innovation culture

The reason I've spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn't written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone

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Ideas have this amazing property. Thomas Jefferson said "He who receives an idea from me receives instruction himself, without lessening mine. As he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense.... See more

Why is data integration so hard? The data is often in different formats that aren’t easily analyzed by computers – PDFs, notebooks, Excel files (my god, so many Excel files) and so on. But often what really gets in the way is organizational politics: a team, or group, controls a key data source, the reason for their existence is that they are the... See more

Yes, there can be taste in technology. But the problem is that the majority of practitioners are not consciously trying to extend nor synthesize towards improving quality of life.

Instead we are stuck in the darkest loop of identity confirmation derivatives, in order to extract and accumulate professional status for ourselves.

Taste in technology... See more

Here is how Plutarch, classical biographer par excellence, described his attraction to the stories of great men:

We may say, then, that achievements of this kind, which do not arouse the spirit of emulation or create any passionate desire to imitate them, are of no great benefit to the spectator. On the other hand virtue in action immediately takes

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But in this case, as at times in the past, Klein has brought a gavel to a knife fight. Progressives didn’t just adopt anti-growth attitudes because they were reacting to the excesses of Robert Moses. Anti-growth attitudes are motivated by more than just NIMBYism and fear of change. There are deep class resentments involved.