“Increasing variation in productivity is a good thing. In a low-tech society you don’t see much variation in productivity. If you have a tribe of nomads collecting sticks for a fire, how much more productive is the best stick gatherer going to be than the worst? A factor of two? Whereas when you hand people a complex tool like a computer, the variation in what they can do with it is enormous.

If your society has no variation in productivity, it’s probably not because everyone is Thomas Edison. It’s probably because you have no Thomas Edisons.

“If you believe that a business will magically become more efficient as it grows, just walk into the headquarters of Amazon or eBay.

“Ranking search results using Pagerank requires a time lag. Until recently Google preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

To identify fresh information, analyze the attention streams of people when they consume it.

“We need to be careful about issues that become superstition: “we talked about that once and it didn’t work so that topic is done,” “maybe that would be better but it’s too much trouble” or (my favorite) “that couldn’t possibly be efficient enough to be justified.

“My reality is that it is basically not possible to make a living in the Long Tail. The long-tail theory is a basic and profound truth that I happily embrace as a consumer. But as a producer and creator of Long Tail content it basically spells out my doom. I have the same issues and problems my predecessors did. I need to find multiple large national distributors if I hope to even come close to making a living at this game. And I need to produce fresh content on a reasonably frequent basis.

“A la carte pricing focuses your consumer. It forces them to make a choice in a spot where they didn’t use to make a choice. It can highlight features that might have gone unnoticed.

“If you don’t believe Euclid’s proof that there are infinitely many primes, then I don’t know why seeing a formal proof in ZF set theory should quell your doubts. You could deny Modus Ponens, you could demand a formal proof for the assertion “The infinitude of primes is a theorem of ZF” itself (ad infinitum), you could refuse to identify the formal notions of ‘prime’ or ‘infinity’ with the informal ones, and so on.

“Easy things are often simple, and hard things are often complicated. But making a hard thing simple takes skill.

“‘Work’ is usually doing what others tell you to. ‘Life’ is doing what you want. The modern fixation on ‘work-life balance’ becomes irrelevant if you work for yourself.

“These posts are aimed at people who want to excel throughout their careers and make a significant impact on their fields and the world. These posts are not appropriate for people for whom work/life balance is a high priority..