Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
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FollowA life-changing classic!
But why is slow bad? Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness.
When it comes to thinking the mind has an optimal way to be operated. When operated correctly you’ll find yourself with plenty of free time. When operated incorrectly, most of your time will be consumed correcting mistakes.
Good decisions create time, bad ones consume it. Good initial decisions pay dividends for years, allowing abundant free time and low stress. Poor decisions, on the other hand, consume time, increase anxiety, and drain us of energy.
“It isn’t inherently awful that YouTube uses AI to recommend video for you, because if the AI is well tuned it can help you get what you want. This would be amazing,” Chaslot told TNW. “But the problem is that the AI isn’t built to help you get what you want — it’s built to get you addicted to YouTube. Recommendations were designed to waste your time.”
Is there a way to cultivate curiosity? To start with, you want to avoid situations that suppress it.
Meeting magicians is the first step to becoming one – when you are attempting to learn implicit knowledge that by definition you don’t understand, it is important to have a bunch of examples in front of you to feed your brain’s pattern-recognition systems. This will start to change your worldview without the controlling ‘you’ explicitly approving or denying every new belief or framework.
History is driven by surprising events, forecasting is driven by predictable ones. It’s not an easy problem to solve.
Find the right environment, and very little effort is necessary.
Complexity is like energy. It cannot be created or destroyed, only moved somewhere else. When a product or service becomes simpler for users, engineers and designers have to work harder.
"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."
"any room that you enter should have more certainty and a firmer plan by the time that you leave it"
"We should embrace systems designed to reduce mistakes, but some will sneak through. When they do, it is in the best interests of scientific progress that they come to light. However, for individual researchers who attach their professional worth to their work, there are many, many incentives not to reveal errors."
An interesting take on the simulation argument
"I would define power as the ability to make other people do what you want; freedom is the ability to do what you want. Like gravity and acceleration, these are two forces that appear to be different but are in fact one. Freedom is the defensive, or pre-emptive, form of power: the power that’s necessary to resist all the power the world attempts to exert over us from day one."
"In this model the Doers are solely accountable for implementation, failure, and support of other people’s ideas, while the Thinker is rewarded for their success. This is at the heart of the contention and misalignment between the teams. It creates an IT group rather than an engineering team."