Collecting these little ideas has become a major focus. Here’s this month’s installment.
- What is the underlying issue of the dispute?
- The Internet is a machine for wrecking consensus and trust.—Marginal Revolution
- To correct a mistake, acknowledge a mistake has been made and state any new information necessary. Don’t repeat whatever needed correcting.
- The world rewards you for outcomes, not effort.
- What would make you change your mind?
- You can never go back. Change cannot be undone.
- Change tends to effect relationships with everything.
- Some goals require being and not having.
- Extending our senses also means limiting them. The microscope and telescope changes our view completely and are valuable as alternatives that can be used at will.
- Vanity Fair is in our pockets and it is always open for business.
- We should be wary of allowing the logic of the market to colonize all facets of our experience.
- Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.—Hannah Arendt
- Codes, even the best codes, can become idolatrous traps that tempt us to complicity in violence.—Charles Tayler
- What frames what?
- To betray, you must first belong.—Kim Philby
- Only the paranoid survive in a computerized world.
- You teach best what you most need to learn.—Richard Bach
- The best problems are insoluble.
- Management is a discipline. When used as an incentive, it becomes something else.
- Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.
- Sometimes dreams are poison.
- The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.—Brandolini’s law
- Sing the newspaper.
- The point of abstracting responsiblity to policies, algorithms, bureaucracies, etc. is to replace anger with disbelief and resignation.
- Talent is the capacity for doing continuous hard work in the right way.
- Fan is an abbreviation of fanatic.
- The correct value of most of our assets is zero.
- No past, no future.
- Human behavior is driven by love or want of love.
- Do your best, and as you improve, do better.
- Escape the sociology of the last five minutes.—cf. Michael Mann
- Military veterans don’t laugh at the circus.
- Most people are interested in discovering the truth, if it is within walking distance.
- Disruption is never one variable, but a wholesale revisiting of all the variables.
- Comfort always comes at a cost.
- The earth is slippery, slick.—Nahuatl proverb
- Write to tell stories, not explain research.
- Never a day without a line.
- Silence doesn’t allow for difference or self-aggrandizement.
- Avoid strain, anxiety and tension.
- Misuse of words leads to abuse of people.
- Learn to hear what you’d rather not hear.
- The sedated cannot be engaged.
- Loneliness can be like air, something unnoticed until it is gone.
- Intimacy comes when there is nothing left to say.
- Reality binds everybody to limits.
- Commerce reduces product to commodity.
- Be a sound craftsman, in whatever work you choose to do.
- If you’re big on the Internet, three likely outcomes: you burn out, you get cancelled, or you disappear.
- A weird paradox of the Internet. It amplifies and aggregates, which, in turn, creates new niches.
- What’s the lingering cost of life lived on a pedestal?
- In the firehose of faces, you need a strategy to stand out. Be unique.
- Identify the best tool for the job, and use it.
- Hard problems can be made smaller and/or reframed into easier problems.
- Always seek to better yourself and your tools.
- Volume is just about the number of fools.
- The secret ingredient to anything great is love.
- All progress runs the risk of bad precedents. No decision worth making is free of potentially bad consequences.
- In some games, there is no such thing as overkill.
- Do not shit where you sleep.
- One with courage makes a majority.
- Commitment means compounded returns on effort and creates meaning.
- There are no rules; there are only targets.
- Technology changes exponentially but our institutions adapt only linearly, if at all.
- Selective with strong citation.
- Everything digital is mental representation that can be changed as the mind changes.
- Creativity rarely emerges rapidly.
- Run away from monoculture.
- Having our perception of the world increasingly mediated by proprietary technologies that immerse us in ever more sophisticated realms of digital simulacra is a way of surrendering the experience of a shared reality with others.
- The final form of the physical store is an environment where prospective or existing customers just hang out, marinating in the brand without necessarily buying anything while inside.
- Our stories fit reality to the narrative instead of the narrative to reality, i.e., they are fictions.
- Look for things that don’t make sense.
- There is no clean way to enter the heavy machinery of the heart.—This is the Nonsense of Love by Mindy Nettifee
- Only those who do not seek power are qualified to hold it.–Plato
- To be happy, be unashamed.
- Very occasionally, it is okay to be angry, even with the gods, but anger as a default mode is poison.
- Sigmoid or singular?
- Payments is the most frequent and effective means of controlling discourse.
- Markets roll over when you least expect.
- People often signal left, only to turn right. Turns over signals.
- Focus on process over results. Work on multiple problems and rotate them. Discuss with people who perceive it differently and can help.
- Pour les encourager les autres.
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