Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Libraries: Arms Too Short to Feed the Mind

N.B. This essay was motivated by a conversation with Alberta Comer, Dean and Director of the University of Utah's Marriott Library.

From my earliest days, I have sought to plumb its great depths, gleaning knowledge here, seeking meaning there, and always, encountering fellow explorers on their own intrepid quests. I speak, of course, of that extraordinary thing we so prosaically call the "public library." Beyond mere edifice, a library is the embodiment of an ancient idea – that knowledge and its representations can and must be protected, preserved, and transmitted to future generations, that access to knowledge is not limited to merely the rich or the powerful, but available to all who seek insight and understanding.

This simple notion of knowledge preservation and transmission is a noble idea for which many a person has given their very life to defend. The burning of the great Library at Alexandria is an enduring lesson on the dangers of cultural loss. More recently, Ray Bradbury's dystopian account of book burning in Fahrenheit 451 is itself a cautionary tale of censorship and the dangers that lurk when the free exchange of ideas is suppressed, something we would do well to remember today.

Books have always been my friends. From my earliest days, my parents read to me, as I nestled in their laps. Then, when I could read myself, they took me to the local library. In our case, it was a humble, small town, Arkansas library with just a few thousand books. Nevertheless, for me, it was a magical place, filled with extraordinary things.

My new University of Utah colleague, Alberta Comer, the Marriott librarian, tells a similar story of her rural Oklahoma childhood and the transformative power of the library. Alberta's parents drove her many miles to reach the traveling bookmobile, where she discovered a world unknown. Decades later, her eyes still glisten with the memory as she tells the tale. My own eyes moisten, as I too remember and understand.

As a young boy, I remember staggering up to the library's checkout counter, arms filled with all the books I could carry. Looking up at the library clerk, I struggled mightily to set the stack on a counter that was above my head. In turn, the clerk looked down at me, smiled, and asked in the adult voice every child instinctively knows, "Are you sure you can read all of these?"

The implication of the library clerk's interrogative being, of course, that I had selected more books than a young boy could possibly read in the allotted time. I thought, but dared not say, for even children sometimes understand the power and importance of deference and discretion, that I was limited by the length of my arms, not by my reading ability. Given the choice – and longer arms – I would have taken twice as many books. Instead, I simply smiled and said, "Yes, I can."

I knew what the librarian did not. I had already set myself on a book a day habit that was both highly addictive and in equal measure, emotionally and intellectually satisfying. I neither knew the pronunciation nor the etymology of the word autodidact, but I intuitively understood its meaning. I could not delay; fierce urgency drove my actions. I had to hurry – there were so many books, so many things worth knowing, and so, so little time.

In that small town's store of humankind's intellectual treasure, I found transformative ideas. In those books, I felt the warp and woof of history; I saw the power of scientific revolutions; and I marveled at the extraordinary experiences of individuals both living and dead. I read of people, places, and things that once were and are no more, of those that never were but could be, and of those that lived only in the fecund imagination of others.

Like an idea-driven junkie craving an endorphin high, I read omnivorously – books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias. From aardvark to zyzzyva (I still haven't seen either one in the flesh), I read it all. I devoured popular books, some fluffy intellectual cotton candy, momentarily satisfying, but of little import. I read tomes that were as intellectually deep as they were physically weighty, laboring over each page. In that sense, Francis Bacon was right: "Some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."

I read books whose content was well beyond my years – poetry, literature, history, economics, and science – some of which I fully understood – and others whose full import exceeded the capacity of my limited life experience to appreciate. (Reading books on the My Lai massacre at age thirteen comes to mind.) Asimov, Bradbury, Ellison, Heinlein, and Browning, Chaucer, Doyle, Golding, Lewis, Shakespeare, I savored them and many others, an intellectual cornucopia that filled me with both knowledge and wonder.

In time, I came to recognize both the wisdom and the practical truth of Desiderius Erasmus' words, "When I get a little money I buy books; and if any is left I buy food and clothes." At times in my life, I have unhesitatingly made that explicit choice – spending my last dollar on education – then subsisting on canned vegetables until my job provided enough to purchase a more varied diet. One can live for weeks or months on a meager diet, but a life without books, without ideas, is unimaginable.

