective about education—was, perhaps as ever, Janus-like: the injunction was to teach more and getbetter results, but to get kids to be imaginative and creative at the same time.They had to learn the facts of science, but they shouldn’t have original thinkingsqueezed from them in the process. It was the formal versus progressivecontroversy in a nutshell.

      Can the zettelkasten method be a means of fixing/helping with this problem of facts versus creativity in a programmatic way?

  5. Apr 2023
    1. Mills, C. Wright. “On Intellectual Craftsmanship (1952).” Society 17, no. 2 (January 1, 1980): 63–70. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02700062.

      Cross reference published version from 1959, 1980: https://hypothes.is/a/7NmPckD4Ee2-r1NbihZN2A

      Read on 2022-10-01 14:10

      annotation target: urn:x-pdf:0138200b4bfcde2757a137d61cd65cb8

  6. Mar 2023
  7. Feb 2023
    1. “subvocal imagination”:imagined futures that are treated as too unlikely to be publicly presented asa rationale for action, but that nonetheless can affect action profoundly.

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  8. Jan 2023
    1. adrienne maree brown wrote not long ago that there is an element of science fiction in climate action: “We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle.”

      This is how I've read SF for years, both near future and space opera. As mood board and thinking input.

      adrienne maree brown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrienne_Maree_Brown in turn inspired by SF author Octavia Butler (have I read her xenogenesis trilogy?)

    1. A paper recommended in the presentation "William Rowlandson - Image, Imagination And The Imaginal" filmed at Breaking Convention 2017.

      Seems to be a different take on the "imaginal" than John Vervaeke's suggestion that the "imaginal" is using imagination for the sake of training and enhancing sensory awareness.

  9. Dec 2022
    1. In posting AI-generated content, we signal that willingness, which seems also to indicate a willingness to accept the established parameters of culture, to accept the world as given, to embrace the status quo as the horizon of imagination.
  10. Nov 2022
    1. We figured that judgments must be built on comparisons: to say that something is bad is really to say that it’s worse than something else. The thing you compare it to is just whatever pops into your head, even if it doesn’t exist, or can’t exist. Basically, if you can easily imagine something being better, then it must not be very good.
  11. Oct 2022
    1. In his essay ‘On Intellectual Craftsmanship’, appended to his The Sociological Imagination (1959), C. Wright Mills reassuringly remarks that ‘the way in which these categories change, some being dropped and others being added, is an index of your intellectual progress ... As you rearrange a filing system, you often find that you are, as it were, loosening your imagination.’

      One's notes are an index of their intellectual progress. In sorting through and re-arranging them one "loosens their imagination".

    1. here are several ways I havefound useful to invite the sociological imagination:

      C. Wright Mills delineates a rough definition of "sociological imagination" which could be thought of as a framework within tools for thought: 1. Combinatorial creativity<br /> 2. Diffuse thinking, flâneur<br /> 3. Changing perspective (how would x see this?) Writing dialogues is a useful method to accomplish this. (He doesn't state it, but acting as a devil's advocate is a useful technique here as well.)<br /> 4. Collecting and lay out all the multiple viewpoints and arguments on a topic. (This might presume the method of devil's advocate I mentioned above 😀)<br /> 5. Play and exploration with words and terms<br /> 6. Watching levels of generality and breaking things down into smaller constituent parts or building blocks. (This also might benefit of abstracting ideas from one space to another.)<br /> 7. Categorization or casting ideas into types 8. Cross-tabulating and creation of charts, tables, and diagrams or other visualizations 9. Comparative cases and examples - finding examples of an idea in other contexts and time settings for comparison and contrast 10. Extreme types and opposites (or polar types) - coming up with the most extreme examples of comparative cases or opposites of one's idea. (cross reference: Compass Points https://hypothes.is/a/Di4hzvftEeyY9EOsxaOg7w and thinking routines). This includes creating dimensions of study on an object - what axes define it? What indices can one find data or statistics on? 11. Create historical depth - examples may be limited in number, so what might exist in the historical record to provide depth.

    2. As I thus rearranged the filing system, I found that I wasloosening my imagination.

      "loosening my imagination" !!

  12. Sep 2022
    1. Or, take the case of unemployment as described by sociologist C. WrightMills:When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his per-sonal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of theman, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and

      we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. The very structure of opportunities has collapsed. Both the correct statement of the problem and the range of possible solutions require us to consider the economic and political institutions of the society, and not merely the personal situation and character of a scatter of individuals.16

      1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), p. 9.

      I love this quote and it's interesting food for thought.

      Framing problems from the perspectives of a single individual versus a majority of people can be a powerful tool.

