How to dismantle a Rubik’s cube: barbarians can solve problems?

August 21, 2013 By Luca Ronda

ABSTRACT:
A contemporaneous Italian writer, Alessandro Baricco, recently published a sage named “The barbarians: an essay on the mutation”, a tracing and exhaustive analysis of the modern society, a nice effort to delineate the traits representing behavioral aspects merging in the ongoing social revolution. The mechanism underlying this mutation towards what are provocative called barbarians, opposed to the previous society, considered civil, are so summarized:
“accomplice to a specific technological innovation, a group of people substantially aligned with the imperial model of culture, a gesture which access was denied, instinctively returns to a more immediate and spectacular modern linguistic universe, to give him a surprising commercial success”.

ARTICLE TEXT:
A contemporaneous Italian writer, Alessandro Baricco, recently published a sage named “The barbarians: an essay on the mutation”, a tracing and exhaustive analysis of the modern society, a nice effort to delineate the traits representing behavioral aspects merging in the ongoing social revolution. The mechanism underlying this mutation towards what are provocative called barbarians, opposed to the previous society, considered civil, are so summarized:
“accomplice to a specific technological innovation, a group of people substantially aligned with the imperial model of culture, a gesture which access was denied, instinctively returns to a more immediate and spectacular modern linguistic universe, to give him a surprising commercial success”.

This is for the author the key mechanism for most of social revolutions throughout history. If we look to the internet technological coming, we can’t consider, besides its obvious and immediate advantages, the effect in mutating, keeping the Baricco’s vocabulary, people behavior and thinking. The possibility to access to the knowledge know and at the same time to make a infinite searches at the same time, surfing the immense internet space, resulted in a multitasking and less profound issues approach.

On the other side, the possibility for people alongside the World to communicate and share thoughts was the sine qua non condition for open innovation coming, and the possibility to access to the immense knowledge surfing on the net amplify the possibility to find a solution for a problem. The environmental disaster in Mexico gulf was followed by a global world look for a solution, demonstrating the relevance of interrogating World communities for a global problem.
But how problems with unavoidable need of deep concentration can cope with this new way of thinking? How scientific challenges, coming from a increasingly complex, populated and demanding World can be addressed without the necessary concentration on a specific problem?

So this technological innovation, the trigger event for Baricco, is at the same time a necessary condition and a risk for a problem solver. How to solve the solving problem?

If I go back in my mind when I was I child, I remind a Christmas gift from my relatives, a Rubik’s cube. It can be argued that it was not a guessed gift, since I was 6 or 7. After a while leaving me alone, my father found the previously scrambled Rubik’s cube completely solved. The surprise of having a genius son and the idea of his future as a brilliant mathematician was not long lasting, as my parents rapidly discovered how I solved the problem: detaching and sticking again in the right position the sticky labels on the cube.

Rubik’s cube is a typical example of a problem needing a high concentration capacity and, despite the solution is one of the infinite expected, or a completely unexpected one, has already been solved.

Now the main challenge for all the people which would consider their selves problem solver is to find a way to maintain the concentration skills of civilian and the ability to surf as a barbarian.


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