What I learned after spending two days with futurists and positive psychologists

boing
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[Read the post]

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After all that “positivity” I feel I can go conquer the universe, or maybe I start with the World first.

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It would be interesting to take these exercises and do them with different groups. How would a group that uses a food bank respond? Poorer group? Minority group? Non-US folks?

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[quote=“eaddict, post:3, topic:78738”]How would a group that uses a food bank respond? Poorer group? Minority group? Non-US folks?
[/quote]Suddenly I recall:

Thinking about the future shouldn’t be about trying to be correct.

Something of a luxury, that.

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“Possibility thinking” is difficult when our culture tends toward problem rather than solution orientation and conflict is the default mode of operation rather than cooperation.

I wonder why we don’t yet have an ad hoc World Game online where those who wish to can play with scenarios that provide basic services for 100% of humanity. The pieces for a “dashboard for Spaceship Earth” are all pretty much available but no one, I know of, has put them all in one place and added a game layer on top of them so that different possibilities can be evaluated.

For instance, about 1.4 billion people are without access to electricity. I know of one company in India, Thrive Solar, which says they are now producing solar lights for a production cost of $1 per unit. I know of another effort in the Dominican Republic which is trying to provide solar lights to all the families in that country at a total cost of $5 per unit. Global access to basic electricity - light, communications, battery charging - is practical and affordable NOW. And, by the way, in the developed world, this is a solar civil defense in case of emergency and disaster.

Providing water, food, and shelter to the bottom billion of us all have aspects that are addressable now with practical and affordable technologies and techniques that we are not taking advantage of simply because of a lack of imagination and cooperation. We persist in thinking that the solutions are impossible when everything that’s needed is right in front of us NOW.

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Just a note that my favorite idea-generating and group-brainstorming game, by far, is Microscope. Definitely worth checking out.

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I love that game (and Kingdom).

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I didn’t mean it as a ‘correct’ just would like to see the exercises down by a different group of people and see what comes out.

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Word.

Let’s do this.

Together.

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How about you conquer yourself first?

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Interestingly, the Positive Psychology Center, in addition to generating sticky notes with the word “future” on them, is a military contractor - http://harpers.org/blog/2010/10/psychologists-and-torture/

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Are you speaking from experience or just bloviating?

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That was a meaty read, @frauenfelder - thanks!

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Why not create games in which scoring points created a tangible benefit for people like putting money toward developing clean water solutions for those who have none; electricity for those who have none, etc? Great ideas, gmoke!

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I’m finding myself mentally assigning scores with that pentagon chart to a number of posters and their pet utopias over at the Eclipse Phase forum… handy little thing.

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Yep

A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children’s performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense. Prior to the Marshmallow Studies at Stanford, Walter Mischel had shown that the child’s belief that the promised delayed rewards would actually be delivered is an important determinant of the choice to delay, but his later experiments did not take this factor into account or control for individual variation in beliefs about reliability when reporting correlations with life successes.[13][14][15][16]

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Heute die Welt, morgens die Sonnensystem!

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“morgen das Sonnensystem”. If you want to be our overlord I will not stop you. But please grammatically correct.

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I’ve been to paradise. But I’ve never been to me!

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Sounds like something @William_Holz would say. Have you seen his threads here?

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