Mental Model: Equilibrium
There are many ways in which you can visualize the concept of equilibrium, but one of the simplest comes from Boombustology where a ball sits on a simple curved shape. A situation in which equilibrium …
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Robert Greene explains the Process to Attain Mastery
The relationship between people and their craft is such that you can tell by the path they have followed whether they are a master or an amateur. Robert Greene, most famous for his exposure of power, …
Edward Tufte on Cognitive Load and Picasso
“The world is much more interesting than any one discipline.” — Edward Tufte *** NPR’s Science Friday talks with data scientist Edward Tufte on everything from Steve Jobs’ considerations of …
John Holland: The Building Blocks of Innovation
“Most innovation comes from combining well-known, well-established, building blocks in new ways.” *** John Holland, a professor of two vastly different fields—psychology and engineering—at …
Metaphors
For most people a metaphor is a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. “For this reason,” write Mark Johnson and George Lakoff in their book Metaphors We Live By, “most people think …
History Does Not Belong To Us But We Belong To It
“Because an experience is itself within the whole of life, the whole of life is present in it too.” — Gadamer Hans-Georg Gadamer is associated in particular with one form of philosophy: …
Wittgenstein: Reality is Shaped by the Words we Use
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of our language.” — Wittgenstein Philosopher Bertrand Russell described Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein as …
Why LEGOs Are So Expensive — And So Popular
A lot of people wonder how LEGO, selling a now un-patented product, can command both massive market share and sell at twice the price of the nearest competitor: Megablocks. Rhett Allain, in his WIRED …
What is the Objective of a Company?
This quote was expressed over 30 years ago by the CEO of a textile company called Indian Head Mills. The objective of our company is to increase the intrinsic value of our common stock. We are not in …
How Good Gamblers Think
From The Signal And The Noise: Successful gamblers – and successful forecasters of any kind – do not think of the future in terms of no-lose best, unimpeachable theories, and infinitely …
The Value of Culture
What exactly is culture? Melvyn Bragg is here to help us answer that question through his five-part Radio 4 series, The Value of Culture. Episodes: Culture and Anarchy, explores Matthew Arnold’s …
Arguments Are For Learning, Not Winning
Despite his best efforts and long hours, Nobel-Prize winning physicist and professor Carl Wieman grew frustrated by his inability to teach and his students’ failure to learn. When I first taught …
Extraordinary is the New Ordinary
Kevin Kelly, in The Improbable is the New Normal, an article on how the internet increasingly exposes us to massive quantities of impossible and improbable events, explores how that may affect our …
How feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind
In his new book Mastery, Robert Greene writes discusses how feeling powerless directs the narratives of our mind. We live in a world that seems increasingly beyond our control. Our livelihoods are at …
Kathryn Schulz on why Knowledge Collapses as often as it Accretes
Kathryn Schulz comments on the fantasy that knowledge is static in This Will Make You Smarter: New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking. Because so many scientific theories from bygone eras …
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction
A lot of people think that reading, especially critical reading, is on the decline. The thinking goes that we spend too much time distracted on devices. And when we turn the devices off long enough to …