In Quest of Optimism Beyond the Edge: through avoidance of the answering process

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Introduction

Each year the World Question Center, initiated by The Edge, formulates a question that is submitted to a network of people of appropriate eminence in a relevant field. The Edge Annual Question of 2007 is as follows:

The 160 responses are available on the Edge website. They have also been presented in a book edited by John Brockman (What are You Optimistic About? 2007).

The following is a commentary on an encounter by the writer with that set of responses. It follows from earlier responsibility for the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential, use of its databases to generate questions of possible significance (Generating a Million Questions from UIA Databases: Problems, Strategies, Values, 2006), an effort to derive significance from them (Preliminary NetMap Studies of Databases on Questions, World Problems, Global Strategies, and Values, 2006), a concern with fixation on the positive (Being Positive Avoiding Negativity: management challenge of positive vs negative, 2005) and with questions of a "higher order", and a continuing preoccupation with the challenge of comprehension (Musings on Information of Higher Quality, 1996). Aspects of these initiatives notably enabled the work of the Intelligence in its development of a question-based interactive web media facility for Dropping Knowledge (Enabling a Living Library, 2006).

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