Sasha Tan

Whether he names it or not, Hobart practices Systemantics , the discipline of noticing what a system really optimizes for.

And the one simple goal of any student of Systemantics is to answer the question: what’s really going on here?

Hiking on Scree and Talus

During the Trump administration, I took on a part time job: keeping up with all the outrages. Every twenty minutes or so I would have to check my phone in case any new outrages had occurred, so that I could...collect them? Make them into a scrapbook? I'm not sure.

I now think of this as super surveillance , tracking every problem in the world as if... See more

In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.

Distinctive features are not... See more

Other emotions—anger, fear, contentment—are deep enough to snorkel in, and if you keep swimming around in them, you’ll find all sorts of bizarre creatures that dwell in the depths and demand description. Bitterness, on the other hand, is three inches of brackish water. Nothing lives in it. You can stand in it and see the bottom.

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they... See more