From impassioned and zealous acolyte, I finally came full circle, having belatedly learned the most important lesson of all – I truly know nothing – having realized that true knowledge begins with the humility of ignorance. We are all ignorant, each in different ways. Recognizing that, we approach new opportunities as humble supplicants, seeking knowledge and insights from any who would teach.

Make no mistake, books have power, for they contain both knowledge and ideas. Knowledge transforms society; ideas change minds. And it all happens in a library, for books are still the best way to upload new ideas into the wetware of willing minds.

As Plutarch noted, "A mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled." Libraries blaze, but not, I pray, with the burning of books. Rather, libraries set minds afire, and those minds illuminate the darkness that is our collective ignorance.

The future is always burning with possibilities; it begins with each enlightened mind. Books and libraries are the kindling.

Thoreau, Angst, Ennui, and Coming of Age

July 12, 2017 marks two hundred years since the birth of Henry David Thoreau. As an essayist, philosopher, protestor, and transcendentalist, to name just a few attributes, he is an enduring figure in the American literary pantheon. Best known for his book Walden, which extolled the virtues of lifestyle simplicity, and his Civil Disobedience essay, which called on individuals of conscience to resist unjust government, Thoreau's ideas and influence burn brightly in the hearts and minds of every American secondary school English teacher, and by extension, in the existential ennui and soul searching angst of every teenaged would-be poet and wanna-be folksinger.

Thoreau's famous lines echo Arnold's eternal note of sadness and the long, melancholy withdrawing roar:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. -- Walden

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. – Civil Disobedience and Other Essays

Add a dash of John Donne, a pinch of Franz Kafka, and a teaspoon of Poe. Stir vigorously with a stock of Shakespeare and you have a witch's brew of coming of age uncertainty and self-doubt. What does it all mean? Why am I here? What does my future hold?

The thoughtful of every new generation taste this bitter soup, seeking answers to the timeless questions. I certainly did, and my struggle was by no means unique or even unusual.

As a small town boy in Arkansas, I craved intellectual and emotional certainty. The former, I found in books, which opened a world of science and technology, of art and music, of poetry and philosophy, in a place where those were rare. The latter – emotional maturity – I learned, comes only with life experiences and time, for learning and knowledge, however deep, are not understanding.

As a boy, fishing with my grandfather taught me the essential truth of Thoreau's observation, "Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after." Sometimes my grandfather and I caught fish, but both of us knew that was not why we went repeatedly to the pond. Together, young and old, we sought and found something much more important, in the shared conversations, in the fading memories of a life lived, and in the ill-formed dreams of a life yet formed.

Thoreau expressed some essential and eternal truths, sometimes rendered banal by over-repetition, ones all too often lost in the hubbub of living. On Thoreau's 200^th birthday, it is worth remembering just a few:

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you've imagined.

Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this.

Resist unnecessary conformity; seize opportunity; pursue your dreams; heed the distant drummer; live your own life. Therein lie the answers to those teenaged questions, and a life well lived.

As Kierkegaard said, "Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

Shaping the Message, Using the Medium

N.B. This essay also appeared on the University of Iowa's Next Generation Humanities PhD blog.

Marshall McLuhan's famous aphorism, "The medium is the message," has taken on new poignancy in a world of tweet storms, Snapchat imagery, cellphone videos, 24 hour cable news, and ubiquitous digital communication. Within this dizzying cacophony, Paul Simon's prescient lyrics from The Sound of Silence, which found a new audience in Disturbed's recent cover, ring ever more true:

And in the naked light I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening

How does one gain mindshare and precipitate reflective analysis when Andy Warhol's fifteen minutes of fame seems so quaint, a Q rating window both languorous and prolix? If you have braved my prose to this point, you have already followed a cognitive causal chain that spans five decades of cultural referents, something increasingly rare as attention spans in our hyperkinetic echo chamber asymptotically approach the de minimis.

