Wisdom from the young generation: We fear “the new”
“Emily Bruell, a valedictorian at Roaring Forks High School in Carbondale, Colorado, delivered a powerful message to her fellow graduates. Objectively, it was about labels. But the ultimate takeaway was the importance of courage.
She acknowledged the tendency we all have when faced with something new:
“And the easiest thing to do when you are scared of something is to ignore it, to just keep on acting the way you did before you got scared.””
Many scientists face this response to new proposals, ideas or beliefs.
Contrast this simple but profound quote to the long speech from Bill Clinton that the university probably paid $100,000 or more for.
He talked about the significance of education and its role in advancing society. We all agree with the importance of education of course. Education is essential to create useful advances but is it sufficient?
He concluded his speech with this recommendation:
THE WORLD IS IN A RACE BETWEEN THE POSITIVE AND THE NEGATIVE FORCES OF OUR INTERDEPENDENCE. GETTING OUT OF EACH OTHER IS NOT AN OPTION. THE ONLY OPTION IS VICTORY FOR THE POSITIVE FORCES. AND NONE OF US CAN DO THAT ALONE. SO JOIN THE FIGHT. AND GOOD LUCK.
From: Clinton commensement speech to NYU
An inspiring speech of course from a brilliant man with many off-scale accomplishments. But I think we all read this somewhere, and heard about “positive or negative” or “good and “bad” a “few” times… Oh yes, in virtually every religious speech …or text. Is this a sound advice, yes, whether one is religious or not. Is it new or novel, not so much. Also, each one of us also has a different definition of positive or negative… and isn’t “fight” negative almost by definition. How about stand-up to by creative innovation?
Perhaps Bill Clinton knows what the young student observed — it is hard to teach people something they don’t know already, it will mostly create fear and rejection Unless we find ways to change that.
The young student was talking about “new vs old”. That distinction is pretty clear. The society’s response to new is a very important point here. Its fear, rejection, or simply ignoring it.
This has to improve.
Bill Clinton talks about education and tightly connects it to “invention”. Education does not create invention. The search for novelty and change does. In order to experiment and adopt the new we must have courage to consider and accept it.
Education + Innovation + Removing the barriers (e.g. fear) to integrating innovation into the real world is my proposal for catalyzing more rapid advances, technological, medical, political or societal.
See my blog on Agile and Lean Education: Lessons from Bacteria
Go NEW Generation !
p.s. Here is one example of a cool idea from a jointly supervised PhD student, Clark Freifeld (BS Yale, MA MIT, PhD Boston University) who won the Engineering Best Societal Dissertation Award.
Crossing Epidemiology and Public Health with Twitter cannot be found in textbooks…. and I can brag about it because the idea and the solution are not mine.
But I did sign Clark’s thesis approval papers and I am already trying to integrate it into other significant real world problems….
