Bringing yourself to think about death

Q: Most people find it morbid for someone young and healthy to think about their death.

me: I can never understand that. I am accomplishment-oriented rather than experience-oriented. I derive daily motivation much more from having a sense of accomplishment and impact on the world than from experiential pleasures, or even from having learned something. If you feel the same, it behooves you to think about the impact you will have on the world after you're gone, and how to best channel it. It's only experience that ends when you die.

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How subliminals influence your ability

Exhibit A: When a group of Stanford undergraduates took a standardized test and were told that it was a measure of their intellectual ability, the white students did much better than their black counterparts. But when the same test was presented simply as an abstract laboratory tool, with no relevance to ability, the scores of blacks and whites were virtually identical. This is stereotype threat.

Exhibit B: Students were asked a series of brain teaser questions. One group of students was told that the questions were invented at their university; the other group was told they were invented in a far away university. Thinking that the test came from far away somehow raised the creativity of the subjects. This is psychological distance.

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Cities and slums

Mike Davis: More than half the human race now lives in cities. Mostly in the squalor of slums and squatter cities.

Kevin Kelly: The city is a wonderful technological invention which concentrates the flow of energy and minds into computer chip-like density. In a relatively small footprint it generates a maximum of ideas and inventions. Slums are the skin of the city, its permeable edge that can balloon as it grows. Discomfort is an investment. In the favelas of Rio, the first generation of squatters had a literacy rate of only 5%, but their kids were 97% literate.

Michael Balter: In Anatolia nine thousand years ago, a stone-age civilization lived in high density without cities or slums for three thousand years. (via Ken Macleod)

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Entrepreneurship as profitability vs entrepreneurship as growth

Chris O'Brien: Andreessen has never started or operated a profitable business, except for one year with Netscape. LoudCloud/Opsware failed to turn an annual profit in its six years as a publicly traded company.

Ben Horowitz: First, with Loudcloud we saw the whole “cloud computing” trend way before most. Second, when the dot-com bust hit, we took radical steps to reboot, something a lot of founders might have been unable to do.

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The hungry ocean

A month in the life of a swordboat captain, a glimpse into the mindset needed from a leader.

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Bullfinch on Pythagoras

“The first lesson Pythagoras's disciples learned was silence. For a time they were required to be only hearers. "He (Pythagoras) said so" (Ipse dixit) was to be held by them to be sufficient without proof. It was only advanced pupils, after years of patient submission, who were allowed to ask questions and to state objections."

— Thomas Bullfinch, The age of fable (1855). Do we paradoxically have less critical thought today because we are free to ask questions from day one?

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Rethinking America's prisons is cheaper than rethinking incarceration

We punish people with architecture. The building is the method.

New prison construction is parceled out to a handful of large and anonymous firms, discouraging innovation.

American prisons are built in the countryside. Rural prisons need no public face. It need articulate no sense of communal pride or civic justice.

Convicts tend to come from cities; guards do not. Culture clashes inevitably arise.

Convicts tend to come from cities; their families often can't afford to travel to visit. Rehabilitation becomes difficult.

Guards serve "lifetime sentences 8 hours at a time." Guards and prisoners often want the same improvements.

Prisons that look pleasing suffer less vandalism.

— Jim Lewis

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* *

“The publishing industry turns out to be a lousy place to keep stuff published."
— Jon Udell

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Coping with friendfeed's time-ordered torrent

I've been increasingly using friendfeed, and the number of my subscriptions has trended steadily down. The reason: ordering by time forces me to be strict in who I let in.

Every new watering hole for conversation — facebook, google reader, twitter, friendfeed — orders my reading by time to provide immediacy. Ordering by time renders it susceptible to frequent posters. The minute I subscribe to one, the diversity of my reading goes down. Other voices become hard to find. My response to this: never subscribe to frequent posters.

But this is a blunt heuristic. High-volume sources often have great posts. As the need for other views grows, I find coping mechanisms. Sometimes I give up and leave. Sometimes I build a replacement, and sometimes I find others have done so. Once I can get around pure time ordering, I heave a sigh of relief and subscribe to the people I want to without feeling constrained by volume.

So, friendfeed, please help me navigate this stage of my reading. Find ways to keep my reading diverse, even if I subscribe to Robert Scoble.

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Designing for serendipity

Lu Liu: How can we use serendipity to get out of homophily traps? I have a serendipity friend list. But if I can define my serendipity friends, then I guess they are not really serendipity friends by my expectation. In reality, I seldom read articles from that list.

Me: Yes, a serendipity list can't come from yourself. It must be an external recommendation. Automated since that's my bias :)

Time is key. What is serendipitous today is not so tomorrow. That makes it harder to 'define'. In practice, I suspect we must evaluate it like we evaluate porn: not by defining it but by categorizing examples.

Perhaps it can't be a list either, just one recommendation, with pride of place. I find I require time to appreciate something outside of my comfort zone.

Since it must take prime real estate it must be high-confidence. If nothing is good enough today, show me nothing.

Finally, it mustn't nag. Make it easy to dismiss, use the dismissal as a signal to learn from.

comments

  
Anonymous, 2009-06-01: I agree with you on the categorization part. But you need to have data to do the categorization. Where do you get those data in the first place?

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