Thinking
Documents vs. decks
On Programming
The quality of thought
Walking is a natural armature for thinking sequentially
Writing is one way to go about thinking
Trees and graphs
Let the body wander
If the mind needs to wander, best let the body do the same. A short walk is more effective in coming up with an idea than pouring all the coffee in the world down your gullet.
Agents of thought and experiment
The act of drawing serves to remind us that hands are agents of thought and experiment. Photography has a great future, but no matter how much ancillary wizardry photography accumulates, it will not be in competition with “drawing” in the broadest sense of that term. There will always be a role for exploration by the hands, encumbered by no more than a piece of ocher or a stick of charcoal.
Its practical utility is as a manifestation of the mind struggling with the meaning of what it encounters and what it wants to explore.
For one who can see
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.
A blue glow
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
Get a grip
The hand is the window on to the mind. — Immanuel Kant
American slang advises us to "get a grip"; more generally we speak of "coming to grips with an issue." Both figures reflect the evolutionary dialogue between the hand and the brain.
In a stare
Being in a stare referred to staring fixedly and without expression at something for extensive periods of time. It can happen when you haven't had enough sleep, or too much sleep, or if you've overeaten, or are distracted, or merely daydreaming. It is not daydreaming, however, because it involved gazing at something. Staring at it. Usually straight ahead—a shelf on a bookcase, or the centerpiece on the dining room table, or your daughter or child. But in a stare, you are not really looking at this thing you are seeming to stare at, you are not even really noticing it—however, neither are you thinking of something else. You in truth are not doing anything, mentally, but you are doing it fixedly, with what appears to be intent concentration. It is as if one's concentration becomes stuck the way an auto's wheels can be stuck in the snow, turning rapidly without going forward, although it looks like intense concentration. And now I too do this.
The Ladder of Abstraction
An Essay by Bret VictorPensées
A Book by Blaise PascalOn online collaboration and our obligations as makers of software
An Essay by Baldur BjarnasonIs it the notetaking system that’s helping you think more clearly? Or is it the act of writing that forces you to clarify your thoughts?
Is it the complex interlinked web of notes that helps you get new ideas? Or is it all the reading you’re doing to fill that notetaking app bucket?
Is all of this notetaking work making you smarter? Or is it just indirectly forcing you into deliberate, goalless practice?
The Feynman Algorithm
A Definition- Write down the problem.
- Think real hard.
- Write down the solution.
e-worm.club
A Website by Zach ShermanI’m building a custom pleroma client so that my friends and I can have a cute, self-hosted social network to post about politics and art. Besides being much more visually interesting than our facebook messenger groupchat, e-worm also attempts to solve design problems around conversational, collaborative thinking. The biggest of these problems is the inherent ephemerality of our groupchat— it doesn’t really succeed as a collaborative thinking space because it has no long-term memory. When messages are constantly buried under new ones, it places the burden on us to remember previous conversations. So the ultimate design goal for e-worm is to create a self-archiving conversational interface that preserves thought and helps us keep thinking new things rather than going in intellectual circles.
The surprising effectiveness of writing and rewriting
An Article by Matt Webb- The act of writing the first draft creates new “essential data” that feeds the imagination and makes possible figuring out the second draft.
- Or: In your head, ideas expand until they max out “working memory” – and it’s only be externalising them in the written word that you have capacity to iterate them.
- Or: Good writing necessarily takes multiple edits, and the act of writing and act of rewriting are sufficiently different that performing both simultaneously is like rubbing your tummy and patting your head.
How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
A Research Paper by Andy Matuschak & Michael NielsenConventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought.
...The aspiration is for any team serious about making transformative tools for thought. It’s to create a culture that combines the best parts of modern product practice with the best parts of the (very different) modern research culture. You need the insight-through-making loop to operate, whereby deep, original insights about the subject feed back to change and improve the system, and changes to the system result in deep, original insights about the subject.
Obsidian
An ApplicationObsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.
In Obsidian, making and following [[connections]] is frictionless. Tend to your notes like a gardener; at the end of the day, sit back and marvel at your own knowledge graph.
are.na
An Application by Charles BroskoskiBuild ideas mindfully.
Save content, create collections, and connect ideas with other people.
The right box to think inside of
A Quote by Aza RaskinDesign is not about learning to think outside the box, it’s about finding the right box to think inside of.
