Why Life Can’t Be Simpler
We’d all like life to be simpler. But we also don’t want to sacrifice our options and capabilities. Tesler’s law of the conservation of complexity, a rule from design, explains why we can’t have both. …
Technology
The Spiral of Silence
Our desire to fit in with others means we don’t always say what we think. We only express opinions that seem safe. Here’s how the spiral of silence works and how we can discover what people really …
The Ingredients For Innovation
Inventing new things is hard. Getting people to accept and use new inventions is often even harder. For most people, at most times, technological stagnation has been the norm. What does it take to …
Critical Mass and Tipping Points: How To Identify Inflection Points Before They Happen
Critical mass, which is sometimes referred to as tipping points, is one of the most effective mental models you can use to understand the world. The concept can explain everything from viral cat …
Why the Printing Press and the Telegraph Were as Impactful as the Internet
What makes a communications technology revolutionary? One answer to this is to ask whether it fundamentally changes the way society is organized. This can be a very hard question to answer, because …
Memory and the Printing Press
You probably know that Gutenberg invented the printing press. You probably know it was pretty important. You may have heard some stuff about everyone being able to finally read the Bible without a …
A Short List of Books for Doing New Things
Andrew Ng has quite the modern resume. He founded Coursera, a wonderful website that gives anyone with Internet access the ability to take high level university courses on almost any topic. He founded …
Paul Graham on Free Speech, Suburbia, Getting Rich, and Nerds
“I think a society in which people can do and say what they want will also tend to be one in which the most efficient solutions win.” *** Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. …
Garrett Hardin: The Other Side of Expertise
From Garrett Hardin‘s mind-blowingly awesome Filters Against Folly. In our highly technological society we cannot do without experts. We accept this fact of life, but not without anxiety. There …
Marshall McLuhan: The Here And Now
“In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the …
What A Rembrandt Can Teach you about Software and Programmers
A thoughtful passage by David Gelernter in Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox…How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean on how looking at a Rembrandt can teach us …
Real vs. Simulated Memories
Software memory is increasingly doing more and more for us. Yet it lacks one important element of human memory: emotion. This thought-provoking excerpt comes from Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software …
The Glass Cage: Automation and US
People have worried about losing their jobs to robots for decades now. But how is growing automation really going to change us? Let’s take a look at the limitations of automation and the uniquely …
Paul Graham: On Arguing With Idiots and Where Ideas Come From
Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. His 2004 anthology Hackers and Painters explores the world and the people who inhabit it. He calls the book an “intellectual wild west,” …
Claude Shannon: The Man Who Turned Paper Into Pixels
“The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning.” — …
Douglas Adams on our Reactions to Technology Over Time
“I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies,” writes Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt. 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is …