🪴 PAR Brain

Prompt - The Last of the Lens-Benders

Mar 29, 20254 min read

Let’s play a game called The Last of the Lens-Benders.

Game Backstory:

  • In the near future, the thinking muscles of large swathes of humanity continue to deteriorate. A game is developed by the surviving active, engaged thinkers to keep their numbers high enough to keep the human race from sliding back into darkness.
  • Good thinkers work in concepts. A concept is a pattern, truth, or mechanism that has been given a name. Any THING can be given a name. Once a THING has a name, it can be viewed as a concept.
  • We use names to grasp, to understand, to use concepts. Concepts are used as prisms to bend the light around any thought.
  • This is formally called Refraction Thinking: Thinking about ONE thing, through the lens of ANOTHER thing. Informally, this is called “Lens-Bending”.
  • With humanity on the brink of a return to the Stone Age, you are determined to carry the Promethean torch of knowledge forward at least one more generation. You are determined to remain…one of the last of the lens-benders.

Game Instructions:

  • In a two-paragraph, 111-word Narrative, talk about the Target Concept through the perspective of the Prism Concepts. They are your prisms to lens-bend around.
  • Even though the ideas are abstract, don’t talk too academically, and try for a slightly casual tone (not too casual either).
  • You win your turn by incorporating all Prism Concepts into the Narrative. You lose by actually saying “lens-bending”, so avoid referencing “lens-bending” in your Narrative.
  • Your Narrative should prioritize: connections between concepts, leaps of insights, unexpected observations, and second-order outcomes.

Here are the details for your turn:

  • Your Target Concept: Root for clusters, not clubs
  • Your Prism Concepts: fandom, B1G bowl game revenue is split equally, meaning the team that earned the spot, gets less than 10% of the revenue, rising tide raises all boats

Your turn, Lens-bender! Still got it, Lens-bender? What say you, Lens-bender?!

END OF PROMPT

Examples to Try Out

  • Your Target Concept: “The mood of the moment is weighted too heavily”
  • Your Prism Concepts: Environment, Hot-Cold Empathy Gap, Levels of Abstraction, Overlapping Gels for Shooting Film, Pace Layers
  • Your Target Concept: Root for clusters, not clubs
  • Your Prism Concepts: fandom, B1G bowl game revenue is split equally, meaning the team that earned the spot, gets less than 10% of the revenue, rising tide raises all boats
  • Your Target Concept: You are what you eat
  • Your Prism Concepts: strong opinions weakly held, the Id, Signal-to-Noise Ratio

Example with Result

  • Your Target Concept: Without Beethoven’s Chorale, there is no Ode to Joy
  • Your Prism Concepts: Ideas are eerily like people, Don’t specialize, hybridize, Structure must be earned
Consider ideas as peculiar entities, much like people. They emerge, grow, transform, and sometimes, even inspire others. Like Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' that wouldn't exist without the preceding Chorale, it's the mingling of separate ideas that sometimes generate the most profound symphonies of thought.

Embrace the ethos of 'Don't specialize, hybridize.' Just as a diverse orchestra resonates more richly than a solo instrument, a mind filled with varied ideas will play more harmonious symphonies. Avoid confining yourself within the bounds of one discipline. Explore freely and widely, just as Beethoven did with his innovations in musical structure.

But remember, this approach comes with a caveat: 'Structure must be earned.' Beethoven didn’t abandon musical principles; he expanded upon them. Similarly, by earning the structure in each domain you delve into, you gain the tools to remix them into something profoundly unique, just as Beethoven did with his Chorale and Ode to Joy. The result? A breathtaking symphony of thought that echoes long after its final note has played.

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