A friend of mine helped organising the Dropping Knowledge Event. It takes place right now at the time I am writing this. Hafsat Abiola and Willem Dafoe lead a round table of about a hundred people who answer questions of people from all over the world (People who are “online” that is).
A discussion among 100 people! Well, if they all have to talk to each other, the number of talks between each two people will be quite big: 4950 talks if all talk to all once.
For those of you, who don’t have a calculator or a brain to do the job, here is the Lisp “program” to calculate that number:
To accomplish that, organising 4950 talks, one day is just not enough. And in life outside maths, you are still not finished. So you would have to iterate the whole process, in order to have a final and “streamlined” version of the answer that everybody agrees with. And after all, that is what all the questioners would like to get, isn’t it?, an answer from all of the savvy folks down from Berlin.
It looks as if the organisers found that out too. They let different people answer different questions. So that problem seems to be solved: Nobody really had to argue with anybody! Leaving the questioners with pure luck of who got to answer their question.
My impression on what I saw so far on the live-stream, is that unfortunately it is just another feel good get-together for a bunch of people who consider themselves humanists.
Because that’s what they go on about. About how everybody should have respect for life, other human beings, animals, trees, toothpaste, et cetera… That everybody is the same in the end and the religons anyway, one god, the god a guy who has no religion himself and in some way has showed us how to live, I learn – interesting.
Nothing new here… what a pitty! There must have been quite a bunch of disappointed questioners who thought to themselves, they could have given that answer themselves just as easily…
In fact I cannot hear it anymore. I have seen it way too often. It is always so easy to look out into the world and find mistakes all over the place. Stuff other people do wrong, the system that is “unnatural” or the society that is ill and perverted and ah oh how good it was when everyone still run around half-naked, clubbing each others heads…
“What a nice and wonderful event that was today”, “How intelligent my appeal to world peace must have made me look!” – and then they go home and beat up their wives and children…
And why? Because they have looked out, into the world and had many ideas of how it should be, but they did not look inside. Into themselves. To where the negativity, they so much want to free the world off, actually lifes. It’s the inside of the individual where any change has to start.
Changing the world without first changing oneself will never ever work out. It is an uphill battle, a Sisyphean task.
I am not saying I am any better, but hey, I also don’t give the world such great advices (that any 1st grader could come up with, anyway)!
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