Builder Brain An Essay by Charlie Warzel newsletters.theatlantic.com The Builder mindset often eschews policy completely and focuses on the macro issues, rather than the micro complexities. It is a mindset that seeks to find very elaborate, hypothetical-but-definitely-paradigm-shifting, futuristic technology to fix current problems, instead of focusing on a series of boring-sounding and modest reforms that might help people now. …The worst version of Builder mentality is that their dreams become reality, but instead of maintaining their creations, they simply move onto the next Big Thing, leaving others to deal with the mess they’ve made. A time to build and a time to repair technologybuildingsocietyrepair
If we didn’t live to work A Fragment by Charlie Warzel warzel.substack.com When you talk to people who reject the modern notion of a career, many of them say the same thing: They crave more balance, less precarity, and better pay. They also, crucially, want to work. What’s profound about the career rejectionists is that their guiding questions are simple. What if work didn’t make you feel awful? What would life be like if we didn’t live to work? What do workers and employers actually owe each other? What if we structured our work lives around a different idea of success? workvalues
Mass production of variable products Computers have opened the door much more generally to the mass production of a variable product, regardless of what it is: numbers, words, word processing, making furniture, weaving, or what have you. They enable us to deal with variety without excessive standardization, and hence we can evolve more rapidly to a desired future! Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn The Nature and Art of Workmanship