nico λ

One of the most intelligent case studies in design is the Chinese tea cup. They’re made without handles simply because if it’s too hot to touch, it’s too hot to drink.

Humans naturally want to add more. Add a cardboard sleeve, add a warning on the outside of the cup, add a handle. The result of all these things never cools down the actual contents.

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The evidence here is a bit more mixed. There’s no relationship between extraversion and general intelligence. But smart kids tend to be more selective about who they like, and among the extremely intelligent there’s a negative relationship between life satisfaction and time spent with others. This latter finding isn’t necessarily causal (it could... See more

Changing the scale of these simple thought experiments adds complexities that completely change the calculus of the scenario

The key to using optimism to enhance resilience is in rejecting black-and-white, either/or thinking. Resilient people use both optimism and pessimism strategically to gain the critical insights and information they need to adjust to change.

The government lost control of controlled substances. The Sackler’s main crime, which doesn’t really come through in these dramas because it’s actually a difficult thing to narrativize, is knowing precisely how to exploit America’s thin, hollowed out, and very weak regulatory state. And that’s just not a very sexy Netflix style crime. It’s a crime... See more

I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. It demands the same skill, devotion, insight, and even inspiration as the... See more

Crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual. It created neutral public systems such as democracy, law, and free speech to give individuals a spacious civil order within which they could figure their own life. Common morality, if it existed at all, was based on... See more

People used to call LinkedIn “work Facebook”, by which I think they meant it's a mindless website where people gab about their work lives. But LinkedIn isn’t really about work in any meaningful sense. Of course, people talk about working on LinkedIn. Oh, how they love to talk about working! No matter the shitty job, no matter the grueling hours,... See more

We fail to see, or refuse to accept, that any attempt to bring our ideas into concrete reality must inevitably fall short of our dreams, no matter how brilliantly we succeed in carrying things off—because reality, unlike fantasy, is a realm in which we don’t have limitless control, and can’t possibly hope to meet our perfectionist standards.... See more