How many poets does it take to change a lightbulb? It's more complicated than you thought, by some way.
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
How many poets does it take to change a light bulb?
That's an important question. You might not think so, but I believe it is, and I'm offering you today a poem that was written by a commentator on my blog called Jon Harvey.
Jon has served as a local councillor in the UK, and he wrote this poem to explore an idea which I have explored on my blog of late, and that is the difference between what is called linear and non-linear thinking and the consequences that the difference between those two types of thinking have for political decision making.
For those who don't know about it, linear decision making is intensely rational, and step, by step, by step, you can move from A to B, to C, to D and E , and that's the way in which most decisions are made by most politicians in the UK.
You might think it's a very logical thing to do, but the problem with it is that you end up with rather routine, dull, uninspired, and frequently, very narrow decisions which fail to take into consideration all the information that is required to reach a proper conclusion about complex problems, which most of those things that of course our politicians are required to look at are.
They aren't simple.
They involve vast numbers of different variables coming together to try to meet a combination of needs using a combination of resources. And that's what non-linear thinking does.
Non-linear thinking is a concept which is particularly noted amongst those who are considered to be neurodivergent in our society, and those are people who have things like autism and ADHD, or the combination, which is AuDHD, or who are maybe dyslexic, or dyspraxic, or whatever. They seem to be very good at making the types of connections that actually create complex outcomes to complex problems . They may have difficulty explaining how they've got from A to E, but they'll actually get to J, because they've seen problems, which linear thinking does not.
Why did Jon offer me this poem? Well, he offered it because poets are a particular group in our society who are very likely to be non-linear thinkers. And so this is what he had to say, and I want to share it with you because I really enjoyed his poem.
How many poets
How many does it take
To change a light bulb?
You want to know..?
Ten
It's a made up number
Plucked from a random synapse
Ten poets
Ten poets:
One to hold the bulb,
To cradle it with care
To honour it
To see it
To be it.
A second to worry
About whether any word
Rhymes with bulb
And no word does
Dr Internet confirms
A third to imagine
Magical metaphors
How bulbs light up our lives
How bulbs are binary
Off or on
A fourth to shoehorn analogies
Of how bulbs are like small suns
Are like the stars of our homes
Guiding us like torches in the night
A fifth to talk of love
And passion
And devotion
Of how bulbs just fit
And slide
Into their screw fittings
Or bayonets…
A sixth to imagine
A world without light bulbs
A desolate desert of darkness
A future to grieve for and despair
A seventh to hold the ladder
Because poets need to be safe
Even when their words stir, challenge
And upset
An eighth to evoke history
To recall times gone past
Of Edison
And Tesla
And Benjamin Franklin
A ninth to sense
The bulbous
The globular
The spherical
The oval
The infinite symmetry
And a tenth to hold the poet holding the chair.
Ten poets
Changing light bulbs
For the world
Buckingham
24 March 2024
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I think you’ll find that in principle it takes either an infinite number of poets to change a lightbulb. Or zero. But after renormalisation (which is essentially dividing infinity by another infinity) only one.
In the words of The Matrix, there is no spoon.
Rhymes for “bulb” are tricky but there are some close ones – pulp or gulp or sculpt or skulk perhaps.
I am not convinced they rhyme…
I note the rest
‘culled’ = as in flowers and ‘mulled’ as in thinking – but it is Sunday – so maybe not – or perhaps ‘dulled’ because it is a rainy Sunday so maybe lulled – or a little exercise as in ‘sculled’ – maybe none of these rhyme to a purist but —
You may have more luck with a poem that rhymes if you write it in Italian.
Bulb = lampadina.
Carina
Bustina
Etc.
🙂
Infinity divided by infinity is as mathematically spurious as nought divided by nought. It does not come to one, try a worked example: divide the infinity of counting numbers by the infinity of even numbers. The answer is two. Divide the infinity of counting numbers by the infinity of prime numbers and the answer is incalculable although I think it might regress towards e. Infinities all might be infinite, but they have an infinite variety of population densities
This is what a lot of those idiots who think that their local council employs too many people need to read.
You need men on the highway watching out for hazards whilst others dig.
You need someone to help when using a ladder just in case or using heavy equipment on their own – just in case.
In case something goes wrong. Which it can and looking at the HSE figures every year for accidents at work it will tell you that.
Which is why you need other poets around to show you how to do stuff properly and safely – pedagogy and all that.
That’s what this poem means to me.
Thanks – and to Jon Harvey
Reminds me of this.
https://www.productthinking.cc/p/the-messiness-of-doing-the-work
A lot of people who set ‘targets’ often seem never to have done the job themselves.
They look at spreadsheet or something,
i’ve just had a lightbulb moment i can’t keep to myself
i finally understand money creation
when a bank makes a loan, the double entry leads to an asset and a liability on the bank’s balance sheet
so far so good
the inspiration i have obtained from the FTs Brendon Greeley this morning:
the asset in the bank’s balance sheet is the loan that the bank has made & which the borrower will have to repay
the liability – the deposit – is the sum which the bank must get back from the borrower in the future. if the borrower doesn’t pay it is a debt/liability to the bank
as you have said so many times
“ALL MONEY IS DEBT”
Correct
But he went on to make crass comments on central banking, which he does not understand.
Just saying….
Come on, we have the right people coming together on this website to solve this complex problem. How about “Shmulb – Definition – a solution to a complex problem that has been found by someone with the special gift of non-linear thinking.”
I might be putting my immortal soul at risk in saying this, but it does seem to me that all the evidence suggests that God is non linear.
🙂
Related to the whole political decision-making angle, I would recommend The Unaccountability Machine by Daniel Davies, if you’ve not encountered it before.
It explores the importance of information theory in institutions – so much of our modern society has exported any sort of communication to the market – the only information available is Price, and from price alone we are meant to make decisions, according to neoliberal theory, since we’re all perfectly rational welfare maximizers etc etc.
This also extends to politics, in that, actually, getting to only say a single thing once every 5 years is not a great feedback mechanism. Local elections kind of act as additional information, but they’re inadequate with how centralised power is in Westminster.
The fact that we cannot – generally – recall MPs is truly bizarre. Elections are not free to run, of course, but surely democratic input is worth the cost?
I wonder how many poets write their poems backwards because they get too excited to wait for the twist at the end.
[…] Harvey, who recently let me publish his poem entitled Ten Poets, has also submitted this to the blog. I share it because I like […]