Visa founder Dee Hock had a great saying: “A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute.” That’s when you start ignoring information that might require you to update your beliefs. It might sound crazy, but I think a good rule of thumb is that your strongest convictions have the highest chance of being wrong or incomplete, if only because they are the hardest beliefs to challenge, update, and abandon when necessary.
Are complex ecosystems like ponds actually smarter than we are? Are they “thinking”? Gordon says yes:
Evolution is a pragmatist. It only cares about actual behavior. It is the getting and the doing that matter. The how can be approached in many different ways, through pheromone trails, or trophic networks, or nerve nets, or brains, or symbolic representation. Evolution doesn’t care. If you can get information and do something about it, you are thinking.
All we really need to say a system is “intelligent” is that it incorporates feedback. Loops generate reactions, learnings...
New Metaphors is a project to help spur creative thinking through metaphor. It’s a deck of cards you can use in exercises to help stimulate new perspectives on an existing idea:
A metaphor is just a way of expressing one idea in terms of another. This project is a nightmare. The city is a playground. You are a gem. Creating new metaphors could help us design new kinds of product, service, or experience, and even help us think about and understand the world differently.
When working through problems, the most impressive creators to me aren’t those that divine an entire solution in their brain for an hour, then slam out a perfect result (spoiler: this doesn’t exist outside of the occasional savant). I love to watch people who are great at avoiding the temptation to overcomplicate. People who can break problems down into components. People who can simplify complex problems by isolating parts, and blocking and tackling.
I enjoyed this, from an interview with Ward Cunningham (programmer and inventor of the wiki):
Some solutions rely on convoluted chains of logic that are strictly dependent on every single statement being true. They are more likely to have hidden “divide by zero” problems that may be easily noticeable to the experienced practitioner but are invisible to the layman. Simple solutions might have errors too, but they will be much more obvious. Also, complicated chains of logic “feel” correct because a lot of the steps will be verifiably true; people sometimes forget that all of the steps have to be true for the entire argument to have any truth.
This resignation letter from former Philadephia 76ers GM Sam Hinkie is full of gems. Here are a couple.
On contrarianism in a short-sighted league when you’re always under the microscope:
To develop truly contrarian views will require a never-ending thirst for better, more diverse inputs. What player do you think is most undervalued? Get him for your team. What basketball axiom is most likely to be untrue? Take it on and do the opposite. What is the biggest, least valuable time sink for the organization? Stop doing it. Otherwise, it’s a big game of pitty...
Shane Parrish on the power of second-order thinking:
Second-order thinking is more deliberate. It is thinking in terms of interactions and time, understanding that despite our intentions our interventions often cause harm. Second order thinkers ask themselves the question “And then what?” This means thinking about the consequences of repeatedly eating a chocolate bar when you are hungry and using that to inform your decision. If you do this you’re more likely to eat something healthy.
Those that excel at second- or third-order thinking spend a lot more time running these simulations in...
If a note is an idea, we want to make the idea as atomic as possible, so we can find and stitch them together into an interconnected web of ideas. We want composable building blocks.
Composability helps us stack, mix, and repurpose ideas. To correlate them and find the relationships between them. Prose is an excellent medium for consumption, for diving deep on a particular topic. But with a prose format for documenting ideas (through notes), it’s harder to relate shared ideas across domains. Prose makes ideas easy to expand on and consume, but difficult to decompose into reusable parts....
He differentiates what the “waking” mind and “background” mind are good at, which I’d interchangeably refer to as the “at the desk” mind and the “away from the computer” mind:
Of the hundreds of posts I’ve written here over the past few years, I would guess that 80% of the topics spawned in my head while exercising. Running is my primary regular means for alone time to think in silence. I usually listen to audiobooks while I’m out, but constantly pause to dictate notes to myself into a scratchpad document. Reviewing this occasionally is like a stream of consciousness chain of observations and ideas that I can usually peg to an origin of what triggered the idea, then can take it and run with it when back home. There may...
David Perell’s been putting out a series of 100 posts, 1 per day, brief essays about writing. I enjoyed this one about the evolutionary, and recombinant, nature of ideas:
All creativity is inspired by other people’s ideas. The faster you embrace that, the more successful you can be as a creative. As Brain Pickings author Maria Popova once said: “Something we all understand on a deep intuitive level, but our creative egos sort of don’t really want to accept: And that is the idea that creativity is combinatorial, that nothing is entirely original, that everything builds on what came...
Lately I’ve been pouring time into Roam, finding ways to improve my long-term memory, and reading about taking notes, all in service of getting better at synthesizing new ideas.
