the human premium

The Value Of Human Error

Try as we might to utilize reason and logic for our arguments, the human race is first and foremost an emotional species. On a base level, I might even say that the most important aspect of foresight is the ability to create emotional connections between people and their possible, probable, preferred, and preventable futures.

Broadly, good writing seems to require a balance of conformity and nonconformity, and at times, deliberate rule-breaking. A certain amount of Strunk and White-style convention is necessary to convey ideas coherently — after all, language is a shared system of meaning, and straying too far from its rules risks losing connection with readers or

something critical is missing from its voice: a certain sense of connection. At its core, writing is about creating intimacy between writer and reader. It’s a relational act, not a one-sided performance, and its power is in the exchange of ideas. It’s the closest we can get to inhabiting the mind of another human, the closest to escaping our own

Ideas are expansive, elastic things, and many are big enough that they’ll seek multiple outlets.

Transactional conversation—speaking, and being spoken to, like a bot—can be efficient, maybe even nice, depending on the context and on your disposition. But it can also feel condescending, flattening, manipulative, and generic—like being treated as an N.P.C.