      The idea of the "welfare queen" was possibly too powerful because it singled out an imaginary individual rather than focusing on millions of people with a variety of backgrounds and diversity. Compare this with the fundraisers for impoverished children in Sally Stuther's Christian Children's Fund (aka ChildFund) which, while they show thousands of people in trouble, quite often focus on one individual child. This helps to personalize the plea and the charity actually assigned each donor a particular child they were helping out.

      How might this set up be used in reverse to change the perspective and opinions of those who think the "welfare queen" is a real thing instead of a problematic trope?

    1. Imagine for a moment that, by some quirk of the universe, you are sharing your workspace with a time traveller. Specifically, yourself from 1 year in the future. How will you react to your new co-worker?

      That imagination makes one to ponder for a pretty good time :)

  13. Jul 2022
    1. I'm deeply inspired by the exhibition title "Zettelkästen. Machines of imagination". - When I look at the ZK literature and ZK discussions on the internet, I see a massive emphasis on (a) how to "process literature", while I see surprisingly few discussions on (b) how to create ideas using ZK methods. I'm much more motivated to contribute to (b), while I do not want to dispraise (a).

      amen!

      Reference to the museum exhibit: Zettelkästen. Maschinen der Phantasie.

  14. Jun 2022
    1. “None of the women and men emerging from our schools in the next decade should expect to lead to purely mechanical, conforming, robotic lives. They must not be resigned to thoughtlessness, passivity, or lassitude if they are to find pathways through the nettles, the swamps, the jungles of our time.” ~ Maxine Greene, Releasing the Imagination

      I appreciate the poetry in this on top of the broader sentiment.

  15. Mar 2022
    1. Immersion in previous work may bia s creativity and limit imagination if users cannot break free from tradition.

      Being bound in the shackles of prior traditions and even one's own work can be stifling for future creativity and the expansion of our imaginations.

      Link to the scientific revolution thesis of Thomas Kuhn.

  16. Dec 2021
    1. In my gaze it felt that despite the almost omnipresent governmental presence, human networks took a measure of their importance and along the course of confinement we saw the buildup of the lines of many solidarity networks, not only because we benevolently provided necessary goods for each-other, but also because we shared opinions, information, and a lot of imaginations along the modalities of our existing independent infrastructures, trusting each other, across borders.
    1. Neither, we think, would anyonewho has ever learned a truly alien language deny that doing so takesa great deal of imaginative work, trying to grasp unfamiliar concepts.

      Learning and mastering an alien language takes a tremendous amount of work, taxing one's imagination attempting to come to terms with similarly alien cultural concepts.

    1. the really insidious part about it is not the idea of the noble savage actually there is no noble savage in Russo's 00:54:51 discourse because his state of nature involves creatures which are like humans but actually lack any sort of philosophy at all because what they call do is project their own lives into the 00:55:05 future and imagine themselves in other states they're constantly inventing things and chasing their own tails or rushing headlong for their own chains as he puts it they invent agriculture but 00:55:18 they can't see the consequences they invent cities but they can't see the consequences so we're talking about no imagination

      Rousseau was perfectly describing the intelligence and politics of Donald J. Trump when he described creatures which are like humans, but are "rushing headlong for their own chains". Trump was able to govern, but completely lacked the ability to imagine the consequences of any of his actions.


      Not sure what name Rousseau gave these creatures. Which book was this in? Discourse on the Origin and Basis of Inequality Among Men?

  17. Oct 2021
    1. Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there.

      Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.

  18. Sep 2021
  19. Jun 2021
    1. as I walk in the streets of Petersburgh, I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves, and fills me with delight. Do you understand this feeling? This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes. Inspirited by this wind of promise, my day dreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight. There, Margaret, the sun is for ever visible; its broad disk just skirting the horizon, and diffusing a perpetual splendour.

      A very pregnant passage that also only seems boring and uninteresting at first glance.

      First point: feelings, "nerves," emotions are highlighted and a big deal is made about their communicability ("Do you understand this feeling?").

      Next: this "scientific adventurer" is a "romantic poet"! ("Inspirited," "day dreams," "imagination," "beauty and delight.") No surprise then that a major theme of the novel is: the power of the imagination.

      Unfortunately, he is also delusional: in mid-December, the sun would not be very visible at all! Why don't more people get this? Robert Walton is well-intentioned but also kind of a nut (IMHO)!

  20. May 2021
  21. Feb 2021
  22. Dec 2020
    1. My high school English teacher used to say, “Image evokes emotion.” Convey a powerful enough image or idea (and make it vague enough) and people will project onto it what they will. This is the heart of many a savvy PR strategy
  23. Nov 2020
    1. creating sensory rich memories

      I like this phrase and I want to implement it into my thinking. This is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves or the greatest way that we can hamper ourselves: within the sensory rich memories that we create. Isaiah 26:3

  24. Oct 2020
    1. Is it possible to create a medium which blends the best qualities of both video and text?

      IMAGINATION!!!

