Town Hall

This was one of the better talks I’ve been to. I liked it for many reasons—one being that Robert Fuller didn’t claim to have all the answers but still came off as a wise and authoratative person on his own topic. He’s obviously put a lot of thought into Liberty, Fraternity & Equality as governing concepts. And he claims that his idea of Dignity is more a result of a thinking on the couch when he’d become a “nobody” himself without the title or rank privledge he’d held before leaving his job. He’s lived the philosophy he is suggesting we embrace.

During the follow-up Q&A session a potentially uncomfortable moment unfolded as a gentleman in his 50s talked about living in downtown Seattle for 20+ years—but feeling like he’d been routinely ignored by his fellow citizens. On his walk to the talk last night he described people looking away from him as he made his way through his city to Town Hall from downtown. He dressed and looked perhaps less fortunate or lower in rank than other folks at the talk last night (he was bushy bearded and modestly dressed). His voice quavered as he tried to get out that he felt hurt and banished by his own Seattle people. After a bit of emotional rambling he finally asked Dr. Fuller what he thought the solution to such alienation might be. Fuller graciously asked the man how he would answer his own question.

The room of Seattleites hushed and (in my mind) a rare collective moment of strangers connecting with strangers occured. Fuller, myself, the man asking the question and others waited expectantly, not knowing what was going to happen next. The man paused, then said that if people would simply gesture and acknowledge him … instead of ignoring him … he would feel like he belonged. It was a golden moment.

To me this exchange summarized much of the entire evening: a little dignity between people can go a long way.

Learn more about the Dignity Movement.

I’m preaching to the choir here as both of you appear to be going—but this looks to be a promising talk on Sunday. See you there!

At my third Town Hall talk last night I decided this place has already enriched my life enough that I should become a member. Anyone else interested? It’s $35 for a year membership. They save seats for members and the ticket prices are sometimes lower. Totally worth it even without the perks.

I enjoyed Daniel Gilbert’s talk last night—if anything I wish he would have cut his humorous examples in half and left more time to vere off the planned path of his talk and into the more interesting territory of the Q&A session that followed. But he’s an entertaining speaker and the talk was well received by the sold-out crowd.

I enjoyed the analogy of measuring happiness as Optometry. It’s all established through asking questions and adjusting for context. Never really thought about it before, but the prescription glasses I wear are arrived at after an extensive interview by a person who knows what and how to ask me, “is A better or B? Better A; better B”.

One thing that stuck in my head was the concept of reducing all life decisions to a happiness value equation. How does that explain contextual happiness with multiple events that rely on one another? For instance, if you go on vacation you can hit the pause button on a given day where you’re definitely not happy, but within the context of the greater goal of “vacation” you end up with a very happy vacation experience. It just seems that if you separate these equations too much and can get absurd. You lose the drama.

That said, this isn’t where Mr. Gilbert was taking his talk but I’d love to hear his thoughts on it. He was clear that you can’t separate the chemicals of happiness in your brain from the event causing happiness. They’re intertwined.

Thanks for a highly engaging and entertaining talk, Mr. Happiness Optometrist!

In Todd’s words, “This is a decent short-form version of the lecture
we saw last Monday, in case you wanted to check it out.”.

A great, short speech that opened me up to the Iran perspective. Very experience-based point of view from Shirin Ebadi—I loved her notion that you can judge the human rights record of a culture by the way they treat women. Although simply stated, she built a complex argument around this concept by tracing the origins and functions of a woman being worth 50% of a man in current Iranian law (2 female eyewitnesses to stand against 1 male, damages paid in civil cases are calculated at 50% for women, etc.). But this was not a speech about the shortcomings of Iranian political culture—it was an analysis of geo-politics in the Iran/Iraq region and within the US and Europe. She said more in 30 minutes than most people can say in 90.

This was interesting material—Seth’s premise is that the nature of the universe is one of computing. For him this isn’t a metaphor but a fact. In Seth’s world matter has been computing since the Big Bang and continues to do so. Human computers are really a harnessing or redirecting of already existing computing acitivity. Without too much blah blah, I’ll say that he made a compelling argument and was a highly entertaining and likeable person. The most interesting challenge to his premise was that his leap from atoms and such being bits (just like computer bits) to the universe-as-computer program is a big one. That is, programs that we think of have intention—they go somewhere and peform a specified funtion. He stumbled a bit on this challenge, but openly so claiming that the program of the Universe can be random or not totally apparent. At least that’s what I got out of the exchange.

This was only the 2nd “computerized” speech (using powerpoint) that Seth has made in 3 years as he tries to keep computers out of his non-work life. So his slides where hand-drawn projections which added a nice human touch to the talk. And the audience was really a great component to his talk. A great event from a guy with lots of brain power and a sharp wit. Definitely catch Seth if he’s in your hood—and buy his book (it’s got a lot of sex in it, he claims).