Thoughts & Ideas
On Greatness
v0.crap
- ââWriting, Brieflyââ
Shaped and reshaped
A distinct and complementary stance
But bulldozers move mountains
Argue against the best
Half-winged, half-imprisoned
Curiosity spurred on
From one Arte to another
The Innovation Funnel
The power of One
An Article by Kathy SierraIt's not teams that are the problem, it's the rabid insistence on teamwork. Group think. Committee decisions.
Most truly remarkable ideas did not come from teamwork. Most truly brave decisions were not made through teamwork. The team's role should be to act as a supportive environment for a collection of individuals. People with their own unique voice, ideas, thoughts, perspectives. A team should be there to encourage one another to pursue the wild ass ideas, not get in lock step to keep everything cheery and pleasant.
A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea
AÂ Fragment by Ryan BroderickI guess what youâre describing is like a tweet that hits the uncanny valley of good and bad in such a precise way, with such confidence, that it just pisses everybody off.
Because if you look at this tweet for just a second youâre like ok, thatâs a fine bedroom, but then you look at it, and it starts to unravel in your mind, like trying to remember a dream after you just woke up. And youâre like âwhat is this?â Itâs like a deepfake of a personâs face.
âŚOk, Iâve got some fire for you: A bad tweet is like a deepfake of an idea.
The perfect bad tweet is like something you read and youâre like âok yeahâ but then youâre like, âwaitâŚâ, and it just starts to come apart in your mind and youâre like that makes no fucking sense, just like this photo of this incredibly bad room.
The McDonaldâs Theory of Creativity
An Article by Jon BellI use a trick with co-workers when weâre trying to decide where to eat for lunch and no one has any ideas. I recommend McDonaldâs.
An interesting thing happens. Everyone unanimously agrees that we canât possibly go to McDonaldâs, and better lunch suggestions emerge. Magic!
Itâs as if weâve broken the ice with the worst possible idea, and now that the discussion has started, people suddenly get very creative. I call it the McDonaldâs Theory: people are inspired to come up with good ideas to ward off bad ones.
Eulogy for Steve Jobs
An Article by Jonathan IveHe was without doubt the most inquisitive human I have ever met. His insatiable curiosity was not limited or distracted by his knowledge or expertise, nor was it casual or passive. It was ferocious, energetic and restless. His curiosity was practiced with intention and rigor.
Many of us have an innate predisposition to be curious. I believe that after a traditional education, or working in an environment with many people, curiosity is a decision requiring intent and discipline.
In larger groups our conversations gravitate towards the tangible, the measurable. It is more comfortable, far easier and more socially acceptable talking about what is known. Being curious and exploring tentative ideas were far more important to Steve than being socially acceptable.
Our curiosity begs that we learn. And for Steve, wanting to learn was far more important than wanting to be right.
- ââSteve Jobsââ
Ideas behind their time
An Article by Tim HarfordThese days I am more interested in the reverse case [of Da Vinci's helicopter]: ideas that could have worked many centuries before they actually appeared. The economist Alex Tabarrok calls these âideas behind their timeâ
Curious minds want to know why these ideas appeared so late â and whether there might be anything that would prevent delays in future. One explanation is that the ideas arenât as simple as they appear.
The bicycle is not as straightforward an invention as it seems. To move from ox-hauled cart to human-powered bicycle requires smooth-rolling wheel bearings, which in turn need precisely engineered bearing balls. Modern steel ball bearings were not patented until the late 1700s, and demand from the 19th-century bicycle industry helped to improve their design.
Negative Creativity
An Article by Scott AlexanderComing up with entirely novel ideas is really, really hard.
Early work
An Essay by Paul GrahamImagine if we could turn off the fear of making something lame. Imagine how much more we'd do.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
An Essay by Paul GrahamI think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
The still life effect
AÂ Fragment by Paul GrahamIf you're going to spend years working on something, you'd think it might be wise to spend at least a couple days considering different ideas, instead of going with the first that comes into your head. You'd think. But people don't. In fact, this is a constant problem when you're painting still lifes. You plonk down a bunch of stuff on a table, and maybe spend five or ten minutes rearranging it to look interesting. But you're so impatient to get started painting that ten minutes of rearranging feels very long. So you start painting. Three days later, having spent twenty hours staring at it, you're kicking yourself for having set up such an awkward and boring composition, but by then it's too late.
A lightbulb is not an idea
An Article by Ralph AmmerWith conventional placeholders, such as words, we can describe patterns for a large number of situations. On the other hand it is easy to fool yourself (and others) with words, since you can avoid to be specific. Any business meeting can confirm this.
When you draw something you are forced to be specific â and honest.
Our illustration of an âideaâ from above is unconventional in the sense that it conveys specific original thoughts of what an idea is. It adds value to the words.
And that is the catch: The drawing must be unconventional to support the conventional words. We have to make sure not to use âwords in disguiseâ. Take a common illustration for âideaâ for example, which haunts flip charts all over the world: the lightbulb.
The lightbulb image works on a purely symbolic level, it only replaces the word âideaâ. This image of a household item contains no original thought about what an idea is. While symbols like these work well as international replacements for words or icons to indicate a light switch for instance, they convey no nutritional value as illustrations â they are empty.
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
- ââThe Tao of rationalityââ
- ââEveryone sees themselves as behaving normallyââ
- ââArgue against the bestââ
- ââLet the meaning choose the wordââ
- ââPeople can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring itââ
- ââDo not propose solutionsââ
- ââOne brickââ
- ââYour intention to cutââ
The Tao of rationality
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.Everyone sees themselves as behaving normally
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
Argue against the best
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
Itâs all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you canât settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesnât make it dark out.
Let the meaning choose the word
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get oneâs meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
People can stand for what is true, for they are already enduring it
Knowing the design
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
Cutting through to the truth
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
Joy in the merely attainable
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
I have failed my art
The novice goes astray and says, âThe art has failed me.â
The master goes astray and says, âI have failed my art."Taboo your words
Albert says that people have âfree will.â Barry says that people donât have âfree will.â Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by âfree will,â on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase âfree willâ at all.
Your map of reality
Reality is very largeâjust the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I donât mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, âOh, look, Iâm compressing two things into one point on my map.â What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
What you're trying to swim
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what youâre trying to swim.
Applause lights
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldnât balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. âWe need to balance the risks and opportunities of AIâ can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalistâthe link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
Reality just seems to go on crunching
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answerânot just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answerâbecause at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculationsâor if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
Lost purposes
Thereâs chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find thereâs no chocolate at the supermarket, you wonât stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
Itâs another matter when incentives must flow through large organizationsâor worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because thatâs whatâs measurable; and this person doesnât care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.