On the Link Between Great Thinking and Obsessive Walking
An Article by Jeremy DeSilvaYou 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.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Pellucidity
A DefinitionFree from obscurity and easy to understand; the comprehensibility of clear expression
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
A Book by Eliezer YudkowskyHow to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think
An EssayZettelkasten
A Tool by Niklas LuhmannA zettelkasten consists of many individual notes with ideas and other short pieces of information that are taken down as they occur or are acquired. The notes are numbered hierarchically, so that new notes may be inserted at the appropriate place, and contain metadata to allow the note-taker to associate notes with each other. For example, notes may contain tags that describe key aspects of the note, and they may reference other notes. The numbering, metadata, format and structure of the notes is subject to variation depending on the specific method employed.
That the mind may not be taxed
A Quote by Thomas FarnabyIn order that the mind may not be taxed, moreover, by the manifold and confused reading of so many such things, and in order to prevent the escape of something valuable that we have read, heard, or discovered through the process of thinking itself, it will be found very useful to entrust to notebooks...those things which seem noteworthy and striking.
Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think
A Book by Ben Shneiderman
Steve Jobs
You'll know it's there
Jobs's father had once taught him that a drive for perfection meant caring about the craftsmanship even of the parts unseen. Jobs applied that to the layout of the circuit board inside the Apple II. He rejected the initial design because the lines were not straight enough.
In an interview a few years later, after the Macintosh came out, Jobs again reiterated that lesson from his father: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You'll know it's there, so you're going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through."
The Apple Marketing Philosophy
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled "The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points.
The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company."
The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities."
The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO just a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities."
Not just in the details
There falls a shadow, as T.S. Eliot noted, between the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.
The improvements [over Xerox] were in not just the details but the entire concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a window around the screen. Apple's engineers devised an interface so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to select a command in order to do anything...the Apple system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by allowing you to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate things. And Apple's engineers worked in tandem with its designers to improve the desktop concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down from a bar atop each window and the capability to open files and folders with a double click.
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages
An icon is a symbol equally incomprehensible in all human languages. There's a reason why humans invented phonetic languages.
If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to make it faster?
"If it could save a person's life, would you find a way to shave ten seconds off the boot time?" [Jobs] asked. Kenyon allowed that he probably could. Jobs went to a whiteboard and showed that if there were five million people using the Max, and it took ten seconds extra to turn it on every day, that added up to three hundred million or so hours per year that people would save, which was the equivalent of at least one hundred lifetimes saved per year. "Larry was suitably impressed, and a few weeks later he came back and it booted up twenty-eight seconds faster," Atkinson recalled. "Steve had a way of motivating by looking at the bigger picture."
We might as well make them beautiful
The Macintosh team came to share Jobs's passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or even to make a lot of money. It was the do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany's example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'"
Models and iterations
Every month or so, Manock and Oyama would present a new iteration based on Jobs's previous criticisms. The latest plaster model would be dramatically unveiled, and all the previous attempts would be lined up next to it. That not only helped them gauge the design's evolution, but it prevented Jobs from insisting that one of his suggestions had been ignored.
For a computer to be friendly
Even though Steve didn't draw any of the lines, his ideas and inspiration made the design what it is. To be honest, we didn't know what it meant for a computer to be 'friendly' until Steve told us.
It's not just a little thing
At one point Kare and Atkinson complained that he was making them spend too much time on tiny little tweaks to the title bar when they had bigger things to do. Jobs erupted. "Can you imagine looking at that every day?" he shouted. "It's not just a little thing, it's something we have to do right."
Real artists sign their work
When the design was finally locked in, Jobs called the Macintosh team together for a ceremony. "Real artists sign their work," he said. So he got out a sheet of drafting paper and a Sharpie pen and had all of them sign their names. The signatures were engraved inside each Macintosh.
Whole widgets
Jobs believed that for a computer to be truly great, its hardware and its software had to be tightly linked. When a computer was open to running software that also worked on other computers, it would end up sacrificing some functionality. The best products, he believed, were "whole widgets" that were designed end-to-end, with the software closely tailored to the hardware and vice versa.
A ripple through the universe
As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe. I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I've done in my life.
Customers don't know what they want
At the end of the presentation someone asked whether he thought they should do some market research to see what customers wanted. "No," he replied, "because customers don't know what they want until we've shown them." Then he pulled out a device that was about the size of a desk diary. "Do you want to see something neat?" When he flipped it open, it turned out to be a mock-up of a computer that could fit in your lap, with a keyboard and a screen hinged together like a notebook. "This is my dream of what we will be making in the mid- to late eighties," he said. They were building a company that would invent the future.
All sorts of ways to use the machine
Jobs wanted to sell Pixar's computers to a mass market, so he had the Pixar folks open up sales offices—for which he approved the design—in major cities, on the theory that creative people would soon come up with all sorts of ways to use the machine. "My view is that people are creative animals and will figure out clever new ways to use tools that the inventor never imagined."
