Ideas I want to write about

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith on being open-minded:

“Faced with the choice between changing one’s mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.”

I keep returning to that William Gibson line:

The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

• Jasmine Sun

Your ego is not your amigo.

Ignorance doesn’t mean stupid. It simply means you don’t know what you don’t know.

Often the answer was there and you didn’t look. That’s not ignorance. That’s quiet incompetence. Not malicious. Not lazy. Just… avoidant.

You didn’t fail because it was hidden. You failed because you didn’t look.

• James Sinclair
  

Just because something got you the right result doesn’t mean it was the right thing to do in the first place.

The measure of a person is the congruence between their words and actions, their kindness, their confidence, and their decisiveness about who they are in the world and who they intend to remain.

• Farnam Street Brain Food

Optimism recognizes that our potential for improvement is infinite in all directions.

“You want the sport to evolve. Anytime I think that's the main goal, to be honest—where people are trying things—things are never going to be perfect the first time, with anything. But I think we were always like, ‘Hey, they're trying to do something to make it evolve.’ It's hard not to be supporting something with that mindset.”

• Christian Harrison

The truth is that we don’t have to choose between being ambitious and being responsible. We can be both. We don’t have to choose between going fast and staying safe. We can build big, bold, beautiful technology that bestows untold benefits to society and at the same time avoids the massive harms heading our way right now. We can rally the best and