Jay Matthews

On complementarity: Near the end of A Beautiful Question, Wilczek devotes a few pages to complementarity—the idea that no single description of a phenomenon can be complete. The great Danish physicist Niels Bohr introduced complementarity to resolve a problem bedeviling the developers of quantum mechanics in the 1920s: in some cases, it appeared to... See more

But typically, it is an implicit model in which the assumptions are hidden, their internal consistency is untested, their logical consequences are unknown, and their relation to data is unknown . But, when you close your eyes and imagine an epidemic spreading, or any other social dynamic, you are running some model or other. It is just an implicit... See more

On Internet Scale Businesses

One to One: On maps, cartography and our relationship with geographical enquiry over time stretching from ancient Babylon to GIS software. With increasingly sophisticated tools to build maps, "we have the means to comprehend the future.

"We are each at the centre of our own map... We are all innate mapmakers... maps [are the] mediators between an... See more

The problem here, Fromm emphasizes, is not whether or not the beliefs are correct—the problem is whether or not the beliefs are a result of one’s own thinking. It is certainly possible that someone, through their original reasoning, can arrive at the same beliefs as the person I described above. The difference is that they came to these beliefs... See more

Scalable future self-continuity interventions may open up new channels for enhancing health, education, and wealth.

This book as a website is a rabbit-hole into the history of Futurism as an art movement at the start of the 20th century. The book has interesting prompts or perspectives for creativity as well as illuminating record of the problems within this movement. While for the most part we have moved past the precise content of these manifestos, many of the... See more