I strongly dislike giving unsolicited opinions or advice to those who haven't requested it. However, I've inherited a trait from my parents that earned them both respect and resentment. While I strive to express it with more tact, that trait is an unshakable moral drive to be brutally honest… almost all the time.

"When everything is readily available and consumable, contemplative attention is impossible." (Byung-Chal Han, Vita Contemplativa)

“The TL;DR is there’s a huge ship with a broken engine, but none of the engineers know how to fix it. That is, until they bring in an older, more experienced engineer, who figures out the problem immediately. But when this more experienced engineer bills them for $10,000, the other engineers think they’re being ripped off - after all, he only

Jim Simons: "I’m not an extremely fast thinker myself; I just work hard."

That was all I needed to do—work hard, not fast. A paper I published in '68 took me five years. But it has had 1,850 citations. For a math paper, that’s an awful lot.

There’s too much emphasis on a person’s being able to answer questions quickly."

To me, the ideal life is to take the 20 percent of my time that make me feel most alive and see if I can cut everything else out until that fills everything. Then do that again, cutting the “worst” 80 percent of the best. This is the inverse of how many companies operate. There the ideal is often “growth,” which they take to mean “say yes to all op

Working in technology means one thing above all else: chasing scale. There is a reason why much of the tech world is obsessed with growth. Free from physical constraints, digital systems can scale to an incomprehensible size. The appeal of conquering the engineering, design and business challenges of mega-scale is strong, the rewards immense. But u

Ad legend Bill Bernbach letter on creativity, written in 1947:

Dear ________:

Our agency is getting big. That’s something to be happy about. But it’s something to worry about, too, and I don’t mind telling you I’m damned worried. I’m worried that we’re going to fall into the trap of bigness, that we’re going to worship techniques instead of substance

How do you want to feel?

The human brain is wired to respond to sound. Music adds meaning and dimension that is hard to capture with just text.

Elements such as pitch, melody, harmony, timbre, amplitude, scale, and tones, along with the graduated series of notes or intervals dividing octaves, have an affective, emotional, psychological, cognitive, an