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Nassin Taleb calls this "glander." Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process a
by DTrejo 16y ago
Nassin Taleb calls this "glander."
Glander best describes the notion of lifting all inhibitions to “tinker intellectually in an undirected stochastic process aiming at capturing some idea that will enrich your corpus”. “Researching” or “thinking” smack of a top-down activity." More on Glander by Taleb: "It is an irony that the academy does not have a word for the process by which discovery works best –but slang does. I was trying to describe in a letter what I am currently doing: French would not let me. But argot lends itself very well... I am involved in an activity called “Glander”, more precisely “glandouiller”. It means “to idle”, though not “to be in a state of idleness” (it is an active verb). Gandouiller denotes enjoyment. The formal French word is “ne rien faire” (to do nothing), which misses on the active part –so do words that have a languishing connotation. Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. It resembles flâner which has this perambulation part; though Glander does not have any strings attached. The Italians have farniente but it is really doing nothing. Even the Arabs do not have a verb for Glander: the construction takaslana from the Semitic root ksl denotes laziness (other words imply some inertia)."
Newton was a “glandeur”; In Dijksterhuis 2004:
George Spencer Brown has famously said about Sir Isaac Newton that “to arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behavior of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is that one needs to know.”
— Excerpt from The Black Swan
- wazoox 16y ago> Nassin Taleb calls this "glander." So do all french speakers :)
- gruseom 16y agoWhat a marvelous paragraph. It almost makes me want to give Taleb a second chance (Fooled by Randomness did nothing for me). This is a sharp observation: Glander is what children without soccer moms do when they are out of school. I'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond. Also interesting that while he addresses the lack of similar words in Arabic and Italian, he doesn't mention the lack of such a word in English, which of course is the only reason he's writing the paragraph to begin with. "Idleness" is loaded with a Protestant strain of the moralism he's objecting to. I suppose colloquialisms like "hanging out" and "chilling" convey something of the idea, but lack its generative core. "Reverie" comes to mind as having a similar quality; telling, perhaps, that it too is French.
- logicalmind 16y agoI'm reminded of someone (maybe John Taylor Gatto) who wrote about the education he got as a boy from long hours spent at a pond. If you discover what you were referring to, please post. I am curious to read about that. I did a bit of searching and as far as I can find, Gatto discussed ponds and education in relation to Thoreau's Walden Pond experience.
- foompy_katt 16y agoI believe the body of water was the Monongahela river, actually, but close enough :). Go to http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc3.htm http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/toc3.htm and then click on Chapter 10. That's from the online version of "The Underground History of American Education", which is worth reading in its entirety. The published version is even better and has been updated and corrected. Enjoy!
- gruseom 16y agoYou're right! The text I was thinking of was Chapter 3 of Dumbing Us Down, which is titled "The Green Monongahela".