goals
You can't look a big problem too directly in the eye
Let the goals suggest themselves
Lost purposes
So many tactics, so well entrenched
I won't get
People I'd like to meet
At least everything was important
A Quote by Mads MikkelsenMy approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
Theory of Change
An Essay by Aaron SwartzA theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
Not an accumulation of facts
Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.
On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.
More that can be done
The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:
Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.
Open Transclude
What you are looking at is an scroll-locked iframe that links to a quote I picked out of my blog post “Notes on Comparative Psychology.” You can use Open Transclude anywhere you can drop an
<a>
tag on your own site.Open Transclude:
- Works anywhere on your own domain
- Compatible with most static site generators / templating engines
- 12 lines of HTML, 80 lines of SCSS, 22 lines of JS (4.5 kb total)
- Has 0 dependencies — this is native web technology
Open Transclude is extremely simple, and the heaviest part of the code is the CSS, which you can simplify at your whim. That’s why I am referring to it as a UX pattern. This is not a protocol. The code is really a commodity. What’s interesting about it is the idea and the design, and this is just one viable implementation! Feel free to adapt it however you like.
The principal improvement over a block quotation is sense of context.