ben de bock

Ph. D. student clinical decision-making & complexity thinking

[Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar]

Do not use your energy to worry. Life is too short to worry about stupid things. Have fun. Fall in love. Regret nothing and do not let people bring you down. 

Study, think, create and grow. Teach yourself and teach others. 

—Professor Richard Feynman

[ben de bock @badebock]

Le président français a salué, lors d'un hommage national aux Invalides rendu mercredi au philosophe et sociologue Edgar Morin, mort à 104 ans, la mémoire d'un homme qui ne céda jamais à "la vérité d'un seul camp, d'un seul dogme". https://t.co/ibs1E82pQR

[ben de bock @badebock]

France's president hailed Edgar Morin, 104, as a thinker who refused any single camp or dogma. https://t.co/KoHFJGQZWd

[ben de bock @badebock]

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[ben de bock @badebock]

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[ben de bock @badebock]

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[Walther Schoonenberg @WSchoonenberg]

Ingezonden brief in Het Parool over het bouwpuin in de Oude Kerk dat daar ligt als ‘kunstwerk’.

[Eric Hendriks @HendrKim]

The legendary Chantal Delsol, one of my favourite French philosophers, spoke at the @InstituteDanube about the de-secularisation that has crept into Western civilisation’s late modernity.

Prof. Delsol challenges the standard story about secularisation, which holds that it has become increasingly pronounced in recent decades. Instead, she argues the opposite: that we have, in fact, been de-secularising.

Properly understood, secularisation means the differentiation between politics and statecraft on the one hand, and religion and the church on the other. Morality in society was once largely mediated through Christianity, its sermons, clergy, theologians, and religious schools. But with the decline of Christian religiosity and the authority of the church, the administrative state, state-centric public education, and, I would add, journalism, have increasingly taken over many of the moralising and moral-educational functions once reserved for institutionalised religion.

The result is an odd blurring, in which a misdirected, unrefined, even barbaric moralism now pervades areas that should instead be approached more rationally and in more specialised, functionally differentiated ways.

Think of how moralism increasingly attacks academic research and intellectual life, where even would-be professionals struggle to distinguish truth from what is “morally” convenient, and critical thought from quasi-critical stigmatisation campaigns against heterodox speakers.

Hence, Delsol’s argument: our problem is not excessive secularisation, but de-secularisation. I strongly agree with this theory.

It runs counter to much standard sociological theorising, which holds that society has become ever more functionally differentiated over time. Yet in contemporary politics, academia, and the arts, one can clearly see traces of de-differentiation and de-secularisation, as many people now pour quasi-religious fervour into their public engagement, believing themselves to be fighting for phantasmatic idols such as “equality” and against the omnipresent evil of “unconscious bias,” with catastrophic consequences for the quality and autonomous functioning of policy discussions, intellectual life, and artistic domains.

We suffer under an unconstrained and primitive moralism, disconnected from any ethical teachings and wisdom, unleashed upon the fine-grained machinery of twenty-first-century society that requires much more differentiated and “localised” judgements and evaluation schemes to take precedence.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Harvard professor who has written 9 books and spent 40 years studying how language works inside the human brain just gave the most important writing masterclass I've ever seen.

Here's what he said that broke my entire understanding of writing.

Steven Pinker, the professor, opened with a single question: why is so much writing terrible? Not just academic writing, but corporate writing, government writing, and even most blog posts.

His answer had nothing to do with effort or intelligence.

He called it the Curse of Knowledge. The moment you understand something deeply, you lose the ability to remember what it felt like not to know it. You stop seeing your own blind spots because the blind spots feel like common ground.

He watched a brilliant molecular biologist destroy a room of 400 people at a TED event. The man launched straight into jargon without ever explaining the problem he was solving or why anyone should care. The biologist had no idea it was happening. That's the curse.

Then he said something I haven't stopped thinking about.

Bad writing is not a character flaw. It's a failure of empathy. You cannot get inside your reader's head by trying harder. You have to actually find a real human being and watch them read your words in real time.

He showed his drafts to his mother. Not because she was unsophisticated, but because she wasn't a cognitive psychologist. She was smart, well-read, and completely outside his world. When she lost the thread, he knew something was wrong.

The second thing he said changed how I think about every sentence I write.

Language is a delivery system, not the destination. What your reader actually understands is not the words. It is the image, the sensation, the concrete thing those words are supposed to summon. If your reader cannot picture it, they have not understood it.

He asked: what is a paradigm? What does a framework look like? What color is a concept?

Nobody could answer. Because abstractions produce nothing in the mind's eye.

The writers from two centuries ago who still feel alive today were forced to think visually because they had no abstractions to hide behind. They had to say the spirit of the hawk tore into our flesh instead of aggression. The image did the work that the jargon could not.

The third thing he said was the one most people ignore completely.

Brevity is not about word count. It is about removing every word that makes the reader work harder without rewarding them for it. He quoted a line he had memorized for 40 years: omit needless words. Three words. An instruction that is also an example of itself.

He said the best thing that ever happened to his writing was editors who gave him an 800-word limit and wouldn't budge. The constraint always improved the piece. Always.

The curse of knowledge is real. The fix is simple and most people never do it.

Find one person outside your world. Show them what you wrote. Watch their face, not the page.

[Ida Overdijk @IdaOverdijk]

“Preventie vraagt om een bredere blik op gezondheid” — Het symposium markeert het startpunt van een bredere beweging: een uitnodiging om het gesprek over #zingeving in de samenleving te normaliseren, voorbij labels en medicalisering #zielzorg https://t.co/sDB5phMXHN

[ben de bock @badebock]

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[Omar Meriwani @OmarMeriwani]

"'To reach the point you don’t know, you must take the road you don’t know.' San Juan de la Cruz
I am more and more convinced that the problems whose urgency binds us to the present require us to break away from them in order to consider them in their depth."

Edgar Morin

[Omar Meriwani @OmarMeriwani]

Edgar Morin’s Paradigm of Complexity
https://t.co/eQdLkeg98p

[ben de bock @badebock]

https://t.co/kR1iIMZ1Sm

[ben de bock @badebock]

Ik heb ontdekt dat ik een integratieve wereldbeeld heb. Wat is die van jou? https://t.co/dEzwWoYy6U

[ben de bock @badebock]

Op https://t.co/jr1y9KuGHk las ik het volgende interessante artikel: "Voor kunsthistoricus en Rijksmuseum-directeur Henk van Os stond cultuur midden in de samenleving. Dat bracht hij over bij een breed publiek" https://t.co/a1xIZICdfF

[ben de bock @badebock]

Heb je dit gezien? - Het kwaad herdacht https://t.co/umBD4ktaEe

[ben de bock @badebock]

Portrait d une reliante Marie Noëlle ALBERT https://t.co/KfkZhY38wr via @YouTube

[ben de bock @badebock]

Principes de la pensée complexe - Régis MEISSONIER https://t.co/55wAxthq34 via @YouTube