      Hello?

  25. Apr 2020
    1. I say humility because, as it turns out, unimaginable says more about the limits of our imagination than about reality itself.

      Imagination!

  26. Jan 2020
    1. Just as the Enlightenment had deified Reason, so Shelley and other Romantics deified what I have been calling “the Imagination.”

      What is revolutionary about this?

  27. Dec 2019
    1. my imagination was too much exalted

      Victor's imagination is treated as an element of his personality motivated by its own success.

    2. His favourite study consisted in books of chivalry and romance

      Like Robert Walton's love for poetry, Henry Clerval's love for books of chivalry and romance makes him sociable and open to domestic affections, unlike Victor. Victor will later regret that he did not have Henry's or Victor's orientation to languages and poetry at the most critical moments of his life.

    3. Theseus

      Theseus was the mythical king and founder-hero of Athens. Plutarch's Life of Theseus makes use of varying accounts of the death of the Minotaur, Theseus' escape, and the love of Ariadne for Theseus.

    4. a Paradise of my own creation

      Walton's imagined "paradise" of his own making suggests the power of imagination, yet also the possibility of creating a Hell of one's own. It is also one of the novel's many allusions to John Milton's Paradise Lost.

    5. I also became a poet

      Walton's wish to be a poet, like Henry Clerval's taste for tales of romance, attest to their imaginativeness and capacity for sympathy that seems greater than Victor's, who has no literary interests. Victor also suggests that had his fate not turned out differently, he might have been a Henry Clerval. See Volume 1, Chapter 7.

    6. wonderful and sublime

      The sublime is a notion in aesthetic and literary theory of striking grandeur of thought and emotion. The most important English work on the sublime is Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgement, which influenced nineteenth-century English thought.

  28. May 2019
    1. This is spot on. An idea on its own does nothing. Execution and actually doing the hard work are the most important thing in any creative endeavour.

      This blog is very good, high signal and low noise. The dense version of this idea that has stuck with me is that the thing we're aiming for (productivity, make-world-better-stuff, doing good) is a multiplicative-product of both hustle (physical work, pressing buttons, saying words that other people hear) and the thinking part. That is, long term goal completion is hustle (doing stuff) * thought (knowing what to do)

      I may technically disagree with the "most important thing" part, but it needs some sort of strong emphasis. Hustle modifies ideas in a times-ish (multiplying) way, so if you've got zero hustle, you don't really have anything

      One way to do world-bettering is to just have enough hustle to outsource the hustle (get other people to act on your ideas), or alternately if you have tons of hustle, then you can take good ideas which aren't going anywhere.

      Knowing the difference between bad and good ideas is one of the core problems with the super-connected society/net we're in. The solution to the problem is too large for this margin.

  29. Apr 2019
    1. “Imagination is absolutely critical to the quality of our lives. Our imagination enables us to leave our routine everyday existence by fantasizing about travel, food, sex, falling in love, or having the last word—all the things that make life interesting. Imagination gives us the opportunity to envision new possibilities—it is an essential launchpad for making our hopes come true. It fires our creativity, relieves our boredom, alleviates our pain, enhances our pleasure, and enriches our most intimate relationships.”
  30. Feb 2019
    1. By this means, his sentiments are perverted; nor have the same beauties and blemishes the same influence upon him, as if he had imposed a proper violence on his imagination, and had for­gotten himself for a moment. So far his taste evi­dently departs from the true standard; and of con­sequence loses all credit and authority

      This is stuffed to the gills with assumptions. And while there is a good deal of boilerplate Enlightenment business going on, Hume also seems to be planting the seeds later authors will reap.

      Hume is requiring of the listener/taster/receiver, which is not new. "You think rap is good because you don't understand 'art' " is a common refrain. The elites have always used exposure to canonical works and forms as a method of discrediting those outside the circle, and have dismissed emerging works and forms as "lowbrow."

      What strikes me about Hume, and perhaps posthumanism (along with Foucault) would find this noteworthy, is that this "violence on" a person is not done by the community, but by the person themself.

  31. Oct 2018
    1. While machines and algorithms are indeed coming for tasks currently being performed by lawyers, these tasks tend to be labour-intensive and/or low-value and/or process driven.

      Is this the first time that such a transformation has taken place? Can you think of other historical cases where labour-intensive, low-value, or process-driven work has been automated?

    1. I cannot help but wonder, would things have been different if Mrs Lee Kuan Yew had continued to attend these meetings?

