both are true
on holding two conflicting ideas at once
both are true
Are we idealists or pragmatists? Do we have principles we hold dear, and a vision for the future we want to create? Or are we fumbling along, tinkering, finding what works, and forever allowing contact with reality to rearrange our mental furniture, make a mess on our conceptual floor, and occasionally punch so many holes in the walls that need to ... See more
Chris Best • Principles and pragmatism
on pragmatism vs. idealism
There is so much mystique around the creative life. It’s fetishized and coveted and seen as mysterious even by the people who inhabit it. We have a cultural script that says: There’s too much consumption, not enough creation! If you want to be a [tasteful/interesting/admirable/happy] person, you should make more things. But then also: Social media ... See more
Ava • Making Things Is Hard
nuanced piece by Anthropic CEO
The worst kind of company is usually not the one where there's too much real work to do, but the kind where there's not enough. It's in this realm the real monsters appear. Without enough real problems to go around, humans are prone to invent fictitious and dreadful ones.
This is the root of David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs analysis. That a shocking pe
... See more“Life is not like formula fiction. The villain has a heart, and the hero has great flaws.”
— Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
There’s a lot of speculation and rhetoric these days about whether AI democratizes creativity or advances it. However, it is abundantly clear to me that both are true.
On the one hand, humanity’s creative confidence for humanity has gone up as people of all ages are able to prompt whatever is in their mind’s eye and express themselves visually. We’... See more
On the one hand, humanity’s creative confidence for humanity has gone up as people of all ages are able to prompt whatever is in their mind’s eye and express themselves visually. We’... See more
Scott Belsky • The Era of Abstraction & New Creative Tensions
on the shift from being skills-constrained to being imagination-constrained
On the one hand you have — the point you’re making Woz — is that information sort of wants to be expensive because it is so valuable — the right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information almost wants to be free because the costs of getting it out is getting lower and lower all of the time. So you have the... See more
Seth Godin • Information wants to be free*
At Stanford’s dy/dx program, founder Tony Xu was asked about the qualities he interviews for at DoorDash. One of the five traits is holding and making sense of opposing ideas. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to fu... See more