One keyboard at a time
His frustration with Apple was evident when he gave a talk to a Stanford Business School club at the home of a student, who asked him to sign a Macintosh keyboard. Jobs agreed to do so if he could remove the keys that had been added to the Mac after he left. He pulled out his car keys and pried off the four arrow cursor keys, which he had once banned, as well as the top row of F1, F2, F3 ... function keys. "I'm changing the world one keyboard at a time," he deadpanned. Then he signed the mutilated keyboard.
Think Different.
They debated the grammatical issue: If "different" was supposed to modify the verb "think," it should be an adverb, as in "think differently." But Jobs insisted that he wanted "different" to be used as a noun, as in "think victory" or "think beauty." Also, it echoed colloquial use, as in "think big." Jobs later explained, "We discussed whether it was correct before we ran it. It's grammatical, if you think about what we're trying to say. It's not think the same, it's think different. Think a little different, think a lot different, think different. 'Think differently' wouldn't hit the meaning for me"
Ban PowerPoints
One of the first things Jobs did during the product review process was ban PowerPoints. "I hate the way people use slide presentations instead of thinking," Jobs later recalled. "People would confront a problem by creating a presentation. I wanted them to engage, to hash things out at the table, rather than show a bunch of slides. People who know what they're talking about don't need PowerPoint."
Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?
The product review revealed how unfocused Apple had become. The company was churning out multiple versions of each product because of bureaucratic momentum and to satisfy the whims of retailers..."I had people explaining this to me for three weeks," Jobs said. "I couldn't figure it out." He finally began asking simple questions, like, "Which ones do I tell my friends to buy?"
When he couldn't get simple answers, he began slashing away at models and products. Soon he had cut 70% of them..."I came out of the meeting with people who had just gotten their products canceled and they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going."
After a few weeks Jobs finally had enough. "Stop!" he shouted at one big product strategy session. "This is crazy." He grabbed a magic marker, padded to a whiteboard, and drew a horizontal and vertical line to make a four-squared chart. "Here's what we need," he continued. Atop the two columns he wrote "Consumer" and "Pro"; he labeled the two rows "Desktop" and "Portable." Their job, he said, was to make four great products, one for each quadrant. "The room was in dumb silence," Schiller recalled.
That feeling of putting care into a product
I always understood the beauty of things made by hand. I came to realize that what was really important was the care that was put into it. What I really despise is when I sense some carelessness in a product.
Unlike some designers, [Ive] didn't just make beautiful sketches; he also focused on how the engineering and inner components would work.
He became head of [the design department at Apple] in 1996, the year before jobs returned, but wasn't happy. Amelio had little appreciation for design.
There wasn't that feeling of putting care into a product, because we were trying to maximize the money we made. All they wanted from us designers was a model of what something was supposed to look like on the outside, and then engineers would make it as cheap as possible. I was about to quit.
To be truly simple
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn't just a visual style. It's not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep. For example, to have no screws on something you can end up having a product that is so convoluted and so complex. The better way is to go deeper with the simplicity, to understand everything about it and how it's manufactured. You have to deeply understand the essence of a product in order to be able to get rid of the parts that are not essential.
Total collaboration
The process of designing a product at Apple was integrally related to how it would be engineered and manufactured. Ive described one of Apple's Power Macs. "We wanted to get rid of anything other than what was absolutely essential," he said. "To do so required total collaboration between the designers, the product developers, the engineers, and the manufacturing team. We kept going back to the beginning, again and again. Do we need that part? Can we get it to perform the function of the other four parts?"
Pure and seamless
The connection between the design of a product, its essence, and its manufacturing was illustrated for Jobs and Ive when they were traveling in France and went into a kitchen supply store. Ive picked up a knife he admired, but then put it down in disappointment. Jobs did the same. "We both noticed a tiny bit of glue between the handle and the blade," Ive recalled. They talked about how the knife's good design had been ruined by the way it was manufactured. "We don't like to think of our knives as being glued together," Ive said. "Steve and I care about things like that, which ruin the purity and detract from the essence of something like a utensil, and we think alike about how products should be made to look pure and seamless."
When we make a model and realize it's rubbish
Much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He doesn't like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model. He's right. I get surprised when we make a model and then realize it's rubbish, even though based on the CAD renderings it looked great.
He loves coming in here because it's calm and gentle. It's a paradise if you're a visual person. There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead we can make the presentations fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don't run into major disagreements.
A ritual of unpacking
I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.
