Complexity basically means that everything is circuitous and hard to understand. Hard to understand means that the things that lead to the things you want aren't the things you want. They're very complex. So you need to do things like work on vacuum tubes to get to computers because vacuum tubes are in the first computers, even though vacuum tubes... See more
the deeper you go into any one thing, the more you find everything else quietly waiting there. steve reich discovered this in music: "whatever you pursue, if you really begin to pursue it thoroughly and you really get into many, many aspects of it, it flowers and blooms and begins to get into areas you never would have imagined were possible." what... See more
It also helps to travel in topic space. You'll have more new ideas if you explore lots of different topics, partly because it gives the angle grinder more surface area to work on, and partly because analogies are an especially fruitful source of new ideas.
The “problem” with expanding the web of connected things is that “right” answers become few and far between. Instead of a “next step,” you see more questions. Instead of the confidence of an “action plan,” you feel the gentle anxiety of ambiguity.
if you know me, you know that #richardpowers is one of my favorite authors. his pulitzer-prize winning novel #theoverstory was a formative text for me, one that has informed so much of my work with @atmos. we were already working on volume 06: beyond when i saw that his next book was about an astrobiologist looking for life in space as well as the... See more