practice
Thinking in situations
Naturally, practice is not preceded but followed by theory.
Such study promotes a more lasting teaching and learning
through experience. Its aim is development of creativeness
realized in discovery and invention – the criteria of creativity,
or flexibility, being imagination and fantasy. Altogether
it promotes “thinking in situations,” a new educational concept
unfortunately little known and less cultivated, so far.Reaching 95
Reaching 95%-ile isn't very impressive because it's not that hard to do. I think this is one of my most ridiculable ideas. It doesn't help that, when stated nakedly, that sounds elitist. But I think it's just the opposite: most people can become (relatively) good at most things.
Note that when I say 95%-ile, I mean 95%-ile among people who participate, not all people (for many activities, just doing it at all makes you 99%-ile or above across all people). I'm also not referring to 95%-ile among people who practice regularly. The "one weird trick" is that, for a lot of activities, being something like 10%-ile among people who practice can make you something like 90%-ile or 99%-ile among people who participate.
Practice before theory
Instead of mechanically applying or merely implying laws and rules
of color harmony, distinct color effects are produced
– through recognition of the interaction of color –
by making, for instance,
2 very different colors look alike, or nearly alike.The aim of such study is to develop – through experience
– by trial and error – an eye for color.
This means, specifically, seeing color action
as well as feeling color relatedness.As a general training it means development of observation and articulation.
This book, therefore, does not follow an academic conception
of “theory and practice.”
It reverses this order and places practice before theory,
which, after all, is the conclusion of practice.Things you didn't know you can be bad at
An Article by David R. MacIverI wonder how many things we're all going around doing badly because the idea of not knowing how to do them well seems too ridiculous to admit to.
...You've probably never been taught to have a conversation. I've had exactly one class on it and it was in the last six months. I know damn well that many people have not self-taught this well... In general there's this entire class of implicit skills that we mostly don't think of as skills, that we're entirely self-taught on, and that we practice sufficiently non-demonstratively that we can't easily watch what other people do. The result is a very personal skill idiolect.
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory
An Article by Arno Rafael MinkkinenStay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.
Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.
...It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.
Your vision takes off.
Touch the keys
An Article by Rach SmithIn his course Being Productive: Simple Steps to Calm Focus, Kourosh Dini emphasises the importance of taking a moment to “be with” the work every day (or however frequently you need to tackle a project). “Being with” your work is to be fully present and intentional about that activity and doing nothing else.
This idea was inspired by Dini’s piano teacher, who encouraged him to sit at his piano and touch the keys every day. Even on the days that he felt he had no time or inclination to practice. Sometimes touching the keys would lead to a good practice session, even when he didn’t feel like it would before he actually gave it a go.
Just like Dini, I find that once I give the task my full attention and be present, the actual doing of it turns out to be much easier and more enjoyable than my mind had been expecting. As usual, the resistance to getting started is far more uncomfortable than actually doing the thing.
I completely ignored the front end development scene for 6 months. It was fine
An Article by Rach SmithWhat I’ve learnt through experience is that the number of languages I’ve learned or the specific frameworks I’ve gained experience with matters very little. What actually matters is my ability to up-skill quickly and effectively.
If you focus on:
- learning how you best learn, and
- practicing effectively communicating the things you've learned
you can't go wrong.
Writing and Speaking
An Essay by Paul GrahamBeing a really good speaker is not merely orthogonal to having good ideas, but in many ways pushes you in the opposite direction...there's a tradeoff between smoothness and ideas. All the time you spend practicing a talk, you could instead spend making it better.
Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit a Scene
An Article by Scott ReitherI learned years ago how important it is to shoot the same subject and location over and over again.
The practice teaches a photographer how to form deeper relationships with the subject, and better understand how the primary subject interacts with secondary elements – like the way high tide may introduce a stunning new reflection, or how a blaze of stars in a dark sky might be the missing element that lifts the image to new heights.
Revisiting a subject also serves as valuable “practice.” You cannot develop your skills in anything without a healthy (or obsessive) amount of practice. It always surprises me to find out aspiring photographers think that they can simply photograph their two-week vacations once or twice a year and come home with compelling imagery! It doesn’t work that way.
The Real World of Technology
Technology is a system
Technology is not the sum of the artifacts, of the wheels and gears, of the rails and electronic transmitters. Technology is a system. It entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and, most of all, a mindset.
Fish and water
How does one speak about something that is both fish and water, means as well as end?
Defining activities
One has to keep in mind how much the technology of doing something defines the activity itself.
Holistic and prescriptive technologies
Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft. Artisans, be they potters, weavers, metal-smiths, or cooks, control the process of their own work from beginning to finish. Using holistic technologies does not mean that people do not work together, but the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.
The opposite is specialization by process; this I call prescriptive technology. Here, the making or doing of something is broken down into clearly identifiable steps. Each step is carried out by a separate worker, or group or workers, who need to be familiar only with the skills of performing that one step. This is what is normally meant by "division of labor".
That which requires caring
Today's real world of technology is characterized by the dominance of prescriptive technologies.
