Beyond the Obsession with Numbers: Charles Eisenstein

Has the time come to move beyond our obsession with measurement? Charles Eisenstein, author of several books on human culture and identity, compares science to religion, and makes the case for moving beyond the belief that only the measurable is real. "Existing techniques," he says, "are insufficient to the task before us." Everything that really matters to people is left out of the numbers. When we give up the find-the-enemy approach to problem-solving we discover that the problem involves ourselves too - and that we don't know what to do any more. When we admit to not knowing, things become possible. Let's embrace the uncertainty of mystery and paradox, and admit it's OK not to know.
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[@meghanhoran9353]

Sharp intellect. Thoughtful. Courageous. Speaking truth. This is a rare gift. Intelligence paired with care and compassion is true intelligence. If care and compassion are absent, we are left with dry intellect. This stuff is juicy! We need to be having these juicy conversations amongst ourselves.

[@AphroditeVenus68]

Beautifully put. So moved by this talk.

[@courtneyawalsh]

Agreed.

[@MahasTreasurebox]

I went to art school with Charles Einstein so many years ago! He was in my photography class 💕🙃 so pleased to see him actively speaking to the public. Thank you for sharing. Blessings 🎵

[@praveenrai6965]

Charles is echoing what ancient wisdom traditions have always practiced as a way of life. The traditional knowledge systems of say, Indic civilization, have been ignored, dismissed in the name of modern science, esp, the reductionist science that has created this cartesian division between the secular and the sacred. In India, as in many other native traditions, every aspect of nature is sacred; it is not how much one accumulates in terms of material possessions that determines one's success in life, but how well one lives in harmony with others and the nature around him/her. Ancients understood interconnectedness, interdependence of all things within the universe...they experienced the divine in everything, multiplicity of ONE consciousness.

[@meghanhoran9353]

"Ancients understood interconnectedness, interdependence of all things within the universe...they experienced the divine in everything, multiplicity of ONE consciousness." And not only the ancients ......

[@kbeetles]

Charles is never daunted by the impossibility of describing the complexities, breadth and depth of the issue. See on KZbin the short documentary on how bringing back the wolves in an area brought back the river. What do we know? Why do we have to be so enamoured with our narrow understanding of how life, living systems work that we ignore all the lessons right in front of our eyes? Why do we haveto pretend that we are gods?

[@courtneyawalsh]

Fear.

[@PauloConstantino167]

Extremely good talk !

[@MarcoAfonso]

He is right on this: we choose what to measure, and so, science progress is biased, guided by what "money" does not want us to go. Of course there are exceptions and minor deviations...

[@queridia]

I remember a moment when my mind rejected an idea I had just read, it was in Rudy Ruckers' Infinity and the Mind. Galileo seemed to wonder about a facet of 'number' that he had not thought about, i.e, that there are as many odd or even numbers as there are counting numbers. Obviously to the rational mind half the counting numbers are odd, the other half are even numbers so both added together should equal the counting numbers. Yet there is always another number, whether its even or odd or the whole counting numbers... there is always a ''next counting number'. My mind went into a 'no compute mode' for a few minutes, this was a new fact that didn't seem to be true. Finally it seemed to me that counting numbers one by one, is no different than counting apples or any object one by one, in fact each numeral is an object now. I don't believe statistics are valid, yet somehow the fact that statistics are accepted as fact bothers me. Mr. Eisenstein is hesitant in his presentation but in my opinion its about time some one begins to articulate the strange fact that much of reality cannot be quantified, although perhaps someday it will be. Freud wrote and I quote: “.... among the psychic functions there is something which should be differentiated (an amount of affect, a sum of excitation), something having all the attributes of a quantity-although we possess no means of measuring it-a something which is capable of increase, displacement and discharge and which extends itself over the memory traces of an idea like an electric charge over the surface of the body…for the present it is justified by it’s utility in correcting and explaining diverse psychical conditions. Collected papers, Vol I, p.75"

[@Orf]

7:30 "The Cult of Quantity"

[@tristancelayeta6890]

Awesome misunderstanding of science and abstraction

[@danielwhitney5981]

Toast Masters Bro.

[@raoulduke8034]

He is a strong believer in the religion of man-made climate change and the unholy CO2 - not too much science in this talk at all.

[@meghanhoran9353]

I think you missed the essence of his talk, maybe even the main course. He questions the authority of science and argues that it cannot be unbiased. Why hang on the CO2 issue? He didn't.