December 2010
10 posts
The Blast Shack →
The Wikileaks Cablegate scandal is the most exciting and interesting hacker scandal ever. I rather commonly write about such things, and I’m surrounded by online acquaintances who take a burning interest in every little jot and tittle of this ongoing saga. So it’s going to take me a while to explain why this highly newsworthy event fills me with such a chilly, deadening sense of Edgar Allen Poe...
“Being your fullest self is a lot of work”
The future isn’t going to feel futuristic. It’s simply going to feel weird and out-of-control-ish, the way it does now, because too many things are changing too quickly. The reason the future feels odd is because of its unpredictability. If the future didn’t feel weirdly unexpected, then something would be wrong.
Giving Good Design Feedback
Anyone who has had to provide feedback to a design agency they’ve hired should read this piece.
First rule of design feedback: what you’re looking at is not art. It’s not even close. It’s a business tool in the making and should be looked at objectively like any other business tool you work with. The right question is not, “Do I like it?” but “Does this meet our goals?” If it’s blue,...
All right, here, instead of using those keys, you should take this extremely convoluted and foreign-looking mobile phone, into which you have to insert all of your keys, type in a special password, and then oh, well, it works on most locks but not all of them, so you’ll only be able to replace some of your keys with it, so now you should carry this new weird mobile phone on your keyring...
On the importance of control groups
One day when I was a junior medical student, a very important Boston surgeon visited the school and delivered a great treatise on a large number of patients who had undergone successful operations for vascular reconstruction.
At the end of the lecture, a young student at the back of the room timidly asked, “Do you have any controls?” Well, the great surgeon drew himself up to his full...
The Insanity Virus →
Keep Your Identity Small →
Paul Graham describes how discussions on some topics break down into useless argument when certain audiences are participating; People are unable to discuss anything objectively when their own identity is tangled up in it:
More generally, you can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn’t engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion...