Here are some of the best of my fortnightly Friday’s Finds of 2020. Happy New Year 2021!

“Hope and fear cannot occupy the same space. Invite one to stay.” —Maya Angelou

“The first and final thing you have to do in this world is to last it and not be smashed by it.” —Ernest Hemingway

“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” —20 Lessons on Fighting Tyranny

“Don’t attribute to stupidity what can be explained by incentives.” —Mike Elias

“Any idiot can impose and exercise control. It takes genius to elicit freedom and release creativity.” —@DeeWHock

“propaganda does not need to be persuasive, only pervasive — its secondary purpose is to convince — its primary purpose is to exhaust” —@delphina777

“My new favorite definition of Gamification — the process of pouring behaviorist chocolate over instructionist broccoli. Via @bjfr.” —@csessums

“The public has a distorted view of science because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries.” —Freeman Dyson 1923-2020

“The coronavirus teaches us a lot about the true nature of our economy. The most important lesson: for decades, we’ve fundamentally misunderstood how our economy works. Our Civic Economy drives our Market Economy. Not the other way around.” —@edmorrison

“When experts open up and become part of sense-making networks, their expertise travels to become part of informed choices of non-experts. It’s a better option than pushing packaged solutions via authority lines assuming that people are not able to understand complex matters.” —@mathemagenic

Commencement Address 2018 by John Seely Brown (PDF)

“The ‘Catch 22’ of wicked problems is that one cannot learn about the problem without probing it or trying solutions, but every solution you try can have lasting unintended consequences that are likely to spawn new complex problems … But, by now, you must be wondering: how can I keep developing better ways of sensemaking or interrogating context, or, simply picking up new skills given that the half life of skills seem to be shrinking to 5 years or less, and new tools are emerging, almost daily. One approach is to develop a broad and diverse network of colleagues that provide access, insights, and learning opportunities, starting with the connections you have already made here … Perhaps, maybe we can even create the Age of Imagination where we can fuse the arts, humanities & sciences, creating a new kind of alloy having properties that will differ significantly from those of their individual components.”

Collaboration and empathy as evolutionary success stories, via @mbauwens

“If Homo sapiens sapiens wants to continue its fascinating yet so far relatively short evolutionary success story we have to evolve wise societies characterized by empathy, solidarity, and collaboration. Wise cultures, societies and a wise civilization will ‘manage the household’ with wisdom (oikos + sophia) and a love for all life (biophilia). Humanity’s challenge in a constantly changing, complex world is to establish a set of guiding questions that focus our collective intelligence on responding wisely to often unpredictable and surprising change.”

@workchronicles — Prevention is better than Cure. But which one makes a better story?