Thus, it is no surprise that by today's standard of truncated discourse, the long form, reasoned and buttressed scholarship of a Ph.D. dissertation may seem an anachronism, an obsession that Cap'n Ahab would recognize as his own. All too often the dissertation is an embodied variant of Twain's classic book, praised but not read. This "write only" attribute is one of the biggest challenges we face in academia. Increasingly, we are writing only to one another, and all too often, to almost no one, using a vernacular and style both learned and discipline idiosyncratic.

Let's begin with the fundamental question. As scholars, why do we write? We seek to preserve the insights from our scholarship and add a new tile to the great mosaic of human knowledge, an entirely secular but consecrated goal whose motivations can be traced to the birth of writing itself. Equally importantly, we seek to energize others with the power of our ideas, shaping and reshaping social and intellectual discourse. Simply put, we want to be remembered, and we want to make a difference.

Laid bare, these laudable, twin goals of knowledge preservation and transmission need not be pursued via the same media or mechanisms. In this sense, McLuhan was absolutely right; the medium and the message are inextricably intertwined, mutually shaped by evolving culture and technology. We ignore these shifts at our peril, as the demise of many daily newspapers and news magazines has shown.

Let me be clear; I am not suggesting we abandon the long form dissertation. (See my comments in an earlier blog post on reflective communication.) Rather, I am positing that we remember our elemental objectives and disaggregate the historically convolved elements of academic scholarship: chronicling and archiving (dissertation writing); provenance and attribution (dissertation committee approval); and dissemination and engagement (publication and communication).

A book length dissertation has long been the permanent chronicle of the new scholar's research. However, this is mere tradition, derived from 19^th century German academic practice. Like the man's legs in Lincoln's story, a dissertation needs to be only long enough to reach the ground (i.e., cogently encapsulate the research), and it can – and should – take whatever form and length are most appropriate to the task. Choose a medium appropriate to the message.

Likewise, writing a dissertation should not be a consensual and extended, sadomasochistic partnership between advisor and advisee. The goal is not to solve one of life or nature's most vexing problems nor to include a reference to every possible prior insight. Rather, it is to demonstrate competence to conduct independent scholarship and record sufficient evidence of having done so. It should not be a decade long, soul enervating experience.

The key role of a dissertation committee is assuring the originality and sufficient intellectual contribution of an aspiring scholar's work. This certification of provenance and attribution is the committee's affirmation of scholarly worthiness, as documented in the dissertation.

Finally, successful scholarship gains currency in the marketplace of ideas. As academics, we teach and prize artful and effective communication, yet all too often we fail to practice what we preach. Yes, plumbing the depths of a novel idea often requires extended and subtle explication, but that is not the place to start. It begins with engagement and meeting others on their literal, intellectual, and emotional territory, not our own. Why might the idea matter to others? How can it advantage them? What is the attraction and the excitement? How to we reach an audience, both in academia and broader society?

The Three Minute Thesis competition captures the essence of this idea, as do public speeches and popular articles. In this light, a tweet isn't such a bad idea after all. All these are the beginning of a conversation, not an extended colloquy. In the spirit of an aphorism attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Make some noise; use all the available media; rise above the cacophony; make a difference.

What I’m Reading: ‘Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future’

N.B. An abridged version of this essay appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education's What I'm Reading series.

If you've read any science fiction lately, or attended any of the blockbuster movies whose storylines can be traced to science fiction, then you know that most are dominated by post-apocalyptic, dystopian futures – environmental desolation, runaway nanotechnology, AI overlords, genetic discrimination, totalitarianism and the death of privacy. What happened to the future? When did our utopian dreams stagger into an alleyway, drunk on hubris, only to be mugged by our diminished expectations?