The iMac
Ive and his team worked with Apple's Korean manufacturers to perfect the process of making the cases, and they even went to a jelly bean factory to study how to make translucent colors look enticing. The cost of each case was more than $60 per unit, three times that of a regular computer case. Other companies would probably have demanded presentations and studies to show whether the translucent case would increase sales enough to justify the extra cost. Jobs asked for no such analysis.
Topping off the design was the handle nestled into the iMac. It was more playful and semiotic than it was functional. This was a desktop computer; not many people were really going to carry it it around. But as Ive later explained:
Back then, people weren't comfortable with technology. If you're scared of something, then you won't touch it. I could see my mum being scared to touch it. So I thought, if there's this handle on it, it makes a relationship possible. It's approachable. It's intuitive. It gives you permission to touch. It gives a sense of deference to you.
We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk
"The one thing Apple's providing now is leadership in colors," Gates said as he pointed to a Windows-based PC that he jokingly had painted red. "It won't take long for us to catch up with that, I don't think."
Jobs was furious, and he told a reporter that Gates, the man he had publicly decried for being completely devoid of taste, was clueless about what made the iMac so much more appealing than other computers. "The thing that our competitors are missing is they think it's about fashion, and they think it's about surface appearance," he said. "They said, We'll slap a little color on this piece of junk computer, and we'll have one, too."
The Apple Store
"Ron [Johnson] thinks we've got it all wrong. He thinks [the Apple store] should be organized not around products but instead around what people do." There was a pause, then Jobs continued. "And you know, he's right." He said they would redo the layout, even though it would likely delay the planned January rollout by three or four months. "We've only got one chance to get it right."
Jobs liked to tell the story—and he did so to his team that day—about how everything he had done correctly had required a moment when he hit the rewind button. In each case he had to rework something that he discovered was not perfect.
The iPod
Suddenly everything had fallen into place: a drive that would hold a thousand songs; and interface and scroll wheel that would let you navigate a thousand songs; a FireWire connection that could sync a thousand songs in under ten minutes; and a battery that would last through a thousand songs.
"We suddenly were looking at one another and saying, 'This is going to be so cool,'" Jobs recalled. "We knew how cool it was, because we knew how badly we each wanted one personally."
Cannibalize yourself
Like many companies, Sony worried about cannibalization. If it built a music player and service that made it easy for people to share digital songs, that might hurt sales of its record division. One of Jobs's business rules was to never be afraid of cannibalizing yourself. "If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will."
The job of art is to chase ugliness away
Bono later explained that not all corporate sponsorships were deals with the devil.
The 'devil' here is a bunch of creative minds, more creative than a lot of people in rock bands. The lead singer is Steve Jobs. These men have helped design the most beautiful art object in music culture since the electric guitar. That's the iPod. The job of art is to chase ugliness away.
The right kind of building can do great things for a culture
"Steve had this firm belief that the right kind of building can do great things for a culture," said Pixar's president Ed Catmull.
Despite being a denizen of the digital world, or maybe because he knew all too well its isolating potential, Jobs was a strong believer in face-to-face meetings. "There's a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat," he said. "That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you said 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."
When our tools are broken, we feel broken
In his piece [for Time] Lev Grossman correctly noted that the iPhone did not really invent many new features, it just made those features a lot more usable. "But that's important. When our tools don't work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers...When our tools are broken, we feel broken. And when somebody fixes one, we feel a tiny bit more whole."
Scoop it up and whisk it away
At one point Jobs looked at the model [for the first iPad] and was slightly dissatisfied. It didn't feel casual and friendly enough, so that you would naturally scoop it up and whisk it away. Ive put his finger, so to speak, on the problem: They needed to signal that you could grab it with one hand, on impulse. The bottom edge needed to be slightly rounded, so that you'd feel comfortable just scooping it up rather than lifting it carefully.
A pedestrian cloak
Even before the iPad went on sale, Jobs was thinking about what should be in the iPad 2...there was a peripheral issue that he focused on that most people hadn't thought about: The cases that people used covered the beautiful lines of the iPad and detracted from the screen. They made fatter what should be thinner. They put a pedestrian cloak on a device that should be magical in all of its aspects.
To read things that are not yet on the page
My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated the make great products. Everything else was secondary...the products, not the profits, were the motivation.
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Click
I'm about fifty-fifty on believing in God. For most of my life, I've felt that there must be more to our existence than meets the eye.
I like to think that something survives after you die. It's strange to think that you accumulate all this experience, and maybe a little wisdom, and that it just goes away. So I really want to believe that something survives, that maybe your consciousness endures.
But on the other hand, perhaps it's like an on-off switch. Click! And you're gone.
...Maybe that's why I never liked to put on-off switches on Apple devices.