The molecular biologist Sidney Brenner recently invented a delicious play on Occam’s Razor, introducing the new term Occam’s Broom, to describe the process in which inconvenient facts are whisked under the rug by intellectually dishonest champions of one theory or another. This is our first boom crutch, an anti-thinking tool, and you should keep

you should actively seek out opportunities to make grand mistakes, just so you can then recover from them.

Philosophy—in every field of inquiry—is what you have to do until you figure out what questions you should have been asking in the first place.

Sometimes you don’t just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them—if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix. Making mistakes is the key to making progress.

with recursive self-representation

Every increment of design in the universe begins with a moment of serendipity, the undesigned intersection of two trajectories yielding something that turns out, retrospectively, to be more than a mere collision.

Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity.

What is all this noise for? It’s not for anything; it’s just there so that every other process has that noise as a potential source of signal, as something that it might turn, by the alchemy of the creative algorithm, into function, into art, into meaning.

It turns out that all the “magic” of cognition depends, just as life itself does, on cycles within cycles of recurrent, “re-entrant,” reflexive information-transformation processes ranging from the nano-scale biochemical cycles within each neuron, through the generate-and-test cycles of predictive coding in the perceptual systems (see Clark, 2013,