A Quote by David Olusoga
Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real-world consequences.
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Chefs who cook in these ivory towers are in control in their own world. We try to approximate that world as best we can, but ultimately our goal is to please our clients.
Even ivory towers need central heating.
The problem with people who live in a world of speeches and books and theories is they don't know how to fix things in the real world when they go wrong. They feign ignorance, blame others, and make another eloquent speech.
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.
To see what books were available for my older students, I made many trips to the library. If a book looked interesting, I checked it out. I once went home with 30 books! It was then that I realized that kids' novels had the shape of real books, and I began to get ideas for young adult novels and juvenile books.
Traditionally, we think that people with ideas are innovators - that Silicon Valley is the world of ideas. But within the hedge-fund world, they believe that they are men of ideas - that the trade is unto itself one of ideas.
When they come downstairs from their Ivory Towers, idealists are very apt to walk straight into the gutter.
Aside from the posters, wherever there was room, there were books. Stacks and stacks of books. Books crammed into mismatched shelves and towers of books up to the ceiling. I liked my books.
Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome.
I think public intellectuals have a responsibility - to be self-critical on the one hand, to do serious, nuanced work rigorously executed; but to also be able to get off those perches and out of those ivory towers and speak to the real people who make decisions; to speak truth to power and the powerless with lucidity and eloquence.
Policies that emanate from ivory towers often have an adverse impact on the people out in the field who are fighting the wars or bringing in the revenues.
For me or a Bruce Springsteen to sit up in our ivory towers and make comments about racism, well, were not really in it, are we?
Some philosophers think that the idea of a consequentialist virtue theory is strange, but the real strength of consequentialism is that it can emulate the requirements of other moral theories when it is the case that acting on those theories would improve the world.
You can't just hoard your ideas inside the ivory tower. You have to get them out into the world.
The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.
Ideas have consequences, and totally erroneous ideas are likely to have destructive consequences.
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