The temptation to design more or less everything according to prescriptive and broken-up technologies is so strong that it is even applied to those tasks that should be conducted in a holistic way. Any tasks that require caring, whether for people or nature, any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment, are best done holistically. Such tasks cannot be planed, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.
Prescriptive technologies eliminate the occasions for decision-making and judgment in general and especially for the making of principled decisions. Any goal of the technology is incorporated a priori in the design and is not negotiable.
One-machine policy
Today population forecasts are based on extensive and reliable data. However, no such demographic base exists for the world's growing population of machines and devices. Now may be the time to take machine demography seriously and enter into real discussions about machine population control.
The downgrading of experience
Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. As a consequence there has been a very marked decrease in the reliance of people on their own experience and their own senses.
The downgrading of experience and the glorification of expertise is a very significant feature of the real world of technology.
Reciprocity
Whenever human activities incorporate machines or rigidly prescribed procedures, the modes of human interaction change. In general, technical arrangements reduce or eliminate reciprocity. Reciprocity is some manner of interactive give and take, a genuine communication among interacting parties.
Instruments of cooperation
When work isn't shared, the instruments of cooperation – listening, taking note, adjusting – atrophy like muscles that are no longer in use.
When all you have is a hammer
The success and spread of a particular tool – and this tool can be organizational or administrative as well as mechanical – has another consequence. Any task tends to be structured by the available tools. It can appear that the available tools represent the best or even the only way to deal with a situation.
Thus is may be wise, when communities are faced with new technological solutions to existing problems, to ask what these techniques may prevent and not only to check what the techniques promise to do.
Consumption
The proponents of technology in the 1840s were very enthusiastic about replacing workers with machines. But somehow I find no indication that they realized that while production could be carried out with few workers and still run to high outputs, buyers would be needed for those outputs. The realization that though the need for workers decreased, the need for purchasers could increase, did not seem to be part of the discourse on the machinery question. Since then, however, technology and its promoters have had to create a social institution – the consumer – in order to deal with the increasingly tricky problem that machines can produce but it is usually people who consume.
Bridges as walls
The biographer of Robert Moses, Robert A. Caro, refers to the bridges and underpasses of the famed New York State parkways. These bridges and underpasses are quite low, intentionally specified by Moses to allow only private cars to pass. All those who traveled by bus because they were poor or black or both were barred from the use and enjoyment of the parkland and its "public amenities" by the technical design of the bridges. Even at the time of Robert Moses, a political statement of the form "We don't want them blacks in our parks" would have been unacceptable in New York State. But a technological expression of the same prejudice appeared to be all right. Of course, to the public the intent of the design became evident only after it was executed, and then the bridges were there.
Designed to be ruins
I don't want to talk here about the grand designs of the past – the sort of thing one finds in majestic cities, in palaces and temples; the sorts of layouts that brought a friend of mine to sum up his first impression of Washington D.C. by saying, "The place seems to be designed to be ruins."
Little sense of season
The real world of technology denies the existence and the reality of nature. For instance, there is little sense of season as one walks through a North American or western European supermarket.
Just as there is a little sense of season, there is little sense of climate. Everything possible is done to equalize the ambiance – to construct and environment that is warm in the winter, cool in the summer.
Humility
Maybe what the real world of technology needs more than anything else are citizens with a sense of humility – the humility of Kepler or Newton, who studied the universe but knew they were not asked to run it.
Technological middle age
In the automobile's technological middle age, it is hard, if not impossible, to tune or repair one's own vehicle. Technical standardization of cars has occurred, and with it the elimination of the user's access to the machine itself. At the same time, the infrastructures that once served those who did not use automobiles atrophied and vanished. Some may say they were deliberately starved out. Railways gave way to more and more roadways. And thus a technology that had been perceived to liberate its users began to enslave them.
All things change
The authors of this prognostication evidently assumed that the introduction of the sewing machine would result in more sewing – and easier sewing – by those who had always sewn. They would do the work they had always done in an unchanged setting. Reality turned out to be quite different.
It should be evident by now that there is no such thing as "just introducing" a new gadget to do one particular task. It is foolish to assume that everything else in such a situation will remain the same; all things change when one thing changes.
Exploiting emotion
There are no shortcuts to the investment of time and care in friendship and human bonding, and it is fraudulent to pretend otherwise. When human loneliness becomes a source of income for others through devices, we'd better stop and think a bit about the place of human needs in the real world of technology.
The receiving end
At times it helps to rephrase an observation in line with a perspective from the receiving end of technology. When my colleagues in the field of cold-water engineering speak of "ice-infested waters", I am tempted to think of "rig-infested oceans". Language is a fine barometer of values and priorities. As such it deserves careful attention.
Speaking people
Surely those who oversee and guide municipal transportation systems ought to use public transit during their work days. Why not put a clause to that effect in their job description or contract?
Requiring those whose work has a major impact on people's lives to experience some of the impact is really not too much ask. It means that they speak "people" rather than French, Cree, or Spanish.
Ping-pong patterns
The role of asynchronicity in unraveling social and political patterns without apparent replacement with other patterns cannot be overestimated. The ping-pong pattern of verbal communication is no longer tied to space or time.
Mechanisms and organisms
"Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.
An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.
This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."
— Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots