If you’re trying to do impossible things, this effect should chill you to your bones. It means you could be intellectually stuck right at this very moment, with the evidence right in front of your face and you just can’t see it.
“The bigger part of it is just in finding the right ways of thinking, finding the right representations of abstractions, so people can think thoughts that they couldn’t think before.“The example I like to give is back in the days of Roman numerals, basic multiplication was considered this incredibly technical concept that only official... See more
But instead of designing interfaces and exploring use cases for tomorrow’s glass-screened gadgets, Victor’s “forty-years-out vision” concerns nothing less than redesigning computing itself — not as a product or service, but “as a medium of thought.”
We learned that we're made of many little dead things, which make up bigger things that are not dead, for some reason, and that we're just another temporary stage in a history going back over a billion years.
Everybody I know who does interesting, creative work they went through years where they had really good taste and they could tell that what they were making wasn't as good as they wanted it to be. They knew it fell short. Everybody goes through that.
Why put "expandable explanations" in your writing?1. The reader can get the background information they need – just-in-time, not just-in-case – all without: a) you re-explaining the basics for every article, or b) your reader breaking the flow of reading by clicking a link to yet another article.2. So your reader can tailor your article to their... See more