Nona- I see that you have a lot of questions within this page and your paper page. Hopefully, I can help by sharing what I think are some other important questions to be asking, and maybe try to shed some light on the ones you've already posed. I'll look at the Antione de Saint Exupéry question about how to build a ship. Without a deeper knowledge of Antione de Saint Exupéry other than Le Petit Prince to guide me, I think (in line with Eben's idea, if I'm understanding it correctly) that the suggestion here is that to achieve an outcome in practice (shipbuilding) we need to inspire the motivation to accomplish a certain thing (yearning for/exploring the sea) which will then instill the drive to build the best boat possible to achieve that goal. It seems to me that deep desires and wants will lead to the best outcomes: we work hardest when we know what we want and have a feeling of urgency to get it. But you've already got the yearning for the sea, and now you need to know how the ship gets built. I think the next step is to translate a general "yearning for the sea" into something concrete: maybe the question is a very simple one. What do you want to achieve? What is it that you really find important? I know you say you want to use your license to shape the institutes to which you belong. I think I have a similar feeling. And so maybe we're at the same roadblock: shape them how? Do something good in this world, but what? What is it that instills in you an urgent desire to change an institution or use your license to achieve a specific practical outcome? What is the problem in this world that you think needs fixing? Those are the questions that will help us figure out what exactly our "yearning" is. But then comes the boat. I don't think we can figure out how to build the boat until we know more about the sea. I think this all speaks to something Eben said in one of our first classes: (approximately) that the only thing you need to change the world is know exactly what you want to do and exactly how to do it. I think that the first part of this might be the hardest. Knowing what we want to do will help drive us to "build with all our energy" the machinery that will help us do it. Figuring out what we want is a hard question, because it isn't one that anyone else can answer or we can find out in some empirical way. But I think just constantly thinking about things we learn, trying to figure out what seems right and what seems wrong, trying to get a feel of our sense of justice and when it is misplaced or nonexistent, and what particular issues strike us the most can all help us formulate some idea of what it is we want. I'm realizing that this is all getting a little bit impractical and abstract, so I'm going to post this in the Talk page rather than the paper page. I hope that some of these questions are helpful for thinking about your ideas, but I also realize that they are kind of nebulous, so if you have any advice on how to refine them or turn them into something more concrete, I would love to hear.

-- JessicaHallett? - 23 Feb 2010