It's enough to make one pull up the blankets, go back to sleep, and dream of a better world, one where precision medicine is ubiquitous and inexpensive, and where personal, autonomous vehicles have eliminated traffic accidents and reduced urban congestion. In that better world, intelligent digital assistants make us more productive and creative, and the Internet of Things helps us minimize our environmental footprint and mitigate climate change. Tomorowland, come back, we miss you and your hope, coupled with The Martian'sscientific and engineering "work the problem" can do spirit. (The latter made me feel proud to be a card carrying geek, though I may never look at potatoes quite the same way again.)

Fear not, there is hope. Hieroglyph is a collection of science fiction short stories, filled with positive visions of the future, and anchored in foreseeable science and technology. The collection itself is an outgrowth of Arizona State's Center for Science and the Imagination. The brainchild of noted writer, Neal Stephenson, the center is a partnership among science fiction writers, scientists, and technologists, predicated on the premise that "… if we want to create a better future, we need to start with better dreams."

Hieroglyph is a wonderful juxtaposition of call and response: speculative, hopeful fiction, followed by dispassionate, technical assessment. It is also a call to arms, encouraging us to not only dream of the future, but also to marshal our broad intellectual assets and build the better world we all yearn to see.

At Iowa, we've been motivated by similar desires. Via ideation events and salon dinners, we are bringing together faculty from across the university – arts, humanities, social sciences, engineering, science and medicine – to discuss broad societal issues and collaborative actions.

Better dreams, better futures: the future begins with us. As Picard would say, let us "Make it so."

Reflections on Francois Jacob

In 1965, the French biologist, Francois Jacob, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, along with Jacques Monod and André Lwoff, for work on the genetic control of enzyme and virus synthesis. Their deep insights into gene regulation (how cells switch genes on and off) continue to have deep and profound implications for post-genomic biology.

For most, a Nobel Prize would be the defining event of a lifetime. For Jacob, it was but one of many recognitions in an extraordinary life. Wounded while fighting to liberate France, he received France's highest World War II decoration, the Order of Liberation. However remarkable, all of that is a story for another day.

In the English translation of his 1988 memoir, The Statue Within: An Autobiography, Jacob wrote the following:

My obsession: a life that shrivels up, slowly rots, goes soft as a pulp. This worry about decline grabs me by the throat as I awake. In the brief interval between dream and waking, it flaunts before my eyes the frenzied dance of everything I would have liked to do, and did not do, and never will. As I turn over and over in my bed, the fear of the too-late, of the irreversible, propels me to the mirror to shave and get ready for the day. And that is the moment of truth. The moment for the old questions. What am I today? Am I capable of renewal? What are the chances I might still produce something I do not expect of myself? For my life unfolds mainly in the yet-to-come, and is based on waiting. Mine is a life of preparation. I enjoy the present only insofar as it is a promise of the future. I am looking for the Promised Land and listening to the music of my tomorrows. My food is anticipation. My drug is hope.

Since reading Jacob's memoir a decade ago, I have been pondering his poignant reflections on creativity and human motivations. What passions drive us to dream and imagine? What compulsion motivates us to sacrifice wealth, comfort and in some cases, even life and safety, to ask and understand, to pursue and create?

The questions are more than mere academic ennui. The impulses are universal, deep and primeval, common to all cultures and human endeavors, not just academic ones. As my colleagues in AI are fond of saying, we are all intelligent agents – autonomous goal-seeking entities. Aware of our own mortality, we seek meaning and validation, and we fear running out of that limited and most precious commodity – time.

Can we put aside our differences to embrace common truths? Can we do the difficult but worthy things, knowing that the act of trying defines us? Can we find collective happiness, as the plains writer Willa Cather once said, by being dissolved into something great? Or is dissipative balkanization our inevitable fate?

As I now look backward to the mean and median of the human lifetime distribution, I find Jacob's angst ever more relevant. Am I capable of renewal? Can I surprise myself? Can I yet mount a compelling story that would overcome, albeit briefly, the repulsive forces of 21^st intellectual reductionism to unite us in a shared academic endeavor for the common good? Can I still make a difference?

I am not prepared to abandon the fight. I still believe the future can be brighter than the past. Like Jacob, my food is anticipation; my drug is hope.

A Conversation on Designing the Future

Update:  The audio from our conversation is now posted on YouTube.