Central to all of these is the Zettelkasten method of note-taking, a fancy-sounding German word for “note box.”
In addition to Sönke Ahrens’s excellent book on the topic, this post offers a deeper look into the mechanics of the system.
In Sönke Ahrens’s book How to Take Smart Notes he describes the “zettelkasten” system (the “slip box”) developed by German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann created the system to help himself organize notes and thoughts in a networked model rather than a structured hierarchy of folders. The zettelkasten system has a few elements to it to help model different types of notes, how and when you should write them, and how you associate ideas together.
The fundamental piece is the “permanent note,” one in which...
Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:
The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get...
Learning to build again will take more than a resurgence of will, as Andreessen would have it. And the U.S. should think of bolder proposals than sensible but long-proposed tweaks to R&D policies, re-training programs and STEM education.
What the U.S. really needs to do is reconstitute its communities of engineering practice. That will require treating manufacturing work, even in low-margin goods, as fundamentally valuable. Technological sophisticates in Silicon Valley would be wise to...
What does it mean to “synthesize” knowledge? Joel Chan, author of this post and professor of human-computer interaction, describes it as “creating a new whole out of components.”
In reading, digesting material, and taking notes, you’re by definition creating small components of information that you then ideally piece together to form knowledge.
The difficulties with synthesis described in the post align well with the reasons I talked about in my review of Roam and how it’s addressing these exact gaps:
Cognitive Overhead (aka Cognitive Load): often the task of specifying formalism is extraneous to the primary task,...
Roam Research has been making the rounds on the internet in the last couple months. I’ve written a little bit here about it, but promised this longer overview of how it’s working for me so far.
What is it?
Roam is a tool for note-taking, described as a tool for “networked thought.” With a glance on Twitter you’ll find all sorts of comparison pieces to Evernote, Google Docs, or Notion. I’ve tried all of those (Notion for quite a bit) and I find the experience of using Roam completely different.
Been reading more about how others are using Roam the last few days. In this post, Sarah Constantin draws an apt connection to Vannevar Bush’s “memex” concept from his 1945 paper “As We May Think”. It was an early influence on what eventually became hypertext — his memex was an electromechanical device that could record and connect ideas on microfilm storage.
Arguably the Internet forms one big memex today. Bush was right in his prediction that “wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear”, that “The patent attorney has on call the millions of...
I’m deeper these days into Roam for info storage and notes. It empowers a looser, free-form version of writing (or as Roam describes it “networked thought”) that’s hard to do in a linear note document. I’ve been working up a post on Roam and where I feel it fitting into my own workflow.
This piece gives a good overview of it and how it’s different from other knowledge management systems.
Tom MacWright on chess. Reduce distraction, increase concentration
Once you have concentration, you realize that there’s another layer: rigor. It’s checking the timer, checking for threats, checking for any of a litany of potential mistakes you might be about to make, a smorgasbord of straightforward opportunities you might miss. Simple rules are easy to forget when you’re feeling the rush of an advantage. But they never become less important.
Might start giving chess a try just to see how I do. Haven’t played in years, but I’m curious.
Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s...
Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.
Time is our most fundamental constraint. If you use an hour for one thing, you can’t use it for anything else. Time passes, whatever we do with it. It seems beneficial then to figure out the means of using it with the lowest possible opportunity costs. One of the simplest ways to do this is to establish how you’d like to be using your time, then track how you’re using it for a week. Many people find a significant discrepancy. Once we...
There’s a really strange phenomenon in certain arenas (particularly politics) where it’s considered a virtue to strongly hold a viewpoint and never change your position. This is strange because, as Rory Sutherland points out here, if you did this in business you’d likely run into frictions that put you out of business. Changing your mind is an imperative when presented with new data.
And herein lies one magic quality of business. It is the only area of human activity where you get paid to change your mind.
In politics, in punditry, in academia, there is great value attached to...
On the power of starting with no baggage, sunk costs, or past poor decisions:
Part of the reason the economy recovered slowly after the financial crisis was that businesses, spooked by the recession, relentlessly reviewed their costs. “I just see business after business after business which has rationalized so that it can protect its balance sheet and earning power while utilizing fewer people” Charlie Munger said in 2010.
So began a new life for the concept of zero-based budgeting.
Zero-based budgeting is the idea that each year’s budget should be created from scratch, rather than using the previous year’s...
A list of broad laws that apply to all fields. Thoughtful stuff as always from Morgan Housel:
6. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
In 1955 historian Cyril Parkinson wrote in The Economist:
IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and despatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent...
