Think Better
Don’t listen to oracles, AI or otherwise. Take responsibility for thinking.
Fire inspectors
Running into a burning building is heroic work. Keeping buildings from burning down in the first place is actually just as important. And it scales more reliably.
Multiple choice
“None of the above” is often the best option. We’re regularly confronted with multiple-choice questions. The foundation is already established, the options are already limited, do…
Environment is Leadership
When talking about architecture, in 1948 Winston Churchill may have said it best: "We shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us." Ain’t that the
Focused commits 🔍
If you don’t know what message to write, it was too long since you last committed.
Misunderstanding bigness
IBM spent a fortune fighting calls for them to be broken up. So did AT&T and Microsoft. In all three cases, there’s plenty of evidence that they would have been better off if they had sim…
The Three Gaps - Scott H Young
Three gaps in knowledge define the quality of our lives: the difference between objective truth and the state of current science, the gap between science and common sense, and finally between common sense and everyday practice.
The challenge of “a risky scheme”
New ideas aren’t adopted all at once. A few people go first while the rest of us watch to see how it goes. “Look, Mikey, he likes it!” This is the story of tech innovations, dance…
The Mississippi River paradox
There’s no water in that river that was there ten years ago. The boundaries have shifted in that time as well, there’s no riverbank that’s exactly where it was. And the silt and t…
Reclaiming “fiasco”
Usually modified with “total,” the failure might not be as bad as we fear. The origin of the word probably comes from Italian, a long time ago. The person who loses a round in a game ha…
The tooth fairy
Make a list of things you used to believe. Fervently, certainly, completely. Things that you were sure of, but now, with the passage of time and the benefit of experience, you know to be incorrect …
Unexpected Lessons from the 50-yard Line
In “On The Waterfront,” the classic 1954 Elia Kazan film about a former professional boxer turned low-status New Jersey longshoreman, the protagonist,
The last little bit
Important hills usually get much steeper at the top. 99% of the training in competitive athletics is devoted to the last 1% of performance. A tenth of a second. The same is true for squeezing the l…
The Domino Effect of 'Just this Once'
Isn't it strange how, once upon a time, our Presidential debates literally sounded like this: “I have no disagreement with the Vice President’s
Stopping a runaway train
It feels urgent because it is. But by the time the train is running away, it might be too late. The better strategy is to not sign up for trains that are likely to run away. The first principle of …
The End of The Chapter
Yesterday was my last day working at Moodle, an Open Source LMS that is used all around the world.
I joined more than 4 years ago, and for the most part it has been a great place to work. But recently I decided it was time to move on, and today I want to share why and what's coming next.
Ambiguity in wording
If I say that a thing costs five dollars but I don’t specify if that’s Canadian Dollars, US Dollars, or Australian Dollars then we might all think we understand the price but we don’t, because I used language that sounded precise and yet was actually ambiguous. What I think I said and what others think I said were substantially different.
Infamy
We’ve gotten so hung up on famous that it’s easy to forget that there are two kinds of renown. Being known for lowering the standards of discourse, cheating, or whining is a choice, but…
Integrate rest into your work and practice | nicole@web
What are you thinking about?
A philosopher can spend a month, a year or a career thinking about one knotty problem. Making assertions, testing theories, understanding how others are thinking about it as well. But this exercise…
Singapore: An Exercise in Creating Culture
According to former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the founding father of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew, made three big decisions in 1959 that had a
My Obsidian Note-Taking Workflow
A Vim-Inspired Approach to Efficient Note Management with Obsidian and Markdown
Doing it step by step
I was surprised to discover that for many AI questions, if you add, “please figure this out step by step,” the AI will provide a dramatically more accurate and useful answer. This works…
Important change is systems change
Willpower is overrated. If you want to eat healthier, don’t work hard to avoid stopping at the cookie jar when you walk into the kitchen. Get rid of the cookie jar. Systems are long-lasting, …
A still, small sound
One of the benefits of having attended a religious elementary school (despite being a fairly secular one as religious schools go) is exposure to the text of the Bible. There are two verses from the…
The two bicycle errors
Momentum activities like public speaking, board sports and leadership all share an attribute with riding a bicycle: It gets easier when you get good at it. The first error we often make is believin…
No, AI Doesn’t Mean You Won’t Need to Learn - Scott H Young
The human brain is (still) the most sophisticated learning machine on the planet. Given the uncertainty of what skills will be most useful in an AI age and the high probability that learning will continue to rely on the same processes in the near future.
The Social Objectification of Kamala
As most of the world knows by now, Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, and within 24 hours Kamala Harris has jumped in to take his place as
A bowl of rice
It’s expensive. Hundreds of people were involved in getting you that simple bowl of rice. It involved countless gallons of water, hours of labor, gallons of fuel. A complex supply chain that …
22.00.0069 What is an ID?
A fundamental Johnny.Decimal question: what is an ID, and how much should it contain?