Nakilicious!

Some of today’s successful tech industry executives have taken unorthodox paths to becoming tech leaders, including dropping out of high school or college. But dropouts make up a tiny percentage of the success stories in the high tech field and beyond. It is true that young people today are light years ahead of past generations in mastering new technologies and adopting innovation. But nothing changes the fact that a 21st century economy requires a 21st century education. Bypassing post-secondary education or training in favor of jumping into the workplace is a disservice to a global society in a competitive world.
It’s concerning then that some opinion leaders are encouraging entrepreneurs to bypass a college degree. In fact, 60 Minutes recently featured PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel promoting this path. These viewpoints serve to fuel speculation that the entirety our future workforce is better served taking their skills directly to the marketplace in lieu of a college degree.

We often forget just how much relationships are built on the small, quiet moments between us: laughing and passing a bowl of popcorn over a movie, car rides together, the happy silence of two people who love each other enough to not have to make small talk when the food arrives. And when these moments are eroded, when simple geography keeps us from speaking this quiet, almost entirely unconscious language of love and friendship, it can make maintaining any kind of relationship an act of constant upkeep.

“What time do you want to go out tonight?” There are three times that are the proper answer to this question, and “I don’t know” is none of them. 5:00, 8:00, or 11:00 (…) are acceptable. We have schedules, too, and we’d like to know what kind of night we’re in for. So what do each of these times mean when you suggest them?

5:00 – I really shouldn’t go out, but we’re going to happy hour after work for some apps and margs. I really want to get home in time for American Idol and/or to tuck my kids in bed. Getting drunk while there’s still daylight is the best of both worlds.

8:00 – I want to go out with the cool kids in their younger 20’s but I have this presentation early in the morning that my boss is going to kill me if I don’t nail. This is usually reserved for people hovering around 30. It is also the prime hour for date night, regardless of age bracket.

11:00 – I want to get black out drunk and nail whatever fills out its jeans properly.

A magician will instantly see the truth behind any colleague’s illusion. But we have a bit of an advantage: We know we are being fooled. Scientists are instinctive doubters who employ a rigorous method to zero in on the truth, but they aren’t necessarily trained to expect deception by subjects and collaborators. We can’t make magicians out of scientists — we wouldn’t want to — but we can help scientists “think in the groove” — think like a magician. And we should.

When my family moved to America, I enrolled in three schools simultaneously: the School of Visual Arts by day, Art Students League classes by night, and group life drawing lessons on weekends. Somehow the idea of not working went out the window, and all throughout my artistic education the emphasis was on work: the idea being that I had to fill all my available time with learning and practice, and that the sheer effort of this was bound to make me an artist. Perhaps this occupation of time was also practice for my future career: being a professional artist in a society where labor and time are still the ultimate producers of value. So the logic was that if all my time was filled with the labor of learning the skills of an artist, perhaps something of value would be produced, leading to a lifetime occupation by artistic labor. Thinking was of relatively little importance within this scenario. I have to add that the system of non-university art education at the time (the 1980s) aided such an approach, because it made it possible to avoid academic studies almost entirely— literature, history, philosophy, and so forth—in favor of studio practice geared toward contriving some sort of artistic style that would be marketable. Sometime in graduate school I started to get the sense that all this was not getting me very far artistically, that some other approach or modality of practice was possible.

In Italo Calvino’s novel “Mr Palomar”, the eponymous hero is dazzled by the mouth-watering variety of cheese he comes across at a fine Parisian fromagerie. “Mr Palomar’s spirit vacillates between contrasting urges: the one that aims at complete, exhaustive knowledge and could be satisfied only by tasting all the varieties; and the one that tends toward an absolute choice, the identification of the cheese that is his alone,” writes Mr Calvino. In the end, “he stammers; he falls back on the most obvious, the most banal, the most advertised, as if the automatons of mass civilisation were waiting only for this moment of uncertainty on his part in order to seize him again and have him at their mercy.