Recently I had the pleasure to participate in a public conversation with science fiction author Bruce Sterling. The occasion was the inaugural event of the Obermann Center's yearlong series, Designing the Future, at the University of Iowa. The conversation took place on the stage of the Englert Theater, a great vaudeville era theater that has been restored to its original grandeur. That juxtaposition of past and future was not lost on me, nor was the gentle irony of seeing the names of geeks on the same marquee as a musical act.

For those of you who do not know him, Bruce has won multiple Hugo awards, one of science fiction's highest honors, for his fiction. He is also an active blogger for Wired, a consultant on several projects, and generally a cool dude. Bruce is also well known for coining neologisms, those linguist viruses that infect our imaginations. From "major consensus narrative" (aka, "the truth") to "Wexelblat disaster" (aka, "a secondary disaster triggered by nature's interaction with human technology"), they are the linguistic legerdemain of a gifted storyteller.

Futurists as Grief Counselors

Bruce and I began by addressing the future and ways to think about change and disruption. We ranged quickly across current and potential disruptions – post-genomic biology and medicine, nanotechnology and personalized manufacturing, cognitive radio and the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles and grand AI, and privacy and information flow in the digital age – but spent most of our time discussing the cultural aspects of Clayton Christensen's innovator's dilemma. Technological nuances, though sometimes daunting, are rarely the most difficult aspects of change. Rather, it is organizational and culture hysteresis that limits technology uptake. It is here that understanding the human condition – in all its historical and cultural context – really matters.

When change comes – and it always does -- all of us find it organizationally and culturally difficult to abandon cherished beliefs, especially when some of those beliefs have been overrun and obviated by new truths. At these points, a futurist is both grief counselor and cheerleader. As grief counselor, one must help others through Kübler-Ross's stages of grief, reaching acceptance as quickly as possible; lingering in anger and denial only invites further loss. As cheerleader, one must highlight the opportunities afforded by the new technology and encourage rapid adoption and adaptation to capture first mover advantage.

Change is never easy. It is why few corporations survive and prosper for more than a few decades. One need only compare the constituents of today's Dow Jones Industrial Average with those of fifty years ago. Have you traded any Victor Talking Machine stock lately?

Humility – innate or imposed – is the handmaiden of change. Why do I hear the echo of Shelley's Ozymandias here?

Advice to a Young Student

As this was a university-dominated audience, it was not surprising that Bruce and I were asked if we had any advice for students about how to face and embrace the future. Though I would not presume the wisdom of P.B. Medawar in Advice to A Young Scientist, I did offer three maxims:

• Hang out with people not like yourself. They will stretch your intellectual and social boundaries and challenge your belief system. They are also valuable partners with skills complementary to your own. So, if you are a science and technology geek, make some friends with the arts and humanities crowd. If you are an entrepreneurial type, socialize with those who build things and understand social memes. If I learned anything over the years, it is that successful individuals, whatever their domain of endeavor, find and partner with people of complementary expertise. Together, the group can do things the individuals could never do separately.
• Take some risks. If you cannot take risks at age twenty-five, you never will. This is the time to stretch your wings and try new things. You are young enough to recover from failure and try, try again. Most importantly, understand that failing to take risks is itself a risk. Nothing in life is certain. As for that "death and taxes" notion, well, taxes do change, though I remain circumspect about the proximity of the singularity.

   

• Make new and original mistakes. Experience is an excellent teacher, far better than success, in fact. However, experience should not be your only teacher; the tuition cost is very high in the school of experience and hard knocks. Instead, understand what has succeeded and failed before, build on successful approaches, but do new and different things. As Linus Pauling wryly noted, the best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.

Here's to the future, that delightfully unpredictable and endlessly fascinating mirage that retreats before us with each step. Still we strive, as Blake reflected:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

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The Love of Language

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men

I am a logophile (λογοπηιλε) – a lover of words. More than that, I am a lover of well crafted, erudite prose that captures and conveys nuance and subtlety. Such prose brings a smile to the lips, both the writer and the reader's reward for dutiful and diligent background research, thoughtful paragraphs that flow as mellifluously as a mountain stream, and phrases that delight with their craftsmanship.