Ever since reading Kahneman’s Thinking Fast, and Slow, biases are always in the front of mind when considering approaches to problems.
Scott Alexander has some interesting thoughts on this topic, namely that bias is ever present regardless of the environment, worthy of vigilance:
This is a general phenomenon: for any issue, you can think of biases that could land people on one side or the other. People might be biased toward supporting moon colonization because of decades of sci-fi movies pushing space colonization as the wave of the future, or because Americans remember...
The predictive processing model is a cognitive framework for modeling how the brain synthesizes information from two channels:
The “bottoms up” stream of raw data coming in through our senses for processing
The “top down” stream of predictions about the world
These two channels merge together in a continuous interplay inside the brain and allow us to make sense of the world, with each system continually feeding back to the other in a process we’d refer to as “learning”.
Many people are familiar with Occam’s razor, the principle summarized as:
Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
There’s a tendency you notice all over for people to overcomplicate situations early. Before even fully understanding a problem, they often dig into their toolbox of knowledge for the most involved, and “powerful” weapon in the arsenal. There must be a reason for this — perhaps the propensity to convolute problems makes people feel more comfortable with their lack of a solution? “I don’t know what to do because problem X is...
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years.”
My post from yesterday got me thinking about this piece I read recently on Farnam Street that dovetails with the thoughts on long-term benefit and the compounding nature of good habits.
The idea of “Gates’ Law”1 is that investments for the long-term can bear fruit sooner than you think. Why does this happen so frequently? And what does this have to do with playing the long game?
I like this idea from Morgan Housel on positioning and defining levels of confidence on a scale from a low to high position of authority on a topic. We’ve all seen plenty of instances of “levels 1 and 2” confidence out there:
Let’s call this Level One confidence. You’re confident in something because you don’t know enough to realize how little confidence you should have. It’s driven by gut feelings and the belief that intelligence in one field justifies your expertise in another. It’s a mess, and one few people think they fall for because beliefs exempt from the...
This is a great episode between two guys with interesting perspectives. Parrish’s Farnam Street blog is one of my favorites out there, along with his podcast, The Knowledge Project. This conversation covers a lot on the FS “mental models” series.
Found via Tom MacWright, a slick and simple tool for doing run route planning built on modern web tech. It uses basic routing APIs and distance calculation to help plan out runs, which is especially cool in new places. I used it in San Diego this past week to estimate a couple distances I did. It also has a cool sharing feature to save and link to routes.
“It may seem surprising but, in terms of digital media storage, our knowledge of language almost fits compactly on a floppy disk,” the authors wrote in the study. In this case, that would be a floppy disk that holds about 1.5 megabytes of information, or the equivalent of about a minute-long song as an Mp3 file. [3D Images: Exploring the Human Brain] The researchers estimate that in the best-case scenario, in a...
Amazon is famous for its “No PowerPoint” policy for meetings, requiring that those calling meetings for any new idea, project, or effort write a narrative document to describe the ins-and-outs of what’s on the table for discussion. These documents get circulated to all the right people beforehand for review, so that the team can really drill in on an aligned objective for the meeting with clear data at their fingertips about the pros and cons.
This piece talks about the experience with this process first-hand from a former employee, bulleted out to help understand how it works:
The NSF StEER program has been using Fulcrum Community for a couple of years now, ever since Hurricane Harvey landed on the Texas coast, followed by Irma and Maria later that fall. They’ve built a neat program on top of our platform that lets them respond quickly with volunteers on the ground conducting structure assessments post-disaster:
The large, geographically distributed effort required the development of unified data standards and digital workflows to enable the swift collection...
The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts: therefore, guard accordingly, and take care that you entertain no notions unsuitable to virtue and reasonable nature.
This is an excellent archive on Farnam Street with background on 109 different mental models — first principles, Occam’s Razor, probabalistic thinking, and many more. So much great reading material here to study different modes of thinking. Like writer Shane Parrish puts it, this latticework helps you “think better”:
The quality of our thinking is proportional to the models in our head and their usefulness in the situation at hand. The more models you have—the bigger your toolbox—the more likely you are to have the right models to see...
I love this brief piece from Shane Parrish about the decaying respect for experience and authority on intellectual topics:
This overwhelming complexity of modern life “produced feelings of helplessness and anger among a citizenry that knew itself increasingly to be at the mercy of smarter elites,” writes Nichols. And Hofstadter warns, “What used to be a jocular and usually benign ridicule of intellect and formal training has turned into a malign resentment of the intellectual in his capacity as expert. Once the intellectual was gently ridiculed because he was not needed; now he...
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