Speeding where?

David St Lawrence has a thought provoking blog on the sustainability of the pace modern corporate life. Are humans incapable of working at the speed of the Internet?

TM Lutas posts on Barnett's criticism of Bush's State of the Union address lamenting Barnett's position which desires more horizontal thinking articulation. This gave me pause to consider the meaning of horizontal and vertical thinking. TM Lutas himself offered a prior post on the matter. It is also his topic in the current Rule-Set Reset which he does a nice job describing. I do ponder whether the 'Renaissance man' is extinct. TM Lutas contends that the shear volume of information and knowledge today  (and for the last few centuries) precludes this. It seems that in antiquity there was also a huge volume of knowledge and information (consider the great lost libraries or the 'sciences' (from pyramid building to alchemy) regardless of the accuracy of that information. When I consider Leonardo da Vinci he was a consummate scientist and artist which seems to be a hallmark of horizontal thinking - being a Renaissance man requires that he confront conventional wisdom as well, but I doubt it is dependent upon the quantity of knowledge. What sets many of these apart is the quality of their work. You look especially at their artistic work and realize they combined the profound with the sublime.

Both of the posts above are written by authors looking above the daily grind to see the bigger picture. We need to put our muscles to work but we also need the vision to give us direction to a destination we really seek. Without that map we may be shocked at the destination we are heading and certainly we will not have find happiness in the journey.

Comments

[David St Lawrence]

Stuart,

Thanks for the favorable mention.
I plan to write more about the issues you bring up.
I think there has to be a place for the modern Renaissance man.

Nice clean blog design. Your writing is thoughtful and enjoyable.
The only suggestion I might make is that an increasing number of your
visitors will be visually challenged by the small type and the long lines of this particular page layout. You might want to look at what happens when you make the center column a few inches narrower.

Keep on blogging!

[Stuart]

Thanks for the feedback and suggestions. I have increased the font size for readability. The text section is of variable width - if you resize your window the column should resize as well.

[TM Lutas]

Thanks for linking to my piece. The difference between antiquity is that there are many new fields of knowledge and we haven't much tossed away any of the old ones. There are people who work very hard on the puzzle of how to build a pyramid or a medieval catapult (you can see the results of their efforts on PBS every once in awhile) and we've also added megalithic ice sculpture and compressed gas powered pumpkin chunking as related fields. If there is anything out there that is "lost" we have a parallel field devoted to finding it again and we also have all these new fields of knowledge that were completely unexamined in antiquity.

One of the things that I mentioned in my RSR article was on creating tools to aid us in better working the horizontal/vertical problem. There's an awful lot of slippage between fields. For example, sociologists have a tendency to not keep up with economists and evolutionary biologists and mathematicians strike frequent sparks. If you could decompose the contents of what you are saying to a structure that could be linked into an automated knowledge base, your work in sociology could be flagged for revision when the consensus of economists discredits an economic theory that you depend on to demonstrate your own work.

The problem is that it would drastically slow down new intellectual output as people devoted a great deal more time to ensuring that stuff that was already published was right. That seems to run right across the grain of "publish or perish" so it's likely to be a hard slog. An alternate application in punditry seems a bit more promising.

[Stuart]

Whenever TM Lutsa posts I get a great workout.

Note to self:
1) Future post on what it takes to become a horizontal thinker
2) The value of appreciating the differences among thinkers - is there value in cross training between the two types?
3) Is a quantity of all knowledge really necessary for Renaissance men?
4) Tools - do we need them to 'plot' the 'network' of cross domain theories? How about tools to measure the 'horizontalness' of societies and disciplines? Would these tools be used to measure credibility or slow
down output? Could it be used to 'datamine' new opportunities or fields?

A good example of a first class Horizontal thinker is Michael Crichton. His recent comments on CSPAN might be useful as a case study.