      How do you think Singapore's history might have been different if women were included among the founders of independent Singapore?

  32. Sep 2018
    1. Was it only by this twist of fate and chance –Lee Kuan Yew wanting to stop the wife of another colleague from attending –that the founding team became and then stayed an All Men’s group?

      How do you think Singapore's history might have been different if women were included among the founders of independent Singapore?

  33. Aug 2018
    1. Fansie wakes [ 110 ] To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes, Wilde work produces oft

      Hello Milton! And maybe your "fancy", your imagination, is deceiving you in regard to believing that you are divinely inspired with the Knowledge of God in your portrayal of Adam, Eve, Satan and the Serpent!

  34. Apr 2018
    1. Shewrote.Shewrote.Shewrote

      We see this many times in Orlando, where time passes by very quickly. Here a whole year passes by while Orlando is writing and the narrator says that with Orlando only writing and thinking about love there is not much to write about in this year of her life. The narrator leaves it to our imagination and just tells us that Orlando writes and thinks about love and that there is not much to say besides that. When there isn't any evidence, any way to write exactly what happened and when the person the biography is being written about is doing unimportant things, time passes by very fast. This also shows us how there is a varying level of fact versus fiction in biographies because we can not be absolutely sure what is happening at every moment of the persons life.

  35. Oct 2017
    1. ‘They look like white elephants,’ she said

      A playful line. The girl offers up a side of childlike imagination, describing the rolling white hills in front as if they looked like white elephants.

      This show sot us readers new insight into the character of the girl: that she is imaginative, creative, and is actively thinking. Perhaps she is not simply a follower to the American.

  36. Sep 2017
    1. look at the edges, the connections between the nodes.

      This is what we mean with the term 'sociological imagination'. Theory allows us to 'see' below the surface of society and to understand the invisible network of norms, values, structures, institutions and systems of inequality that shape individual choice and behavior. In this way, SNA should be fundamental to sociological methods.

    1. visible is not as effective as addressing the entire system

      Sociologists use the term 'sociological imagination' which refers to our ability to 'see' below the surface of society and to understand the invisible network of norms, values, structures, institutions and systems of inequality that shape individual choice and behavior.

  37. Mar 2017
    1. I identified immediately with their show. I reckon that this must be like Mr Benn. We need characters who somehow capture our imagination.

      Identification Narrative culture

    1. reason

      This is quite a departure from the praise of reason we've encountered from many of the Enlightenment writers. For Woolf, reason stifles imagination, especially women's imagination. Is reason stifling because it has often been defined/used by men, including in their defense of the "phantom" of gender roles?

  38. Feb 2017
    1. The conspiracy meme flourishes best in politics, religion, and journalism, where practitioners can succeed by attracting followers from the general public.

      "The imagination is addressed by exhibiting to it a lively and beautiful representation of a suitable object." - Campbell

    1. Since imagination has always been esteemed a most favorable omen of future development, it should in no way be dulled.

      See this talk: "Changing Education Paradigm"

    2. Such are the "instruments" employed by our modem sciences; let us now turn to the comple-menlary aids employed in the various sectors of our culture

      Note his emphasis upon these instruments and the work they have done, which includes shaping the human imagination.

  39. Dec 2016
    1. when you say, "I create my reality," what you are saying is that you are creating an interpretation of what you can experience. If you can only experience this much of life, and it is all your interpretation, then you see your range of perception is very limited. But your Knowledge, which you carry within yourself, is capable of opening your perception completely. Without so much incessant thinking, wondering, asking, pondering, manipulating, planning and scheming, and so forth, the greater part of your mind, your Knowledge, can begin to show you things. It is not difficult to have direct experience. You simply must not be doing anything else.
    2. The fact is you only create interpretations of reality. A better interpretation may be more pleasant temporarily, but you are still disassociated from yourself and life. It is this disassociation that must be bridged. Life is happening all around you, an incredible panorama. But you cannot experience it. Your Teachers are with you, helping you in amazing ways, but you do not know that they are there. There are genuine relationships waiting for you in life, waiting for you to be ready and desirous of them, but you must have the capability and the desire.
  40. Jan 2016
  41. May 2015
    1. The orator has little use for an imaginative world three inches in diameter. His world must be twenty feet in diameter and must include every atom of his own

      This talk about "diameter" reminds me of Burke's notions of "circumference."

  42. Oct 2013
    1. I would even have it an object with teachers themselves to nourish minds that are still tender with more indulgence and to allow them to be satiated, as it were, with the milk of more liberal studies.

      nourish imagination. Plant metaphor. The teachers are the basis, the soil from which students are nourished and grow