Based on the experiences of friends doing some very creative things, I have come to suspect that persistent involvement in creative tasks can create a situation whereby real-world experiences tend to be perceived as an integral part of the creative process (rather than the other way round!). “Composers’ Syndrome”, which is what I call this phenomenon, is perhaps best illustrated by an image of a poet creating real-life experiences—adventures and conflicts—that play out as lyrics of poetry would, without being particularly concerned about the real-life impact of those adventures or conflicts for himself and for others. It would be interesting, I think, to more closely examine the phenomenon philosophically and scientifically.
The works of Richard Rorty, Daniel Dennett, Stephen Pinker, and Patricia Churchland will most likely be of help. That examination can inspire additional psychological perspectives, therapeutical and managerial practices that can really benefit parents raising uber-creative kids, schools training them, managers and teams constantly dealing with creative people, and the larger society to which creative products tends to be hugely beneficial. My armchair assumption is the poet tends to view his life as a poem, and his life experiences as its chapters. But this subject is something I would be very interested in exploring.
At the moment, the world's knowledge is super-easy to access. But a lot of things in life are easy to do. It does not mean we actually do them, or even, that we often want to do them. So, could this access to knowledge benefit us more? We have always encountered certain kinds of knowledge routinely or randomly through everyday experiences. That is a very limited class of knowledge, of course. Then there is the knowledge we intentionally seek from school, work, personal projects, etc., which are also limited by why we are learning, where we are learning, and who is helping us learn (the experiences of our teachers usually make a more lasting impact on us than the actual substance of what they teach!)
To fully unleash the impact of the access to knowledge we now have, we may have to often expose ourelves to nudges to learn new things, and, if possible, we should be able to do so in an environment that is a diverse mix of skills and experiences. So, of course, social media might have been the perfect innovation here, except that (putting aside misinformation), while being watched by many, people tend to develop very strong defences against even the slightest appearance of a willingness to learn. Few people can tolerate the feeling of being made to feel ignorant or stupid publicly. What’s worse? In most such situations, the teacher can be of one of two mindsets: to expect the student to know what he is trying to teach (which is often received as intolerance), or to assume that the student does not know what he is trying to teach (which is often received as condescension).
So the question remains, how can we effectively crowd-source knowledge from the infinite pool of personal and professional experiences we have at our disposal, so that we can finally realise the full impact of advancements in content delivery and online social networking? How do we help people to acquire knowledge in such public settings? That is something I would be very interested in exploring.
The conventional philosophical approach seems to be to assume a perfect case, and then keep correcting one’s theory to account for imperfections or irregularities. Perfection is the reference point from which we consider imperfection. (As Stephen Hawking puts it in The Grand Design, is man a little lower than the angels, or are the angels a little higher than man?). The tradition of thinking from perfection towards imperfection has impacted the engineering of many systems: i.e. build it for use in an ideal scenario, and throw in a handful of loosely-connected features and adjustments that can come in handy in cases where situations are less ideal. That thinking is even observed in everyday life, where people tend to judge the value of their actual relationships using imaginary, arbitrary, supposedly perfect relationships as yardstick. As a philosophical approach, this was always a little weird, I think. A bird in hand should be the basis on which to judge two in the bush, not vice-versa.
Yet, this tradition found its way into one assumption that has had a significant impact on economics; an idea allegedly advanced by Adam Smith, father of modern economics: the idea that human beings act rationally and out of self-interest. That ideology has prevailed, producing theories and models which are then endlessly adjusted to account for irregularities. Not even John Nash’s Nobel-Prize-winning work, I feel, successfully shook away that ideology. People are still thought about in many economic models from that perspective as individual rational agents. So what could possibly go wrong? Well, we can end up with an economic system that is not at all people-friendly. As we no doubt have.
In this context, one can fully appreciate how Richard Thaler’s Nobel-Prize-winning work on "Behavioural Economics" (probably so-called because economists were not quite sure what to make of it, the same way Newtonian mechanics was not quite sure what to make of Relativity and Einstein was not quite sure what to make of quantium mechanics) was a revolution that never really happened. Few people would argue that traditional economics has produced Compassionate Systems. What it has done, it seems to me, is paint a picture of an incomplete human person. We know, for example, that human beings do not have social relationships that are in any substantial way independent of their individual financial circumstances and decisions. If nothing at all, the pioneering work of MIT's Alex Pentland proves this. So we know that the distinction between what is social and what is economic is superficial at best. What the evidence suggests is that society is the economy. The economy, it appears, is the summation of social, rather than isolated individual mental, dispositions and processes. And so we ask the question: In an economy of people, by people, and for people, shouldn’t all observations and interpretations be centred on people’s behaviour? Why then should economics be anything else but "behavioural"?
It seems to me that if traditional economics is Newtonian Physics, a theory of relativity seems very much needed to elegantly clarify phenomena such as bubbles that can be glaringly traced to human (social) behaviour. That theory, I'm convinced, would produce a suite of badly-needed Compassionate Systems at local, national, and international levels. This is something I would be very interested in exploring.