What excellence is Learn what excellence is, how to identify it...This is not a big reading assignment – excellence is scarce, lognormal, long-tailed. Acting on this knowledge is liberating, freeing oneself from vast piles of triviality, knock-offs, petty connoisseurship, over-publishing, and the short-sighted, trendy, greedy. Excellence is long-term knowledge, even forever knowledge. Excellence, like good taste, is perhaps a universal quality. Analytical thinking is about the relationship between evidence and conclusions, and is fundamental to all empirical work, regardless of field, discipline, specialty. Thus it is possible at times to assess credibility of nonfiction work without being a content expert. Thinking eyes may well have an eye for excellence, regardless of field or discipline. Edward Tufte, Seeing With Fresh Eyes Tetlock and the Taliban qualitygenius
Both models are completely useless In your head, you'll probably find two models for writing. One is the familiar model taught in high school and college—a matter of outlines and drafts and transitions and topic sentences and argument. The other model is its antithesis—the way poets and novelists are often thought to write. Words used to describe this second model include "genius", "inspiration", "flow", and "natural", sometimes even "organic". Both models are useless. I should qualify that sentence. Both models are completely useless. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing genius
Florence and Milan You can see how powerful cities are from something I wrote about earlier: the case of the Milanese Leonardo. Practically every fifteenth century Italian painter you've heard of was from Florence, even though Milan was just as big. People in Florence weren't genetically different, so you have to assume there was someone born in Milan with as much natural ability as Leonardo. What happened to him? Paul Graham, Cities and Ambition genius
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking An Article by Jeremy DeSilva lithub.com You are undoubtedly familiar with this situation: You’re struggling with a problem—a tough work or school assignment, a complicated relationship, the prospects of a career change—and you cannot figure out what to do. So you decide to take a walk, and somewhere along that trek, the answer comes to you. walkingthinkinggenius
Scenius A Definition by Brian Eno kk.org Scenius stands for the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius. The Small GroupMutual appreciationTossing an idea around culturegeniuscreativitycollaboration
-2000 Lines Of Code An Article by Andy Hertzfeld www.folklore.org Bill Atkinson...who was by far the most important Lisa implementor, thought that lines of code was a silly measure of software productivity. He thought his goal was to write as small and fast a program as possible, and that the lines of code metric only encouraged writing sloppy, bloated, broken code. ...He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2,000. I'm not sure how the managers reacted to that, but I do know that after a couple more weeks, they stopped asking Bill to fill out the form, and he gladly complied. The amount of work not done metricscodemanagementproductivity