The words matter, for they are the conduit of our ideas and experiences, of our hopes and fears, and of our passions and dreams. They bind us, yet they separate us, for none of us is truly their master.

Between the idea and the reality – the concept and its expression – falls the shadow.

Sunday Rituals

I have a Sunday ritual, practiced with great reverence and solemnity, that cleanses my soul and prepares me to face the viccisidues of the coming week with all the equanimity I can summon. This ritual involves both a large latte, made with freshly ground beans and frothed milk, and the New York Times. When traveling or in extremis, the Times of London or the Washington Post can be substituted. Under no circumstances, however, will a graven image such as the Podunk Picyune-Gazette be tolerated, for reading it is tantamout to drinking instant coffee, an abomination to the world and all right thinking individuals.

Armed with a massive latte, I spread the New York Times on the kitchen table. (As a non New Yorker, I have never mastered the art of newspaper oragami.) For me, it begins with the front page and its extended stories, then the Week in Review, the editorials and the op-eds. I dally over the obituaries and the wedding announcements, a voyeur inspecting the lives of others.

I scan the business section, seeking surcease for our economic sorrows, then linger over the travel section, thinking about the places I have been and those I have yet to visit. Finally, I turn to the Sunday Book Review, looking for new books to read, and the Sunday Magazine, wondering which topics will warrant extended stories. (And yes, I still miss William Safire's wit in the On Language column.)

I feast my soul on language, sated, albeit briefly, for the coming week.

Nuance Matters

Make no mistake, small words have huge effects. Both war and peace have hung on the interpretation of a single word or phrase. In such circumstances, creative ambiguity can be prized, allowing each party to apply their own, convenient interpretation. Often, though, such translingual ambiguity is simply the subject of embarrassment.

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend from graduate school. It was about 1980, and we were discussing the characteristics of dumb terminals (i.e., terminals with limited intelligence and connected by RS-232 connections to a remote computing system). Though not a native English speaker, he was quite proficient, rarely pausing to search for a word or phrase, even when conveying complex ideas.

Gesticulating enthusastically, my friend opined on the limitations of such devices, expressed his preferences and, as I recall, offered a few pejorative comments on certain vendors' products. It was a technical discussion filled with facts and analyses, similar to countless others held every day by computer scientists and engineers. He finally paused in mid-sentence, nonplussed by my uproarous laughter.

After gathering my composure, I explained that he had been railing about stupid terminals, rather than dumb terminals. Though superfically synonymous, the first was an inadvertant value judgement; the second was a technical term of art. Like all non-native speakers, he had been ensnared by an American idiom, with the inevitably amusing results. Both connotation and denotation matter.

Compare and Contrast

On occasion, I read newspaper stories where I have personal knowledge of the events and participants described in the story. Rarely do those stories capture all the details correctly. Even when the facts are correct, the tone, the implications and the nuance are either lost or subtlety incorrect. Years ago, I asked a reporter about this, and he readily acknowledged this was the case, noting that it was extraordinarily difficult to capture complexity.

If you have ever read multiple accounts of an international event, written by reporters from different cultures, countries and perspectives, you know this to be true. You may even have wondered if they were reporting the same events. Read thoughtfully, interpolate and extrapolate, seek complexity, seek understanding.

Food for Thought

School’s out and summer is here. You could grab an airport bestseller -- you know the kind -- “hardnosed but psychologically damaged PI doggedly solves grisly murder” or “elite special forces unit foils terrorist plot in the nick of time.” Perhaps emotionally satisfying, or at least mind numbing, these are the cerebral equivalent of cotton candy and potato chips, empty intellectual calories with instant gratification but no lasting benefit. Or, you could have a hearty bowl of steaming oatmeal – some chewy books on serious topics that will give you strong bones and a healthier intellect.

Herewith are my summer reading recommendations, some old, some new. Bon appétit!