"… he has persuaded me that we can solve many of our problems as long as we don't assume that we know more than we do." So concludes John Horgan in his insightful review of David Deutsch's new book, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Will Transform the World. I not only agree with the [...]
Unlearning the Future
July 10, 2009 By Leave a Comment
Carl Sagan once advised the public to “never underestimate the power of exponential.” It was sound advice. Unfortunately, as with so much other wise counsel, it is easy to dismiss. You shouldn’t. Consider just a few recent examples of exponential growth. In 1998, a small Silicon Valley start-up was conducting 25 million web-based searches a [...]
Unlearning Disease
September 12, 2008 By Leave a Comment
With all of the information now pulsing around us, it is easy to forget that "we don’t know what we don’t know." I constantly try to remind my clients in the health care sector of this simple fact. A case-in-point is the extraordinary strides being made in the field of genomics — which, due to [...]
Pharmaceutical Industry Needs to Unlearn
July 11, 2008 By Leave a Comment
In 2003, I wrote the book, ”The Next Big Thing is Really Small: How Nanotechnology Will Change the Future of Your Business.” In it, I outlined the many ways in which nanotechnology will impact the pharmaceutical industry in the near future. Recently, researchers at Children’s Hospital in Boston have uncovered a method of reviving a [...]
Unlearning Models
June 25, 2008 By Leave a Comment
Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired, has written an excellent article entitled "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes Scientific Method Obsolete" in which he convincingly argues that massive amounts of data, in combination with sophisticated algorithms and super powerful computers, offers mankind a whole new way of understanding the world. Anderson believes that [...]
Unlearn or Die Even More Unneccesarily
June 23, 2008 By Leave a Comment
A few weeks back I had a posting entitled "Change or Die … Unnecessarily” in which I provided a few examples of how our inability to unlearn could, quite literally, cost some people their lives. Well, the other day, one of my favorite thinkers, Josh Wolfe, sent me a copy his weekly newsletter, The Forbes/Wolfe [...]
Unlearn Genetic Nihilism
June 17, 2008 By Leave a Comment
WebMD has interesting article suggesting our behavior can influence how are genes act. According to research by Dean Ornish people can change how certain genes perform by making modest adjustments to their life style. Ornish found that by engaging in exercise and eating a more low-fat diet "more than 500 genes changed the way they [...]
